Basil Jide Fadipe is an indigene of Ile-Ife, the ancient town that occupies a pride of place in Nigerian history. I grew up there, so also are many other prominent Nigerians who are today, playing in the big league in the media and other human endeavours. That was where the late journalism icon, Dele Giwa, who changed the face of journalism practice in Nigeria, was weaned. Others have since followed suit: Dele Momodu, Dele Omotunde, Dare Babarinsa, Dele Olojede, Gbenga Adefaye, among others.
Basil, as he is popularly known, taught me General Science in the secondary school. He is a professor and a surgeon. His scholarship and surgical breakthroughs have earned him accolades, rewards and recognitions all over the world. He is the founder/CEO of Justin Fadipe Centre, a flourishing, groundbreaking medical facility in the West Indies. He regularly churns out highly incontrovertible opinions on any subject under the sun. In this piece, reproduced here, Basil describes ‘Nigerian elections as a Season of Grains’. Read on:
“It is the peculiar universality of his themes that has welded my heart to the man since that moment in 1980, when I first came across a book of his (“Human Knowledge”) as I wandered aimlessly, a newly minted graduate, into a bookshop in the northern part of Nigeria. Ever since, I have never been able to shift my heart even an inch. Other than the four gospels, where comparable universality of themes, can be found, I have come across no thinker the size of Bertrand Russell; not before or since him. And if I thought highly enough of (a) visitor(s), he could never leave Justin Fadipe Centre without a stop at the little ‘shrine’ I mounted for Bertrand Russell, where, from the nature of the volumes, it should be obvious Bertrand Russell, though long dead, weighs heavier dead than alive.
“In 1950, when this Professor of Mathematics was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, (yes literature!!!), here was the citation: “In recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”. And when he came to give his speech as he received his award, here goes Bertrand Russell: “In any democracy, at what level of starvation will a citizen accept a bag of grains for his vote?” Since I listened to that speech few years ago, I lost hope in the intrincisity of democracy as an autonomous force. It is, like many tame-able forces, a merely contingent one, shaped by the quality of its tamers. Democracy could be a lion, but one always at the mercy of hunger.
“Give hunger a room, the lion is de-felinated, reduced, but to own caricature. Politics, as a democratic tool, gets blunted by the ‘rust’ of wants, self or selves, outmoding the polity or collective. Citizens who see the rust not the tool…keep a safe distance, ….see the tool, not the rust… seek its handle and those who see tool as much as it’s blight of rust ….shelter in the clouds, sporting for the right moment. Democracy in the end has no teeth intrinsic to it other than that granted by coalescence of self interests. Stumbling across such (spontaneous) coalescence, however, is so often like stumbling across a toothed chicken. Competition, more than coalescence, more define the turf, one viscious interest pitted against another.
“If democracy is so vulnerable to starvation, why pander to democracy and not starvation. When the dirt poor starves from lack of means, Russellian logic about what a bag of grains may do to his vote is obvious but what happens when it is the rich (or … the not-poor) facing starvation… its own kin. Dig a little down and it soon becomes obvious starvation leads both the poor and the rich to trading votes for a bag of grains. The dirt poor starves for means, the rich for contentment and the super rich for security. Subtract the combined population of these different categories of starvers from the whole, and see what flimsy residuum is left of a nation (any) to save democracy from the crippling effects of starvation. The non-starving have learnt to be content with meeting basic needs, unmoved by desire for wants and more wants. They lie in the extremes of the bell curve, too few and too peripheral to swing democracy in the right direction; the advancement of individuals through advancement, not exploitation of the nation
“Yet if any, it is from within the ranks of the non-starvers, that selfless calculations capable of moving a nation forward can be located .The dirt poor starving for food waits at the door, vote in hand seeking the highest bidder. The rich but uncontented, starving for more of everything, or for contracts or position or loans, or grants or scholarship for kids, or any number of other wants, not needs, standing on one side of the road, beckoning democracy for his kind of grains, too ready to do any dance to seduce dividends. The poor trades vote for grains already in hand, delivered days before, the rich trades on credit, the grains to follow a favourable outcome. Trading on credit has risks, a risk minimized by conspiratorial alliance with the poor.
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‘Jonathan or Buhari, the contest will be decided on grains not ringside rhetorics; bigger trucks of grains and correct addresses. This is today’s predicament, hopefully, not tomorrow’s realities’
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“He seduces the poor into an expedient alliance with yet more bags of grain to bloat his stomach and cloud his judgement. It is this pre-electoral conspiracy between the poor who starve for needs and the rich who starve for wants that reduces Aristotelian democracy to a mockery. The non-starvers, too few to be anything, but featherweight, sit at one end of the political seesaw, pitted against the conspiratorial weight sat at the other end of the poor and the rich. In the asymmetry, the featherweight is lobbed into a cloud he could hardly see his path and the election delivered by unholy alliance into the waiting hands of the highest bidders in the ring.
“The poor for reason of needs, has little loyalty to anything other than the sanctity of self. Inside his need perimeters, issues of national drift, an unaffordable and reckless luxury, loom little, if at all. The rich, slave to uncontentedness and driven by wants, is too self consumed to think nation; he thinks self preservation and self perpetuation. Between the two, democracy becomes a manequin garbed in make believe colours. If there is to be hope for democracy, it is neither the poor, nor the rich, to seek, it is the middle class. The middle class, if it be true to value, is less dependent on handouts or hand in, able always to know the fine line between loyalty to party and loyalty to state. He invests his intellect on state driven agendas, little, if at all, on party driven parodies.
“Governance, not partisanship, is his constant focus. Democracy needs him more than he needs democracy. But the only reliable path to middle class is quality education; it shifts up the totem pole. Current Nigeria still has too little of middle class to steer democracy out of murky waters. The country is bottom heavy with the poor and top loaded with the rich; but to the credit of successive governments, education has remained a priority with expanding opportunities home and abroad, to educate Nigerians. There is now hardly a state in the country without a tertiary centre and hardly a part of the world. Nigerians are not engaged in some form of formal education. In time, a coalescence of these human resources must count for something in growing a critical mass of middle class that can cause democracy to be less beholden to starvation. The seekers of votes still benefit from starvation as a collateral tool to garner votes, but so numbered are the days that the next generation of politicians will encounter steeper climbs should they hope on business as usual.
“For now and until that critical mass of middle class emerges, the winners of elections in Nigeria today will remain the winners in the past; those with bigger bags of grains. Jonathan or Buhari, the contest will be decided on grains not ringside rhetorics; bigger trucks of grains and correct addresses. This is today’s predicament, hopefully, not tomorrow’s realities.
Russell implied it all in 1950.”
