BUHARI ON EXISTENTIALISM

By Biko Agozino

In rationalizing his suspension of the Chief Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, President Muhammadu Buhari stated without explanation, ‘This is an existential policy’. What is the ‘this’ referring to? Within the context of the speech, he could be referring to the fight against corruption as a fight that must be won if the country must continue to exist. However, since corruption is found in every existing country, it is doubtful that fighting corruption alone could be ‘an existential policy’. Perhaps, Buhari’s speech writers were giving us a hint of his ideological or philosophical orientation by invoking existentialism to define the man and his policies as guided by the fear of the end of existence. What is existentialism?

Existentialism is the European belief that existence comes before essence. A country exists before the essential policies of the country can be shaped and implemented by individual social agents. An individual exists before the subjective opinions of the individual can be interpreted by other individuals. Existentialists, therefore, see the world as absurd in the sense that the actions of individuals or the policies of nations do not always make rational sense especially when such actions and policies go against the interests of the actors or policy-makers. Existentialists wonder why some policy-makers pursue goals that may threaten the existence of the nation state or why some individuals indulge in actions that would harm them personally even while experiencing thrill, angst and dread about the consequences?

It is probably flattering to suggest that Buhari is philosophical in any sense of the term but his speech-writers may be individuals who strongly believe that what matters is the existence of political power and not the essence of good and evil policies. The speech-writers are indicating the obvious existentialist dogma that what makes a person like Buhari is the past existence of the individual and Buhari, having been a dictator in the past, is bound to continue existing as a dictator; irrespective of the essence of the present presidential constitution. It is possible that if Buhari understood this self-mocking implication of the concept of existential policy, he would fire the speech writers with what he called ‘alacrity’ in his judge-jury-executioner speech.

Buhari wants us to believe that he was only obeying the order of the Code of Conduct Tribunals by suspending Chief Justice Walter Nkanu Onnoghen and replacing him with an interim Justice. Critics shout that coming only weeks before a presidential election, Buhari is trying to hedge his bets that the election results may be determined by the Supreme Court. Thus, appointing an interim Chief Justice who happens to share his own religious affiliation, ethnicity, and regional origin on the existential ground of being the next most senior Justice of the supreme Court, is just what it is, neither good nor evil, according to existentialism. Being, perhaps, the only Supreme Court Justice with a doctoral degree and having been a Justice of the Sharia Court of Appeal in the past are just existential facts that should not be confused with the essence.

The essence of the policy of rule of law is that the suspended Chief Justice remains innocent before the law until proven guilty. The allegations against him are heavy and if found guilty following a proper investigation and fair trial, Buhari is right that he should not return as the Chief Justice because no one is above the law. However, if the Chief Justice is proven to have been corrupt, it is likely that the Associate Justices of the supreme court share in his guilt. 

Unknown to Buhari’s speech-writers, it is not the Chief Justice alone who determines cases that come before the court and so if people suspected of corruption have been freed by the Supreme Court on ‘mere technicalities’ as alleged, is there evidence of dissenting opinions and concurring opinions to show how the Chief Justice could over-rule the jury of his peers? 

By the way, the Supreme Court usually considers ‘mere technicalities’ or points of law and not the facticity or substantive evidence that may have been examined by the court of first instance. The rule of law uses such ‘mere technicalities’ to ensure that it is better for ten guilty persons to escape punishment than for one innocent person to be punished. Nigerian courts may be corrupt but they are clearly more accountable than the legislative and executive arms of government perhaps because of the relative security of tenure that should not be undermined.

If all judges are tainted in Nigeria, as many suspect, then where would the country find the angels to preside over court cases under a corrupt neocolonial regime? Kwame Nkrumah also removed the Chief Justice of Ghana from office after people suspected of plotting to kill Nkrumah were acquitted by the apex court. Buhari points to undeclared assets worth millions of dollars that the Chief Justice himself admitted that he mistakenly did not declare or failed to declare correctly and the postponement of the National Judicial Council that could vote to suspend the Chief Justice. Critics say that if the same existential policy is applied to Buhari himself and to his nepotistic appointees, there would be a government shutdown in Nigeria.

One of the greatest weaknesses of existentialism as a Eurocentric philosophy is the over-emphasis on the individual who interacts with other individuals in arts and philosophy. Greater attention to the structure of an unjust society would need to go beyond existentialism and individualism to address the on-going generational ethnic-religious-gender-class struggles. 

Buhari must be commended for fighting corruption but he must be reminded that he cannot fight corruption by targeting individuals who may not be loyal to him while turning a blind eye to his cronies. His existential policy of giving more to areas that gave him 95% of their votes and less to those who wisely gave him 5% of their votes with knowledge of his unrepentant chauvinism may not be challengeable in corrupt courtrooms but voters still have the limited power to hold the politicians accountable to some extent if they bother to vote.

In the final analysis, it is not the law that will determine the nature of the society; it is the society that will determine the nature of the law in Nigeria. So long as Nigerian politicians and the masses refuse to address historic wrongs done with the support of the law against millions of the people in the past and the present, for so long will the existential policy of fighting corruption remain a smoke-screen. Buhari does not need the Supreme Court or the Code of Conduct Tribunal to order him to apologize to the survivors of the genocide that he helped to lead against the Igbo in Biafra, of which he was reported as saying that he had no regrets and that he was ready to do it again. 

Nigeria should offer reparations to the survivors as recommended by the Justice Oputa Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuses in the country. Many survivors of other tragic wrongs in the country have been offered some atonement but not the Igbo who still feel unwanted by a country that dreads letting them go to build their own nation. There is no need for a court order before the politicians wage a war against intolerance, illiteracy, disease, and poverty in the country in concert with other African states towards the Peoples Republic of Africa in which no existential individual will be able to impose his free will on the masses ever again.

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.