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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA With Intellectuals Like These…
Last week a somewhat shadowy group calling itself The Guild of Intellectuals took out a two-page advertisement in the May 11 edition of Thisday in which it asked no one in particular to “TELL THE PEOPLE THE TRUTH” about the third term controversy. The advert was signed by Drs. Anthony Obanje and Ken Thompson, who, if they exist at all, must be anything but intellectuals.
I call the group shadowy because most members of the public, I suspect, would have heard of it only for the first time from its advert in Thisday. The Guild of Editors is well-known as is the Academic Staff Union of Universities, but few people may have heard of the Guild of Intellectuals.
My suspicion is that the Guild is one of those fly-by-night creatures people invent to push causes they are ashamed to identify with publicly. I am, however, prepared like Thisday apparently did, to grant that my suspicions are wrong and the Guild does indeed exist.
If it does, then it must be one of the most irrational and illiterate organisations the advocates of third term have created. I have read all kinds of arguments on why President Obasanjo’s second and final tenure must be extended beyond 2007, but for sheer mendacity and illiteracy, the advert by the Guild of Intellectuals is hard, if not impossible, to beat.
Intellectuals appeal to the intellect as opposed to demagogues who only appeal to emotions. However, from the very title of its advert to its conclusion two full pages later, the Guild of Intellectuals appealed to everything but the intellect. The advert asks presumably those opposed to the third term to “tell the people the truth.” Which is to say those against extending President Obasanjo’s tenure beyond 2007 have been lying to Nigerians by denying the Guild’s claim that President Obasanjo is the greatest thing to happen to Nigeria and by also denying that Nigeria will disintegrate without him.
Most dictionaries define truth as something which is factual or words that describe something accurately. To say someone is the greatest thing to happen to his country or society is essentially a matter of opinion not fact, if only because greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As a Muslim, I believe Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) was, and remains, God’s greatest gift to humanity. I do not, however, expect a non-Muslim to share this belief with me as fact even though it is a belief shared by over one billion people the world over
However, most reasonable people, whether they are Muslims or not, would agree that Prophet Muhammad is one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity, along with other great prophets like Moses and Jesus. This is because the critical, but not the only, test for respecting an opinion is the number of those who share it, based, of course, on its rationality.
So when the Guild of Intellectuals says that President Obasanjo is the greatest thing to happen to Nigeria and that unless Nigerians allow him to continue the wonderful work he started seven years ago, their country will disintegrate, the question to ask is how many Nigerians share that opinion? Equally important what are the factual basis of such an opinion? In other words what is the record of the president’s performance which will lend credence to any claims about his greatness?
The culture of opinion survey is still underdeveloped in this country and so we do not know, and may not know for now, exactly how Nigerians divide in their opinion about President Obasanjo. But even without any opinion survey, it is the height of intellectual dishonesty for the Guild of Intellectuals to claim as they did in their advert, that Nigeria is better off today than it was seven years ago. “Today” said the Guild, “it is a fact of history that the real journey to true nationhood and economic prosperity commenced seven years ago.”
The fact is that most Nigerians regard Obasanjo as a great let-down. Nigerians were persuaded in their millions to elect him as president seven years ago in the belief that he will heal the wounds of the long military misrule of the country and that he will also turn around its economic misfortune.
Four years later he proved such a let-down the 2003 general elections had to be rigged massively for him to get a second term. At least this was the opinion of most election observers, local and foreign. The legal challenge of the results of the presidential election by General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the main opposition party, the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), may have been dismissed by the Supreme Court, but there are widespread suspicions that the judgement was not freely given.
Less than one year to go in his second term, the president has still not lived up to the peoples’ expectations. Far from learning from the mistakes of his first term, as he promised to do during a thanksgiving services celebrating his second term, he has only deepened the nation’s wounds by his politics of intimidation and divide and rule. And seven years since his return Nigerians are worse off today than they were in1999. Today, according to the United Nations, the number of Nigerians living on less than the Naira equivalent of a dollar a day have nearly doubled since 1999.
The president himself has said these figures are bogus. Even so he cannot deny that the huge oil windfalls of the last seven years have not had the desired impact on the quality of lives of Nigerians. The Guild of Intellectuals, along with his other supporters, can claim that his economic reforms have worked wonders for Nigerians, but, as the dog said when told there is a celebration going on in its home, ordinary Nigerians will believe it only when they see and feel it for themselves.
The living standard of people rises only when there are increases in the production of tangible goods and services and not because a relatively few people who think they know what is best for the rest of society impose economic reforms on it. The fact is that in the last seven years, there has been a huge increase in unemployment in the country consequent upon the closure of huge numbers of factories and service industries producing tangible goods and services.
Only the other day, Mr. Sunday Ehindero, the Inspector-General of Police, told the Senate in an open hearing that the level of unemployment in the country is mainly responsible for the palpable insecurity pervading the land. And no one can deny that this insecurity had discouraged both Nigerians and foreigners alike from investing in the future of the country.
Of course, we have had speculators moving in for the quick kill as they always do in high-risk economies like ours, but even these speculators have done so by recycling Nigeria’s own money rather than bringing in fresh cash.
And so, even without any opinion survey, one can say, without any fear of contradiction, that President Obasanjo has been a great let-down. It speaks volumes about what people think of his administration, that it has had to resort openly to intimidation of the opposition and the media – the latest was the week-end raid on the premises of the African Independent Television, AIT, for airing a documentary giving a historical perspective to attempts by our leaders to sit-tight in office – and resorting to bribery of legislators to try and get the constitution amended to allow him extend his tenure beyond 2007.
The alert reader would have noticed that this article has not responded to the advert of the Guild of Intellectuals paragraph by paragraph. Rather, it is a broad criticism of the advert in so far the Guild has failed woefully to carry out the role of intellectuals in society, which is to tell truth to power.
Intellectuals do not expect people to accept their claims at face value. They try to back any assertion they make rigorously with facts and logic. Paragraph after paragraph, the advert by the Guild of Intellectuals clearly lacks rigor in both fact and logic. Instead, it is full of generalizations and praise-mongering that should embarrass even a semi-literate..
Not only is the advert a classic study in generalization and praise-mongering it is written in the most inelegant and wordy language that does no credit to an intellectual. Pick any paragraph at random and the prose you read is hardly edifying as a piece of literature.
“This man,” says one paragraph, “has done wonderfully well; his achievements have confounded even his foes and ardent critics alike. If against this background, a case is being made for him to run for a third term, at least, in the interest of the down-trodden masses who had so much been buffeted and marginalized – how then could such a call be said to be unpatriotic.”
How, in the face of the high level of insecurity and unemployment in the land, anyone can claim that President Obasanjo has “done wonderfully well” truly beggars belief. Again how it is in the interest of “the down-trodden masses” of this country for its leaders to seek to perpetuate themselves in power by force and subterfuge, even if they have done well by Nigerians, is difficult to understand.
But not only does the paragraph lack rigor in both fact and logic, it is written in the kind of cliché ridden and poorly structured English you would not associate with anyone who calls himself an intellectual.
Or take an earlier paragraph in the adverts which claims that “Today we all bear witness to the vibrancy injected into the banking sector at the end of the successfully concluded consolidation exercise in that vital sector. Now Nigerian banks, 25 of them, strong and healthy, can compete in the global market. Nigerians now have banks where they can save their hard-earned income and sleep with their two eyes closed. Bank distress is now history, courtesy the Obasanjo regime.”
First, any way you look at it, five months, which is how long the country’s banks have consolidated, is too early to conclude that the banking reform is a success. Second, the size of a bank, as any rookie financial analyst, would tell you, is no guarantee for success. Many a bigger bank than Nigeria’s newly consolidated banks have been known to collapse.
Third, if the Guild had researched its facts well it would have discovered that inspite of their consolidation not a single Nigerian bank, according to the March edition of The Africa Report, published by Paris-based Jeane Afrique, ranked among the top 12 AFRICAN banks by the credits they have extended to their customers or by their total deposits. None is also among the top 10 by their net results, i.e. their profitability. Again, none ranks among the top 20 by their assets. It is therefore strange that the Guild of Intellectuals would claim, as it did, that Nigerian banks are now serious competitors in the GLOBAL market.
Finally take the conclusions of the advert as yet another example of playing fast and loose with facts and appealing to emotions rather than to reason. “Our law makers – fellow Nigerians,” the Guild said, “let us make a date with history. Lets endorse the third term. Let us ignore the political jobbers and charlatans who in the past betrayed this country and fractured our hope. The moment of decision has come, it’s time to take our destiny into our hands.
“Tell the people the truth. Continuity this time is the path to political stability and economic growth.”
If Drs. Obanje and Thompson who signed this advert exist and are indeed intellectuals, they should truly be ashamed of themselves that they would resort to name-calling in their conclusions. Name-calling, as any rational being knows, is the first refuge of someone who cannot back his position with facts and logic.
The Guild of Intellectuals wants opponents of “Third Term” to tell people the truth. But by its advert it has itself only succeeded in telling all sorts of lies to the people. And the biggest lie of all is not even that President Obasanjo has been a miracle worker. The biggest lie is that even if he is, that entitles him to bend or break his country’s Constitution just for him to extend his stay in office.
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