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John La Rose's Enigmatic Nigeria By
In case you have not realised it, we have all spent one month of the new year and grown older by that number of days. This is the season of the year during which some take keen interest in crystal ball matters. If you have bothered to seek the wise counsel of anyone on how to ride on the crest of good fortune this new year, you would probably have been given generous slices of Pentecostal determinism. You are advised to think and dream positively, to imagine yourself a story and the year is bound to obey your desires. When I tried to contradict one of my unsolicited consultants on the issue a few days ago, he chastised me as a man of fickle faith. I did not give up until I told the anecdote of an old song in the Delta steel town of Aladja which warned that if the frequency of prayers were all people needed to succeed in life, then Moslem faithful would all be prosperous. Like an individual, a country needs more than prayers to develop and prosper. Natural resource endowment is important, so are a large land space and population. But all these assets can easily become liabilities if a country does not have visionary thinkers and a committed and progressive (read revolutionary) leadership to harness and channel them. Indeed, a lavish natural resource endowment can easily become a curse such as oil has been to Nigeria. This point was ably argued by Prof. Kwame Jomo Sundaram of the Malaysia when he delivered the second United Bank of Africa international lecture in Lagos a few years ago. When a country has the misfortune of being run by a ruling class lacking a progressive ideology, that country exists in perpetuity as a glorified giant, a mere spectator in the global theatre of development. This was the conclusion I reached in the four-part article I did last year on Nigeria in the out-going millennium. Little has happened on the national scene in the past one year to persuade me to revise my thesis. But John La Rose thinks I am wrong. In the last week of December both of us spent nearly half a day in his London home on the subject. We parted, as we did in previous encounters, without yielding too much ground to each other, although on each occasion we understood ourselves better and appreciated the gargantuan nature of the Nigerian enigma: a country having all the perquisites to make Africa achieve a breakthrough yet shackled by forces that are difficult to comprehend. Trinidad-born John La Rose is acutely familiar with the Nigerian situation. He follows events here with clinical attention and has been doing so for nearly three decades. The New Beacon Books which he co-founded with his wife, Sarah, is one of the most authoritative sources of books on any African country. Since his visit to the country in 1979 he has become deeply committed to its development. In 1983, he wrote an original essay in an edition of the "Race Today" journal with the provocative title: "Nigeria: The Long War" in which he assessed the revolutionary potential of the radical politics in Northern Nigeria via Mallam Aminu Kano's Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). He saw in that intervention the first serious attempt to challenge the conservative ideology of the ruling class in the North which has held both that region and Nigeria hostage for nearly half a century. Soon after La Rose's article appeared in 1983, the reactionary forces in the region rallied under the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and Governor Balarabe Musa of Kaduna, who with Kano's Abubakar Rimi symbolised that revolt, was impeached and removed from office. On the last day of that year, the military struck and sacked the four-year-old civilian government under Alhaji Shehu Shagari's presidency. Muhammadu Buhari, later a General, assumed power. He was succeeded by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida who was supplanted by Gen. Sani Abacha whose mantle was taken over by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar. The June 12, 1993, presidential elections won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola, his imprisonment and death in detention are part of this sordid narrative. For 15 years Nigeria wobbled from crisis to crisis during which time no real development took place. The drift is still on, two years into the post-military era. John La Rose, like other keen watchers of Nigeria, knows the details of this macabre drama. Every year he hosts Nigerian scholars and civil rights advocates and robust debates take place at formal and informal sessions. When I contacted him that I was in London and would like to interview him on the place of black and progressive publishing in the United Kingdom for my newspaper's planned "Review Series" he reminded me of his re-reading of Sir Ahmadu Bello's "My Life," the autobiography of the late Sardauna of Sokoto. We analysed several passages together to decipher the thinking, the philosophy and idiom of the aristocracy celebrated in this excellently written book. We tried to connect the era to the present times. We reviewed the circumstances of progressive politics in the North and the rest of Nigeria. Wherever I despaired, La Rose was confident and hopeful. He was 73 last December. Like most people committed to Africa, John La Rose is deeply troubled by resurgence of what he called the regionalisation (tribalisation?) of resistance against oppression and exploitation in Nigeria. This refers to the emergence of ethnic or region-based political groupings, some of which are veering in the direction of armed politics. In some sense, the tendency is analogous to what obtained in the colonial period. In a number of places such as Algeria, South Africa and Angola, the uprising against imperialism had to be conducted via vehicles that bore racial banners. Where a revolutionary core controlled the leadership of the movements, they did not degenerate into ethnic conflagration. This happened in South Africa. John La Rose is anxious to see a trans-ethnic progressive political alliance in Nigeria that will uplift the various localised agendas so that the struggle for change can be conducted in a manner to emancipate all the oppressed and poor of Nigeria regardless of linguistic and regional affinity. For La Rose, the leaders of this change need not be only those domiciled in Nigeria. The movement should encompass the diasporia, with a conscious effort made to exploit the facilities available in the globalised information technology. Those who avail themselves of these instruments are the modern equivalents of the international working class which brought about the revolutionary changes of the 20th century. At this point of our dialogue, La Rose brought out a file on Nigeria's Philip Emeagwali. He has printed from Emeagwali's internet website some of his over 1,000 publications on computers and the new knowledge industry. La Rose knew of Emeagwali when President Bill Clinton acknowledged him as "Africa's Bill Gates" in his address to our National Assembly on August 26 last year. La Rose drew my attention to a pithy remark in a speech Emeagwali delivered to a school in the United States. He observed that the trouble with Nigeria is that people are adored for creating individual, private wealth. Those who create social wealth such as knowledge, ideas, inventions, are ignored. The people who will save Africa and restore honour and pride to it should, like Emeagwali, think and work hard with new tools of liberation. These were the echoes of John La Rose's words as I clutched books and journals to leave his North London home that day.
The writer wrote in from London and is a member of the Nigerian Guardian Editorial Board
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