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Soyinka Speaks..... continued
Under the allegedly democratic reign of Olusegun Obasanjo that degenerated fast
into a police state – as many warned at the time - you will all recall that a procession
of women in Lagos, on their way to deliver a letter to the state government, was tear-
gassed. Now why were those women on the streets? What was the content of their
letter? They were women whose children had perished in the inferno of a crashed
plane. These mothers, and others who joined them in an expression of solidarity, were
tear-gassed, baton charged and arrested. They included members of the very
association assembled in this hall, perhaps even present here today. That was a gross
encroachment on Civic Will by an agency of one of the Democratic supports – the Law
- a warped presumption of responsibilities that was irresponsible and inhuman, and it
demanded the re-assertion of the Civil Will on all fora – the media, through the Law
itself, or simply and defiantly – Back on the Streets!
Civic Will is seemingly inert, but is easily the most dynamic and eloquent leg of
Democracy. But first, we must avoid any over optimistic assessment, or
romanticisation. Civil Will is not homogenous. It can prove contradictory, fractitious and
even self-desructive, acting against its own interest. Indeed, it is best to see this
support that is the Civic Will as a composite, a mosaic that is not cast as a single
mould, but welded from sometimes incompatible scrap-iron pieces, fragmentary and
fragile. That is the safer image. It ensures that we do not find ourselves astonished
and rear-ended when it breaks apart and flies off in contradictory directions, leaving it
prey to its traditional enemy, Power. Its authenticity sometimes proves as elusive as
that other problematic entity that is glibly called - the public good.
We know also that the Civil Will is not necessarily authenticated by the highest decibel
or expressions of intransigence, nor is it determined by its proneness to volatility and
destructiveness. If it were, the recent disturbances in the normally phlegmatic United
Kingdom would be deemed an expression of that nation’s Civic Will, or the homicidal
myopia of the Boko Haram, or its predecessor the Maitasine, as representative of the
Nigerian Civic Will. Civic Will is subject to internal stress, even as it takes the battle to
its partners and rivals in the democratic construct – the Law and the Constitution - the
latter as a referential point, the former as its controlling, reconciling or interpretative
agency.
Yes, it is sometimes necessary that the Civil Will take the battle to the Constitution.
This should not be surprising. The Constitution is – or should be – an expression of
the Civic Will, not its suppression. When it has emerged as the latter, and as long as
such a constitution is not legitimized by the patent, transparent and collective activity of
the people on behalf whom it has been fashioned, there will be tensions. And as long
as the Law purports to act on behalf of such a document of suppression, there will also
be repudiation of the Law in that regard. In short, a recipe for social anomie. The
Constitution saves itself – at least, saves itself to fight another day - because, in-built
into its provisions, are the mechanisms for possible change.
It is disheartening that humanity is forced again and again to that ledge of desperation
where it must express its own unflinching resolve against the encroachment of Power.
The example, first of Libya, but even more horrendously of Syria are humbling lessons,
inspiring but also near unbearably agonizing. To watch the Syrian populace emerge
again and again, unarmed, despite being cut down by the cowardly agents of al-
Assad, the mass killer of Syria, picked off methodically like fish in a goldfish bowl, with
children singled out also by snipers in order to inflict the maximum anguish upon, and
thus demoralize their parents, is to be confronted all over again with the resilience of
the collective human spirit in its seizure of that immaterial bequest of the human
psyche called – Freedom. Even if African governments, including ours, have largely
remained silent or tepidly disapproving of this daily butchery of the Syrian people, I
take on myself the presumption of conveying the solidarity of the Nigerian people to
their Syrian brothers and sisters – this, alas, is all we have to offer. I express our moral
disgust at the criminality of the usurper of their collective sovereignty. in the estimation
of all decent people, al-Assad has excommunicated himself from the human
community, and we look forward to the day when he, and his henchmen will be tried for
gross crimes against humanity. History is on the side of the people. Their Civic Will is
being stressed to a degree that one cannot quite recall in the past half century. Their
cause is humanity’s historic cause and, in all humility, we salute their courage. Theirs
is a costly struggle, but triumph they shall in the end.
Such luminous, inspirational instances apart, one still recognizes that the Civic Will is
not a seamless mould, is not homogenous and is not proven by belligerent energy.
The question then becomes, how else, by what means other than violence, can Civic
Will be determined?
Let us not mystify an answer that is so glaring, so obvious that it is amazing it should
ever rise in contention – that answer is, Dialogue. Next, how do you organize a
Dialogue? I have heard that question posed and it deserves its dismissal as a
monumental distraction. There are numerous ways in which a nation can dialogue with
itself. We are not short of precedents in this very nation, some genuine, others fake,
purely rhetorical and insincere, constituting an equally monumental distraction away
from the genuine dialogue. We engaged in one a few years ago, which was clearly
nothing more than an opportunistic device for a private, illegitimate power agenda. We
shall not go into those particularities. What needs to be emphasized is that, where
dialogue is lacking, monologues take their place, and these can be of nation
destroying intransigence. Either that or - silence, ominous silence that erupts
eventually in irreversible consequences.
It could be of course that Dialogue is totally unnecessary. There are voices we hear
regularly which preach that our nation has reached that stage where Dialogue has
become superfluous, where the character if the nation is so indelibly stamped on its
operations that dialogue becomes not just a distraction, bur a force for destabilization.
Let us assist them even further in their disposition. We shall offer that the other two
structured legs of Democracy – Constitution and Law (unlike Civic Will) are so firmly
established, so intricately woven into the fabric of civic being that they have indeed
become the incontrovertible expressions of the Civic Will itself and thus, must be taken
as immutable. We shall further advance that Civic Will is not necessarily grasped in
events of overt manifestation, such as Dialogue, that it is already expressed in the
operations of Law and Constitution. Why expend time and money on something that
already exists and is seen to be functioning?
Constitution, that third partner in the democratic tripod, is a candidate for such easy
dismissal. It has not have passed – in the Nigerian case – the test of a product
traceable to the manifested expression of the Civic Will, and many will attest to its
identity as the concoction of a minuscule minority cabal known as the Military Mafioso.
Today, even if that document is not to the satisfaction of huge swathes of the nation’s
population, it has become, we shall propose, its expression, simply through its
operation along symbolic processes such as elections, functioning institutions such as
legislative houses, and the participation of millions of Nigerians in the populating of
those chambers. If I may express this through a Yoruba proverb: ti ewe ba npe l’ara
ose, oun na a d’ose. Traditional soap we know normally comes wrapped in leaves, so,
translate that as: give it sufficient time and the wrapping leaf of the soap also turns to
soap. Civic Will is no more mystical or illogical than that law of Nature, where even inert
matter finds its destiny with seeming passivity but in reality, produces a dynamic result.
Thus, when a constitution of the most alienated originationation remains unchallenged,
is actually cited as the legitimisation of acts, policies and structures of governance,
then that constitution, we may argue, becomes an expression of the Civic Will.
But suppose the structure that is upheld by these three legs appears to be tottering? I
asked this question not so long ago in Abuja. I recall the exhausting, largely
tautological rebuttal that this received from a governor, known as the Comrade
governor, who had been invited to contribute some remarks. I had to chalk that down,
by the way as a unique experience. I was the Keynote speaker, he was just a
discussant. My speech lasted fifty minutes, his nearly one hour and twenty minutes, so
there was no room left for other discussants, audience participation, or even the final
response by this Keynote speaker. In the United States it is known as filibustering – I
simply had not known that the tradition had been imported to Nigeria with the
presidential system. However, let us pass over for now and stick to substance – at
least on the present occasion.
His interjection, the sum of which was that the nation as a democratic state was hale
and hearty, in no need of a medical check-up or second opinion, is even something to
which I am willing to grant plausibility. Nations have been known to survive in a state of
advanced decay or through merely living on the brink. Some are dubbed banana
republics, others client nations to more forceful and productive ones. They carry out
orders which may or may not coincide with the interests of the people who constitute
the nation. We have known these nations both of the right and left – the satellite
nations of the once Soviet blocs, the Third World supply depots of the capitalist bloc
whose leaders swagger through the corridors of the United Nations contributing
nothing of their own to the progress of their own nations or of the world.
These so-called nations are no more than nation spaces. We cannot claim ignorance
of the existence also of nations simply classified as “failed states” yet they seem to
have taken to heart the proposition of that colourful politician/businessman, also from
Edo state. When he was told that his son would not be nominated for a second term as
governor, having failed woefully in the first term, his response was, “So what? If you sit
and exam and you fail the first time, aren’t you allowed a “re-sit”? So maybe ours,
which has been classified a failed state in company with others, is also having a re-sit.
But permit me to pose this question: isn’t the mark of seriousness the will to do
extensive revision before a re-sit? So let’s take the proposed dialogue as a “re-sit”,
and proceed to an in-depth revision exercises.
The dynamics of mutual testing of interests – collaborative, adversarial, territorially
expanding and retreating, contending and conceding until attaining an even keel of
functional interaction, are part and parcel of the operations of Democracy, deepening
and strengthening in the interests of the people it is meant to serve. There are benign,
even creative challenges, needless to say, and there are malevolent, simply
destructive ones. Neither Law nor the Constitution is written in stone and where the
Constitution is not itself a product of Civic Will, it is especially vulnerable. As already
emphasized, Civic Will can itself become a facilitator of any imposition, including
despotism, real or incipient, simply by the culture of complacency, of acquiescence
and collaboration in the operations of any set of protocols of association, however lop-
sided. The Nigerian constitution today enjoys that dubious civic validation. It may be a
grudging accommodation, it may be resentful, it may indeed be hostile but, yes, the
Constitution is the nation’s document of self-validation – but that is not the same as
saying that it has thereby come to stay. Visit the motor park any day and it will not
take you long to find a bus or a lorry emblazoned with that truism: No Condition is
Permanent.
Even absence or omission is not permanent. Augmentation or rectification – owing to
developed or diversified needs, a changing world with unaccustomed challenges,
newly encountered models for possible emulation - it is all part of social development.
So now, let that reminder bring us down to some topicalities. Let us address one item
to which some constituent units of our national estate have woken up as an unjust but
rectifiable absence. We have reached a point in nation becoming where abstractions,
while useful and stimulating, sometimes distance the urgent realities in which we are
involved, so this is a good moment to refer to the recent controversy over a call for the
insertion of a missed arm of our banking system, and ask why it is being elevated
nearly to a ‘do-or-die’ affair. Surely, to bank or not to bank, belongs in the province of
human choice. So far, no one has advanced any evidence that the entry of an Islamic
bank contravenes the Law or offends letter or spirit of the constitution.
That recent cri de coeur - a cry from the heart – of the Sultan of Sokoto is a useful
entry point into this subject and his cry actually opens out into two dimensions. First, I
find myself in empathy with him – “why do people try to islamise….” etc. etc . I however
expand it to read – why do people attempt to force into a religious mould, any religious
mould – clearly social issues, negative or positive, transparent or obscured, projected
or actualized etc. etc. Why on earth should Islamic Banking become a hot-air issue,
with inflammatory discharges going back and forth, drum wars resounding, clerics,
politicians and pundits at one another’s throat?
The recent upheavals across the largely Arab/Islamic world have nothing to do with
christsian banking, any more than the five-day mayhem in more or less Christian
England have the least connection with the existence of Islamic banks which I have
seen occupying the same street with Christian originated banks, even though the latter
are not so described. Islamic banking has not been mentioned as a contributory factor
to the devastating collapse of European and American banks and the economic
meltdown of the world. Islamic banking was not responsible for the hideous, mind-
boggling corruption among several Nigerian banks, executives of which flouted that
moral injunction contained in ancient Mosaic commandment – Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s goods, least of all when such goods are placed
in your sacred charge as highly paid, over guardians.
Islamic banking is not responsible for the violent unrest in the Niger Delta, the
massacres of Idi, Zaki Biam, Bauchi, Kaduna, Gombe. Maiduguri etc etc. I have not
heard Islamic banking cited in the manifesto – if any - of Boko Haram. It never featured
in the statement of purpose of its predecessor, the Maitasine, whose followers
butchered mainstream moslems with even greater zeal that they dispatched christians
and the so-called ‘infidels’ of other faiths. Islamic banking is not responsible for the
failure of Nigeria to have acquired sustainable electric power in sixty years of
independence. It is not responsible for the breakdown of all human public services –
from education to health and shelter, nor is it responsible for the total eradication of
moral restraints that once existed in the nation, producing the new lucrative pastime of
totally dehumanized criminal minds – the kidnapping of human beings – even the
aged, feeble, or simply vulnerable for ransom. Only two years ago, at a lecture in
Lagos, I urged the need to conserve and protect a nation’s youth as its primary asset
– little did I know that this was already being taken literally, manifested in the stuffing of
children into car boots ln order to extort millions of blood-soaked Naira.
I frankly do not understand the fuss. Banking laws exist. If an Orunmila Bank were to
be proposed by followers of orisa, and it does not breach the nation’s laws, then such
a proposal need not give anyone sleepless nights. And even if the Law is held to
oppose it, orisa followers are entitled to take the initiative and make a case for a
change in existing laws – that is their democratic right and no one can take it away
from them. I shall be among the first to open an account with the Bank of Orunmila,
based on Ifa precepts. Until one is established however, I shall join Pastor Tunde
Bakare in opening a solidarity account with the Islamic Bank whenever it begins
operations, as long as its terms are favourable to the needs of a seventy-seven year
old writer without pension, but thankfully with minimal needs.
The extension – by implication - of the Sultan’s protest is, for me, a far more potent
charge directed at society, and crucial to the setting for this gathering. It implicates two
of the legs on which we have posited the democratic edifice – Law, and Constitution. It
is inevitable that we expand the provenance of this challenging lament, since it is one
that is not limited to any one religion. It thrusts its interrogatories beyond Nigeria and
onto other lands and societies, so let us simply re-phrase it to read: “Why do people
theocraticize…..” straightforward concerns of secular existence? The question applies
to a particular cast of mind, usually moulded and fixated during impressionable years.
By its adult phase, such minds have become inflexible and calcified, incapable of
responding to any kind of phenomena except through theocratic lenses. The thrust of
that question goes to the heart of democracy, and determines the basis of the
democratic order. And yet, what other order is possible for harmonized co-existence in
a pluralistic society differentiated by faith, history, and customs?
Here is a familiar example – trite, yet persistent, a recurring decimal in public
instruction. The Plateau government, recently passed a law forbidding that women be
dressed in trousers, under a supposedly Christian ethic of ‘proper dressing’. What
business, in heaven’s name, has Christianity to do with a woman’s trousers? During an
earlier bout of puritanic fever, this time in one of the south-eastern regions – I forget
which, since state boundaries never seem to stop moving – one such resurgence took
place under a military regime. As we have learnt to expect – and that gifted
psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, had identified the syndrome in his seminal work, THE
WRETCHED OF THE EARTH - the first line victims of the oppressed are always the
next in line down the ladder of misery, a symptom of frustration and impotence that
finds release in vengeance - not on their oppressors - but on other wretched of the
earth. Mob rule took over.
Under the allegedly democratic reign of Olusegun Obasanjo that degenerated fast
into a police state – as many warned at the time - you will all recall that a procession
of women in Lagos, on their way to deliver a letter to the state government, was tear-
gassed. Now why were those women on the streets? What was the content of their
letter? They were women whose children had perished in the inferno of a crashed
plane. These mothers, and others who joined them in an expression of solidarity, were
tear-gassed, baton charged and arrested. They included members of the very
association assembled in this hall, perhaps even present here today. That was a gross
encroachment on Civic Will by an agency of one of the Democratic supports – the Law
- a warped presumption of responsibilities that was irresponsible and inhuman, and it
demanded the re-assertion of the Civil Will on all fora – the media, through the Law
itself, or simply and defiantly – Back on the Streets!
Civic Will is seemingly inert, but is easily the most dynamic and eloquent leg of
Democracy. But first, we must avoid any over optimistic assessment, or
romanticisation. Civil Will is not homogenous. It can prove contradictory, fractitious and
even self-desructive, acting against its own interest. Indeed, it is best to see this
support that is the Civic Will as a composite, a mosaic that is not cast as a single
mould, but welded from sometimes incompatible scrap-iron pieces, fragmentary and
fragile. That is the safer image. It ensures that we do not find ourselves astonished
and rear-ended when it breaks apart and flies off in contradictory directions, leaving it
prey to its traditional enemy, Power. Its authenticity sometimes proves as elusive as
that other problematic entity that is glibly called - the public good.
We know also that the Civil Will is not necessarily authenticated by the highest decibel
or expressions of intransigence, nor is it determined by its proneness to volatility and
destructiveness. If it were, the recent disturbances in the normally phlegmatic United
Kingdom would be deemed an expression of that nation’s Civic Will, or the homicidal
myopia of the Boko Haram, or its predecessor the Maitasine, as representative of the
Nigerian Civic Will. Civic Will is subject to internal stress, even as it takes the battle to
its partners and rivals in the democratic construct – the Law and the Constitution - the
latter as a referential point, the former as its controlling, reconciling or interpretative
agency.
Yes, it is sometimes necessary that the Civil Will take the battle to the Constitution.
This should not be surprising. The Constitution is – or should be – an expression of
the Civic Will, not its suppression. When it has emerged as the latter, and as long as
such a constitution is not legitimized by the patent, transparent and collective activity of
the people on behalf whom it has been fashioned, there will be tensions. And as long
as the Law purports to act on behalf of such a document of suppression, there will also
be repudiation of the Law in that regard. In short, a recipe for social anomie. The
Constitution saves itself – at least, saves itself to fight another day - because, in-built
into its provisions, are the mechanisms for possible change.
It is disheartening that humanity is forced again and again to that ledge of desperation
where it must express its own unflinching resolve against the encroachment of Power.
The example, first of Libya, but even more horrendously of Syria are humbling lessons,
inspiring but also near unbearably agonizing. To watch the Syrian populace emerge
again and again, unarmed, despite being cut down by the cowardly agents of al-
Assad, the mass killer of Syria, picked off methodically like fish in a goldfish bowl, with
children singled out also by snipers in order to inflict the maximum anguish upon, and
thus demoralize their parents, is to be confronted all over again with the resilience of
the collective human spirit in its seizure of that immaterial bequest of the human
psyche called – Freedom. Even if African governments, including ours, have largely
remained silent or tepidly disapproving of this daily butchery of the Syrian people, I
take on myself the presumption of conveying the solidarity of the Nigerian people to
their Syrian brothers and sisters – this, alas, is all we have to offer. I express our moral
disgust at the criminality of the usurper of their collective sovereignty. in the estimation
of all decent people, al-Assad has excommunicated himself from the human
community, and we look forward to the day when he, and his henchmen will be tried for
gross crimes against humanity. History is on the side of the people. Their Civic Will is
being stressed to a degree that one cannot quite recall in the past half century. Their
cause is humanity’s historic cause and, in all humility, we salute their courage. Theirs
is a costly struggle, but triumph they shall in the end.
Such luminous, inspirational instances apart, one still recognizes that the Civic Will is
not a seamless mould, is not homogenous and is not proven by belligerent energy.
The question then becomes, how else, by what means other than violence, can Civic
Will be determined?
Let us not mystify an answer that is so glaring, so obvious that it is amazing it should
ever rise in contention – that answer is, Dialogue. Next, how do you organize a
Dialogue? I have heard that question posed and it deserves its dismissal as a
monumental distraction. There are numerous ways in which a nation can dialogue with
itself. We are not short of precedents in this very nation, some genuine, others fake,
purely rhetorical and insincere, constituting an equally monumental distraction away
from the genuine dialogue. We engaged in one a few years ago, which was clearly
nothing more than an opportunistic device for a private, illegitimate power agenda. We
shall not go into those particularities. What needs to be emphasized is that, where
dialogue is lacking, monologues take their place, and these can be of nation
destroying intransigence. Either that or - silence, ominous silence that erupts
eventually in irreversible consequences.
It could be of course that Dialogue is totally unnecessary. There are voices we hear
regularly which preach that our nation has reached that stage where Dialogue has
become superfluous, where the character if the nation is so indelibly stamped on its
operations that dialogue becomes not just a distraction, bur a force for destabilization.
Let us assist them even further in their disposition. We shall offer that the other two
structured legs of Democracy – Constitution and Law (unlike Civic Will) are so firmly
established, so intricately woven into the fabric of civic being that they have indeed
become the incontrovertible expressions of the Civic Will itself and thus, must be taken
as immutable. We shall further advance that Civic Will is not necessarily grasped in
events of overt manifestation, such as Dialogue, that it is already expressed in the
operations of Law and Constitution. Why expend time and money on something that
already exists and is seen to be functioning?
Constitution, that third partner in the democratic tripod, is a candidate for such easy
dismissal. It has not have passed – in the Nigerian case – the test of a product
traceable to the manifested expression of the Civic Will, and many will attest to its
identity as the concoction of a minuscule minority cabal known as the Military Mafioso.
Today, even if that document is not to the satisfaction of huge swathes of the nation’s
population, it has become, we shall propose, its expression, simply through its
operation along symbolic processes such as elections, functioning institutions such as
legislative houses, and the participation of millions of Nigerians in the populating of
those chambers. If I may express this through a Yoruba proverb: ti ewe ba npe l’ara
ose, oun na a d’ose. Traditional soap we know normally comes wrapped in leaves, so,
translate that as: give it sufficient time and the wrapping leaf of the soap also turns to
soap. Civic Will is no more mystical or illogical than that law of Nature, where even inert
matter finds its destiny with seeming passivity but in reality, produces a dynamic result.
Thus, when a constitution of the most alienated originationation remains unchallenged,
is actually cited as the legitimisation of acts, policies and structures of governance,
then that constitution, we may argue, becomes an expression of the Civic Will.
But suppose the structure that is upheld by these three legs appears to be tottering? I
asked this question not so long ago in Abuja. I recall the exhausting, largely
tautological rebuttal that this received from a governor, known as the Comrade
governor, who had been invited to contribute some remarks. I had to chalk that down,
by the way as a unique experience. I was the Keynote speaker, he was just a
discussant. My speech lasted fifty minutes, his nearly one hour and twenty minutes, so
there was no room left for other discussants, audience participation, or even the final
response by this Keynote speaker. In the United States it is known as filibustering – I
simply had not known that the tradition had been imported to Nigeria with the
presidential system. However, let us pass over for now and stick to substance – at
least on the present occasion.
His interjection, the sum of which was that the nation as a democratic state was hale
and hearty, in no need of a medical check-up or second opinion, is even something to
which I am willing to grant plausibility. Nations have been known to survive in a state of
advanced decay or through merely living on the brink. Some are dubbed banana
republics, others client nations to more forceful and productive ones. They carry out
orders which may or may not coincide with the interests of the people who constitute
the nation. We have known these nations both of the right and left – the satellite
nations of the once Soviet blocs, the Third World supply depots of the capitalist bloc
whose leaders swagger through the corridors of the United Nations contributing
nothing of their own to the progress of their own nations or of the world.
These so-called nations are no more than nation spaces. We cannot claim ignorance
of the existence also of nations simply classified as “failed states” yet they seem to
have taken to heart the proposition of that colourful politician/businessman, also from
Edo state. When he was told that his son would not be nominated for a second term as
governor, having failed woefully in the first term, his response was, “So what? If you sit
and exam and you fail the first time, aren’t you allowed a “re-sit”? So maybe ours,
which has been classified a failed state in company with others, is also having a re-sit.
But permit me to pose this question: isn’t the mark of seriousness the will to do
extensive revision before a re-sit? So let’s take the proposed dialogue as a “re-sit”,
and proceed to an in-depth revision exercises.
The dynamics of mutual testing of interests – collaborative, adversarial, territorially
expanding and retreating, contending and conceding until attaining an even keel of
functional interaction, are part and parcel of the operations of Democracy, deepening
and strengthening in the interests of the people it is meant to serve. There are benign,
even creative challenges, needless to say, and there are malevolent, simply
destructive ones. Neither Law nor the Constitution is written in stone and where the
Constitution is not itself a product of Civic Will, it is especially vulnerable. As already
emphasized, Civic Will can itself become a facilitator of any imposition, including
despotism, real or incipient, simply by the culture of complacency, of acquiescence
and collaboration in the operations of any set of protocols of association, however lop-
sided. The Nigerian constitution today enjoys that dubious civic validation. It may be a
grudging accommodation, it may be resentful, it may indeed be hostile but, yes, the
Constitution is the nation’s document of self-validation – but that is not the same as
saying that it has thereby come to stay. Visit the motor park any day and it will not
take you long to find a bus or a lorry emblazoned with that truism: No Condition is
Permanent.
Even absence or omission is not permanent. Augmentation or rectification – owing to
developed or diversified needs, a changing world with unaccustomed challenges,
newly encountered models for possible emulation - it is all part of social development.
So now, let that reminder bring us down to some topicalities. Let us address one item
to which some constituent units of our national estate have woken up as an unjust but
rectifiable absence. We have reached a point in nation becoming where abstractions,
while useful and stimulating, sometimes distance the urgent realities in which we are
involved, so this is a good moment to refer to the recent controversy over a call for the
insertion of a missed arm of our banking system, and ask why it is being elevated
nearly to a ‘do-or-die’ affair. Surely, to bank or not to bank, belongs in the province of
human choice. So far, no one has advanced any evidence that the entry of an Islamic
bank contravenes the Law or offends letter or spirit of the constitution.
That recent cri de coeur - a cry from the heart – of the Sultan of Sokoto is a useful
entry point into this subject and his cry actually opens out into two dimensions. First, I
find myself in empathy with him – “why do people try to islamise….” etc. etc . I however
expand it to read – why do people attempt to force into a religious mould, any religious
mould – clearly social issues, negative or positive, transparent or obscured, projected
or actualized etc. etc. Why on earth should Islamic Banking become a hot-air issue,
with inflammatory discharges going back and forth, drum wars resounding, clerics,
politicians and pundits at one another’s throat?
The recent upheavals across the largely Arab/Islamic world have nothing to do with
christsian banking, any more than the five-day mayhem in more or less Christian
England have the least connection with the existence of Islamic banks which I have
seen occupying the same street with Christian originated banks, even though the latter
are not so described. Islamic banking has not been mentioned as a contributory factor
to the devastating collapse of European and American banks and the economic
meltdown of the world. Islamic banking was not responsible for the hideous, mind-
boggling corruption among several Nigerian banks, executives of which flouted that
moral injunction contained in ancient Mosaic commandment – Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s goods, least of all when such goods are placed
in your sacred charge as highly paid, over guardians.
Islamic banking is not responsible for the violent unrest in the Niger Delta, the
massacres of Idi, Zaki Biam, Bauchi, Kaduna, Gombe. Maiduguri etc etc. I have not
heard Islamic banking cited in the manifesto – if any - of Boko Haram. It never featured
in the statement of purpose of its predecessor, the Maitasine, whose followers
butchered mainstream moslems with even greater zeal that they dispatched christians
and the so-called ‘infidels’ of other faiths. Islamic banking is not responsible for the
failure of Nigeria to have acquired sustainable electric power in sixty years of
independence. It is not responsible for the breakdown of all human public services –
from education to health and shelter, nor is it responsible for the total eradication of
moral restraints that once existed in the nation, producing the new lucrative pastime of
totally dehumanized criminal minds – the kidnapping of human beings – even the
aged, feeble, or simply vulnerable for ransom. Only two years ago, at a lecture in
Lagos, I urged the need to conserve and protect a nation’s youth as its primary asset
– little did I know that this was already being taken literally, manifested in the stuffing of
children into car boots ln order to extort millions of blood-soaked Naira.
I frankly do not understand the fuss. Banking laws exist. If an Orunmila Bank were to
be proposed by followers of orisa, and it does not breach the nation’s laws, then such
a proposal need not give anyone sleepless nights. And even if the Law is held to
oppose it, orisa followers are entitled to take the initiative and make a case for a
change in existing laws – that is their democratic right and no one can take it away
from them. I shall be among the first to open an account with the Bank of Orunmila,
based on Ifa precepts. Until one is established however, I shall join Pastor Tunde
Bakare in opening a solidarity account with the Islamic Bank whenever it begins
operations, as long as its terms are favourable to the needs of a seventy-seven year
old writer without pension, but thankfully with minimal needs.
The extension – by implication - of the Sultan’s protest is, for me, a far more potent
charge directed at society, and crucial to the setting for this gathering. It implicates two
of the legs on which we have posited the democratic edifice – Law, and Constitution. It
is inevitable that we expand the provenance of this challenging lament, since it is one
that is not limited to any one religion. It thrusts its interrogatories beyond Nigeria and
onto other lands and societies, so let us simply re-phrase it to read: “Why do people
theocraticize…..” straightforward concerns of secular existence? The question applies
to a particular cast of mind, usually moulded and fixated during impressionable years.
By its adult phase, such minds have become inflexible and calcified, incapable of
responding to any kind of phenomena except through theocratic lenses. The thrust of
that question goes to the heart of democracy, and determines the basis of the
democratic order. And yet, what other order is possible for harmonized co-existence in
a pluralistic society differentiated by faith, history, and customs?
Here is a familiar example – trite, yet persistent, a recurring decimal in public
instruction. The Plateau government, recently passed a law forbidding that women be
dressed in trousers, under a supposedly Christian ethic of ‘proper dressing’. What
business, in heaven’s name, has Christianity to do with a woman’s trousers? During an
earlier bout of puritanic fever, this time in one of the south-eastern regions – I forget
which, since state boundaries never seem to stop moving – one such resurgence took
place under a military regime. As we have learnt to expect – and that gifted
psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, had identified the syndrome in his seminal work, THE
WRETCHED OF THE EARTH - the first line victims of the oppressed are always the
next in line down the ladder of misery, a symptom of frustration and impotence that
finds release in vengeance - not on their oppressors - but on other wretched of the
earth. Mob rule took over.