Ebenezer Obadare

A Plural Challenge: Rethinking Civil Society in Nigeria

A Review of Humor, Silence, And Civil Society in Nigeria By Ebenezer Obadare

University of Rochester Press, 2016, 177pp

By Tade Ipadeola

Legend has it that after Stalin’s death and the bitter three-year power struggle to provide leadership for the Soviets, Nikita Khrushchev summoned a meeting of Soviet top brass in which he elaborated on the programme of the new administration. He denounced Stalin’s crushing purges stating that his administration would be by far more humane than hitherto. Many reacted viscerally, falling physically ill as the ‘Secret Speech’ was delivered and there were no questions entertained for the four hours that the speech lasted.

An apocryphal account of the same event however states that among those present was a particularly aggrieved man who wanted to know why, all those years of Stalin’s terror, no one spoke up or stood up to Stalin even as Khrushchev denounced the purges. The man spoke out of turn and was initially ignored. But, he felt very strongly about his grievance and heckled Khrushchev with the question once again, out of the crowd and out of turn. Then Khrushchev bowed his head and paused. He didn’t look at anyone particularly but asked in a very clear voice ‘Who said that?’

Silence fell on the entire hall. Thirty seconds passed. A full minute. Two minutes. There was pin-drop silence in the hall. After the third minute, Khrushchev drew himself to his full height (he was not a very tall man) and with his eyes sweeping the rank of officials, Khrushchev finally spoke and said ‘I believe you have your answer there.’ No one spoke or coughed again until Khrushchev finished.

In the evolving discourses of civil society all over the world and especially in Africa, the essentially plural nature of society, the dynamic influences of world politics and the peculiarities of individual nations and their leadership, charismatic or colorless, continue to throw up new perspectives and to shape the directions of inquiry and thought. With Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria, Professor Ebenezer Obadare has opened up new vistas in the growing discourse. The book is primarily designed for academics but it does have far reaching implications beyond academia. It should be of interest to anyone interested in how the last three decades have shaped our perception of what civil society is and what we can do to reclaim lost swathes of intellectual ground.

Can humor and silence form the essence of the enduring warp and woof of civil society in the way that the Agbekoya and traditional civic organizations cannot? Other than as a tool of oppression, can silence be subversively engaged in the reinvention of society generally? How much damage has the dominant associational interpretation of civil society done in Africa and in Nigeria? What are the limitations of ‘soft’ instruments such as humor and silence? These are some of the issues tackled very deftly in the book.

The author starts out by showing how the scholars and the public tend to portray civil society. He expends considerable time and energy showing that whereas the emphasis on voluntary associations has been a neat and pragmatic way to summarize civil society, it is not an adequate model for understanding what constitutes civil society or its essence in Nigeria or Africa. Drawing from developments in Eastern Europe, the author maps the rise of non-governmental organizations, community based organizations and even state-sponsored ‘civic’ associations and shows how over the closing decades of the 20th century into the 21st century, an associational paradigm for civil society effected a shift in the civil society discourse, becoming so dominant as to push non-associational components of civil society into the fringes. Outside the direct influence of the fallouts from the cold war, the traditional forms of associations in guilds and age grades also feature in cameo roles in how sub-Saharan Africa particularly has come to embrace a professionalized civil society regime.

Anyone who has studied the damage that the Association for Better Nigeria did in 1993 or the monstrosity that the claque-inspired and driven Youths Earnestly Yearn for Abacha was until Abacha died suddenly, would understand, for example, the perfidy that is the #SupportSARS in 2017 Nigeria. Are these associations also part of civil society? They tick the boxes. They are voluntary, they are ostensibly non-governmental and they are to all intents and purposes associations by citizen of the country. That some of these are registered by the Corporate Affairs Commission appears to lend much needed ‘legitimacy’ for with this extra element, accounts, structure and functions are all very well defined. Does it matter, then, that there is a huge outcry when the Nigerian Senate proposes to pass an additional NGO Bill into law which puts greater scrutiny on the activities of these star players in the civil society game? Does it matter much that the proposed NGO Bill has many similarities with substantive legislation in contemporary Russia? Can true civil society be so easily blinkered and bridled?

Not,according to Obadare, if we dare to reincorporate non-associational components such as humor and silence. Phenomena such as these, though too tenuous for registrability in ‘Corporate Affairs’ apparatuses anywhere, nevertheless form the very essence of the pulse of what civil society is. Using the sole but supernally significant instance of Siddon Look and Tanda Look invoked by the late Chief Bola Ige at the height of the struggle to wrest back the reins of politics and governance from the duo of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and General Sani Abacha, the author underscores the potent uses of silence. Similarly, the author marshals many instances of citizen humor from the late 1970s up to year 2011, a span of time including both military and civilian rule, to illustrate the profoundly important nature of humour of all varieties.

Recent happenings in Zimbabwe, Uganda and even Rwanda seem to support the central thesis in Obadare’s work. By the time Robert Mugabe finally was dragged away from the seat of power, he had become one of the most joked about heads of state in history. Social media was awash with memes of Uncle Bob literally slipping out of power or offering a wisecrack meant to be understood in purely ironic terms. As the humor machine all over the world went into overdrive, a pall of silence concomitantly descended internally on Zimbabwe. With sophisticated social media monitoring units, no resident of any town or city in Zimbabwe could afford to be careless with speech or gesture right up to the final confirmation of Mugabe’s exit from power when tweets and Facebook posts from within Zimbabwe went to top gear as well.

Tade Ipadeola

In Rwanda, the incumbent reportedly won by a 98% margin at the polls and there is a virtual pin-drop silence about the implausibility of this occurring anywhere on earth least of all in a Rwanda in which young aspirants to top political office have been jostling in the wings. In 2016, a ‘banana joke’ ostensibly directed at Paul Kagame earned the maker of the joke a 20 year sentence in jail. The savage/gallows humor in Rwanda reference the mysterious deaths of opponents of the regime in places as far away as South Africa and Europe. And who but a lunatic would want to change what isn’t broke aha aha? Tyranny, too, has a sense of humor and revels in silence. In the macabre case of Nigeria, the military at the height of their oppressive rule installed an interdiction center at the heart of one of the more cosmopolitan cemeteries in the city of Lagos, making their ultimate aim abundantly clear.

There is rigor in the nuanced arguments made in this book but I will argue that there is revanche as well. Delimiting the provinces of humor and silence isn’t an easy thing to do in any context but here the author pulls it off remarkably, adding to our understanding those insights about what differences exist between the polis and the civis. Copious scholarly references to what has gone on record in Eastern Europe illustrate contemporary developments in Nigeria where a near copycat approach has been the modus vivendi for a while.

The revanchist element in the book may well be, in the view of this reader, an expression of the collective consciousness of all Nigerians who came of age at that critical juncture of the country’s transition out of overt military rule of which the author is one. The tipping point of this transition was the death of General Sani Abacha, a man so forbidding in his very countenance and bodily presentation as to erase any notions of humor on sight. This man came to power after his psychic opposite ‘stepped aside’. President Babangida was known for a form of humor which was rare among practitioners of violence, encouraging ‘debates’ and ‘public contributions’ only to turn around and literally hunt dissenters down. These military men scarred the public consciousness but, as the book under review abundantly shows, failed to eschew the subversive and negative capabilities of humor and silence in a thriving society.

It is interesting that Obadare offers these vistas now. Moving away from the templates from Eastern Europe back to home turf, the salience of Obadare’s offering comes to homely light when juxtaposed with a passage from the fiction of one of the foremost Nigerian novelists, Daniel Fagunwa, who died in 1963. Fagunwa had written of a society called Ilu Ero Ehin, literally The Town Backward Thought. The distinguishing feature of this town is the town-crier who announces what time it is and what the citizens should be doing. Thus, the town-crier can sound the gong and announce ‘It is time to eat!’ or ‘It is time to fight!’ or ‘It is time to laugh!’ or ‘It is time to weep!’ with denizens complying instantly. No such society exists on the planet, even North Korea wouldn’t make the cut (though it comes close) but the moral is clear: ultimately, what makes a society function as Civis is more than the sum total of legislation or regulation in that society. What makes civil society are sometimes the intangibles. Those are the things Obadare has broached in this book of reflections and we do well to meditate on their implications.