By Wilfred Eya
Founding National Secretary of Alliance for Democracy (AD) and a Director with the Centre for Alternative Policy Perspectives and Strategy (CAPPS), Abuja, Prof. Udenta O. Udenta in this interview, speaks on the economic hardship in the country, entrenchment of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies in Nigeria and President Bola Tinubu’s administration, among other issues.
People see you today and they think, what an articulate man whose clarity of thought is infectious. How have you evolved to this point?
Sometimes the path or the pathways to destiny is crucible. It’s not something you can capture in currency. There are magical moments. And if you have that extraordinary gift to discover who you are early enough in life, you will, at some point in the future, say, yes, this was that curve that set me in motion. Possibly, I made the same discovery at the age of 13. That’s when I started writing profusely. And I wrote extravagantly for one and a half years until I was 14 and a half, putting out close to 17 manuscripts.
And I preserved them as a covenant with God that they would see the light of day someday. And they saw the light of day in 2015, and 2018, almost 40-something year time lag. I put out novels, complete novels, short stories, drama texts, philosophical musings, and social commentaries when I was 13, 14 years. And some of my thoughts then, still resonate powerfully with me today in midlife. At 16, I led a student rebellion, a very massive one, successfully. At 17, I challenged the dominant elite structure in my community. At 18, I was leading the Marxist youth movement.
Ultimately, I was part of the pro-democracy agitation, and suffered six detentions as the Secretary of the Alliance for Democracy. Here we are today. My first major scholarly work was originally a status of the African literary process. Composed in 1986, when I was 23, and today, a classic of modern African cultural studies and critical theory. In a sense, I see my life as being composed of two variables, intellectual conscience and praxis.
How do you utilize some modest gifts, intellectual gifts and endowments in the matter of what Antonio Gramsci Edward said or some of those grand thinkers?
My first intellectual biography has a subtitle: “A Personal Journey from Intellectual Conscience to Praxis. A Fair that Scholars Should Not Limit Praxis.” People don’t understand that praxis is motion. Praxis is not practice or action. It is a theory in action. That is that spectrum from theoretical thought or theoretical production to practical life. So, if you have a normative of theoretical production, but you cannot transform those thoughts into societal benefit, then something is lacking.
You’ve written 21 books and dozens of articles for newspapers, journals, magazines, and so on, which would you say qualifies as your magnum opus?
It’s a difficult question, but for me, at the level of a boyhood creator, an imaginative reconstructor or mediator of life as a child, The Wrath of the Gods is a novel. It epitomizes my understanding of the bucolic African condition, pre-colonial condition. The rustic village life of magical realism, in a way, it has to now capture both the essence of what you can consider in the European imagination, the primitive essence of Africa.
Magical Realism has an ontological force. How do you construct the identity of a people? Now, Revolutionary Aesthetics, an African literary process, for the very fact that it had dominated the scene for almost 30 years, and produced tons of scholars, generated, literally speaking, hundreds of master’s degrees and a lot of doctorate degrees. And a lot of Nigerian professors and global professors of literature owe their careers substantially to that work.
It’s a work I composed almost as a child. I was 22. I didn’t even have a master’s degree, not to talk about a PhD. And yet, I felt a passion to say something new. It is in uttering something new that I caused an epistemic rupture between the old tradition of critical practice in African literature to a new thesis called Revolutionary Aesthetics. Now, I have written and produced another work called Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature.
It’s beyond literature. It is cultural studies. It is social transformation. It’s the idea of merging the Western radical aesthetics with African transcendental materialism. So, that work hasn’t seen the measure of intellectual illumination in the hands of scholars.
Let’s take off from Wrath of God, which you wrote as a young man. After the book, you have been speaking publicly, engaging with political parties, with candidates, with governments, and Nigeria is still where it is. Are you increasingly questioning the relevance of your enterprise?
I’m not going to question that, and for my intellectual and ideological companions, when I refer to Nietzsche, of course, you know Friedrich Nietzsche. That’s a conservative rational philosopher. Why put him? I say, no. I find him and his sense of illumination very important in this question you asked me. He believes in dwelling at the mountaintop and that the noise of politics, the din and noise of politics, and the value of life are beneath his content.
That means I write, not because I want people to read and understand me. Generations to come will crack the codes of my writing that are not known today. It’s perfectly normal because to know me today exalts the possibilities of my works. That means 50 to 100 years to come, people could still start interpreting Zarathustra. In that sense, whether the generation I find myself in is not prepared for this kind of intellectual heat or force we’re generating, I have nothing to worry about because 50 years, 100 years and 200 years when we’re no more here, generations coming after will say, oh my God, people like this lived. They can learn lessons.
Incrementally, it happens. Every generation creates heroes out of rupture. Moments of societal decomposition will lead to something unique. When Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 12, 1993 election and Sani Abacha heightened the contradictions that Babangida generated and saw us in and out of detention, we didn’t lose hope. We felt that we were on the cusp of a new dawn. But out of the chaos and disorder of that moment, something we tried for the country. And it did.
When Abiola unfortunately died, it was a new beginning. We were part of that new beginning. So, I found myself in a kind of alliance for democracy. Not because I didn’t love my teaching at university or my writing. I was assessed as a professor in 1997. I abandoned all that and my career suffered. It was taunted because of Nigeria and democratic possibilities. And it happened. When Olusegun Obasanjo came in 1999, even we, the opposition party, rallied around the new democratic order to drag Nigeria from that nadir of existing to something much more clement.
So, it happened. It has incremental success. But the debilitating condition of the post-colony in terms of this construction of democracy in the past 25 or so years is disheartening. But you don’t want to lose hope. I will give you one instance of where one would not lose hope. Recently, if you observe, I’m not jumping any gun, almost all the papers in this country carried some funny news from the National Bureau of Statistics, three-point-something growth, almost defying the sense of unrestrained celebration on the part of government that used strategic communication tools to permeate the media space with that.
I’m happy that the Organized Private Sector (OPS), usually a friend of the government, disowned that piece of data and said, this is nonsensical because we are employers of labour. We know what is going on. So, when you find that a government of the day that ought to be democratic is reliant on fake data that such an important body has put out, therefore diminishing its legitimacy and credibility in the minds of Nigerians, that would tell you that something is amiss in the country.
For a government to have lost its way completely to say we don’t have a solution to the daunting political, economic, and social crisis that we have to leverage on a data of about three-point-something growth rate and a reduction in unemployment is a signal to a new beginning. That is sad. So, for me, this is the hallmark of regime massaging, and it is troubling, to say the least.
What do you think leveraging on the experience that you have of seeing society both from a theoretical point of view and a practical perspective and intellectual point of view, is behind this failure of each successive government in Nigeria?
I can tell you some words that come to my mind and it looks simple, but it’s loaded- accountability. When governments are not held accountable because of the way and manner the system is composed, then governments that come after governments will not constrain themselves. What is accountability? That is an attempt to fetishize the constitution and constitutional provisions. Election holds, somebody is sworn in and so I am legal. I have a legal place to be in power but they are not legitimate.
Legal doesn’t derive from constitutional provisions or from electoral processes. It derives from practice. Two key things; the maintenance of public order and safety and security and then the welfare and prosperity of the people. When you fail in these two particulars as the current Bola Tinubu government has failed, you’ve lost legitimacy but you’re legal. But when you’re not held accountable as Muhammadu Buhari was not held accountable, you understand that successive governments will be producing in the manner the previous ones have produced.
That’s one way of explaining it. And to hold governments accountable is not the duty of government. The guardrails of democratic governance and protection must come from four multiple sources. Here we are, the fourth estate of the realm, the media is the ground because it’s protected by the constitution. Free speech is very important, media freedom and personal liberties. Two, civic spaces must be empowered to push back. Organized labour must protect both the labouring masses and the society and opposition parties apart from nationality groups.
These are the entities that must push back on any government of the day. But when you fail to do so and expect the government to constrain itself, it will not constrain itself. So, if you have a Buhari government not constrained, then you have a Tinubu government not constrained, what hope do you have another future government would be constrained?
Even with all the ups and downs in the country, your passion seems undiminished. How do you sustain that?
It cant be diminished because one must remain eternally intellectually curious. When you are not curious about life, the puzzles and the riddles of life and existence when you wake up in the morning, even the sun appearing and the dew and mist melting should give you pause to say there’s something new breaking forth.
So, every day I live, there’s something new and enchanting for me and the country. The depressing state of the economy of politics and political production apart, there must be hope for the younger generation because if we, who have received a baton from the founding fathers and mothers of this country should drop it, then there’s no future for them.
Do you say to yourself that all that failure to effect the sort of change that you have advocated and that you seek for this country is just compost for the thing that you hope will grow one day?
When you adopt a model of democracy, which is Western liberal democracy, again unfortunately the prefaces are gone. Liberal is not Western anymore. It is democracy. I want us to limit it to Western liberal democracy as an inheritance. It’s a particular mode of democratic governance but is now universalised as democracy. When you adopt that model, it comes with all its implications and its limit situations. That means you must know it is incremental, it is minimalist in effecting positive change.
It’s almost like having a vehicle with a Volkswagen Beetle engine and a Ferrari body and you want it to win a Formula 1 race. It can’t. It crawls. So that sense of crawling, of minimalism in terms of tackling societal conditions is what gives you hope that despite seeing these oddities around, you see the misgovernance every day unfolding before your eyes, there is hope that incrementally, because to do otherwise is to cause for a mental rupture in the system in a revolutionary sense of it which will undermine our democracy.
In that respect, where do you see things going in this country heading, for instance, going into 2027 and after 2027, are you able to plot the trajectory of this country based on the parapraxis that you see today?
Two things will jump out quickly for me. One, for even the system to manage itself well in terms of social formation, it must have a very strong place in the commanding height of the economy for the state. What happens if the state has been retrenched? The retrenchment of the state by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which has been accelerated under this particular regime is not only troubling, it is a disaster for the country. So, the state must firmly play its crucial role in the production of education in terms of health, in terms of social services, in terms of the welfare of the people.
While the private sector will play the overall role in terms of managing certain critical sectors of the economy, that is one. But physically with 2027 and beyond, as I said, every government that comes as part of its mandate, especially this particular government to dismantle those guardrails that will protect the people and democratic order. One, the opposition parties are run by crisis, sometimes generated from outside. Labour is pushed to the limit of despair. The media is harassed from pillar to post. Civic spaces are shrinking.
What we need to do is to start recomposing these spaces and domains. The site of resistance and protest must be reconstituted. Civic spaces must be there. See what happened with the kids who were tried unjustly and illegally. Their story is even gone. They got out of jail, they rode into a vehicle, they entered the villa, they got a pat on the back, got biscuit and Fanta. The Inspector General of Police (IGP) is not held accountable, the Attorney General is not held accountable, and the police officers are not held accountable.
I didn’t see people populate the Unity Fountain the way they did with the #Bring-Back-Our-Girls. We need to see a consort of opposition parties, civic space agitators and empowered civic space leaders, labour and national unions populating that Unity Fountain every day with placards, saying we are agitating for two or three things. Labour should be left free to do its job. The media must be left off the hook and civic spaces should not shrink.
If you do that successfully, you may have 2027 that is enchanting, robust and a well-animated a democratic context. If you fail to achieve that, you may find this current president and his team strolling back to power leisurely.
