I knew Abba Kyari. No, we didn’t school together at St Paul’s Zaria, Warwick or Cambridge. We didn’t work in the same law firm or media house, never exchanged text messages, nor did he buy me books. He wasn’t my bestman nor my children’s godfather. No, we weren’t friends, nor served on the same boards, we never worked as colleagues, ever. I didn’t know him 4 decades ago, but from September 2015 when he was appointed chief of staff to the president. This doesn’t mean I didn’t know him enough. I did.
He was a public official, the basis on which I knew him, and will always remember him. His record is in the open. He will always be remembered be as a power drunk official, an unconscionable power monger who abused his privilege in service simply because he could, without consequences. Someone who served narrow interests as against transcendental national interests, who promoted impunity and abuse of process, and failed in key aspects of his role possibly because he was distracted pursuing other interests. He will be remembered as the epitome of what a public servant should never be.
I have seen Aso Rock letters, riddled with multiple errors, signed by him, and by his boss, Muhammadu Buhari. This should never have been. In one letter Buhari’s name was wrongly spelt, but Buhari too went ahead and signed it, and it was dispatched all them same. I won’t forget the scandal of a plagiarised speech by Buhari, or the grammatical and other bloopers in his speeches as well as deliberate falsehood. It is the duty of the chief of staff to vet and approve all communications to and from the president, ensuring that they are in impeccable states.
Members of the first family, Aisha Buhari, and her daughter, Zara, in particular made it public that the Aso Rock Clinic was in a dysfunctional state, without basic supplies like syringes or paracetamol. If Abba Kyari couldn’t help fix the health sector, he could have at least made the Aso Rock Clinic world class, as this was part of his functions, even more so as the chief physician to the president reported directly to him. How different it would’ve been that he breathed his last on 17 April 2020 at the Aso Rock Clinic with its superb services and facilities, as against that private hospital in Lagos. Perhaps he was too busy doing other things than his core duties.
He was on the board of Nigeria’s ATM, the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) — the country’s darkest, most opaque and unaccountable corporation — whilst serving as chief of staff to the president, in gross violation of the NNPC Act, section 2 to be precise. He was sitting on a board of a company whose chairman and group managing director reported to him, anyway. This is gross abuse is unprecedented.
The NNPC as a black hole, which despite the huge spending on turn-around maintenance of the moribund and useless refineries over the years, announced a cumulative loss of N123.25 billion in 10 months (January to October 2019). It also spent N843.12 billion on fuel subsidy in 13 months. This amount paid on ‘under recovery’ (the fancy name for fuel subsidy, as Buhari had said there’s no such thing as fuel subsidy) stood at a record N206.585 billion for January and February 2019 (an increase of N190.37 billion compared to the N16.212 billion posted for the last two months of 2018.) The NNPC may have denied funding the Buhari presidential campaign during in last year’s general elections, but it must never be lost that this particular payment was curiously effected in the wake of the polls held on 23 February last year.
Aside from having him on the NNPC board, his first daughter, Aisha (Amma), was made assistant vice president at the Nigeria Sovereign Wealth Investment Agency, managers our sovereign wealth fund. Such a coincidence!
A letter he wrote to the National Assembly, not on behalf of anybody but for himself, is in the public domain. All comunications from the executive to the legislature should be by the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), certainly NOT the chief of staff. He had no such power but usurped and abused it. In the said letter, he gleefully announced that the minister of health reported a matter to him. He of all people knew it wasn’t his job to coordinate the work of ministers to be reporting matters to him, but the SGF.
His role in the conspiracy to reinstate the pension thief, Abdulrasheed Maina, and to promote him to the rank of director in the public service he was away from for years, being wanted and on the run, would not be forgotten. Winifred Oyo-Ita, the erstwhile head of the civil service, explained this clearly in response to her query. She named Abba Kyari. He didn’t deny. He couldn’t. Rather, as usual, the matter was swept under the carpet, they smiled over it and moved on, making a fool of us all as they usually do.
Who didn’t see the accusations Babagana Mongonu, the national security adviser, levelled against him in that internal memo made public, as meddlesome, and an interloper, holding unauthorised meetings with service chiefs, thereby frustrating and jeopardising the efforts being made? He didn’t deny, he shall be remembered for this as well.
Even if it is argued that his boss asked/authorised/ordered him to do all he did, he takes full personal liability for doing all the above and many others not mentioned, as it is long settled that people are responsible and liable for the orders they obey. Those who know him personally claim he was okay with whatever was on the record about him, as a sign of loyalty to his boss. That was his choice and he made it, and that settles it. This choice was driven by hubris, and arrogant impunity driven by an assurance that as long as one is the good graces of their boss, they are invincible. It should, however, be noted that public officials owe their ultimate loyalty to the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the Nigerian people, not their bosses and benefactors; as the bosses themselves owe their allegiance to the former, and should always be conscious of this. This is an error present and future public officials must note from the life Abba Kyari.
Africans say we don’t speak ill of the dead, neither have I. I’ve simply stated how I knew Abba Kyari and what he’ll be remembered for. In the same manner his friends and hagiographers are at liberty to mourn and narrate their private encounters and personal perception of him, so am I, from documented, verifiable public records. We write our own eulogies by our actions and inactions, not necessarily by what people say after we are gone. This is the lesson for the living whilst we are still alive.
ART X LAGOS 2019 HELD IN LAGOS
ART X LAGOS 2019, organised by Tokini Peterside experienced a huge turnout from local and international art patrons, gallery owners, enthusiasts, collectors and journalists. Here are a few pictures from the well-respected annual showcase.
The Idea of Edward Said By Missang Oyongha
Sir Isaiah may have been a liberal fox in other matters, equable and palpably averse to extremism, but he was a hedgehog where it concerned the state of Israel, convinced only and always of it’s rightness. Berlin’s Zionism is shown by Said to have impelled several of his overt and covert machinations on behalf of Israel, and to have bred in him a wilful blindness to the existence, much less the fate, of the Palestinians.
Because he was driven by a catholic array of themes and interests, Edward Said himself resists summary in a single noun: he was a polymath, professor, pianist, music critic, controversial pasha of postcolonial literary thought, and a Palestinian. For many this last description of Said seemed to be the operative one. It is invariably in light of this detail that one must note those triply insistent adjectives bearing down on ‘Zionist’. Whatever affinity the two men may have shared as public intellectuals was injured by the lack of empathy inherent in Berlin’s attitude, and Said’s piece ends by sounding a note of bad conscience about this posthumous remonstrance.
Elsewhere in that essay on Berlin, Said attempts to capture the climate of opinion and influence surrounding the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and the chilling Palestinian dispossession it entailed. He names an assortment of personages who lent their imprimatur before and after the fact of the colonial enterprise:
But if one thinks of Churchill, Weizmann, Einstein, Freud, Reinhold Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman, Chagall, the great conductors, Otto Klemperer and Arturo Toscanini, plus dozens of others like him in Britain, the United States, France, and elsewhere in Europe, and then tries to produce a list of Palestinian supporters at the time who might have balanced this tremendous array of influence and prestige, one finds next to nothing.
One of the glories of Edward Said’s life and career is that he came to represent, by the time of his death in 2003, the object of his previous lament. I mean by this that he came to wield tremendous global ‘influence and prestige’, both as an academic and as an advocate for Palestinian rights. Alongside Yasser Arafat, he was and is arguably the most recognizable Palestinian. After he died his friend Alexander Cockburn concluded that ‘’ the Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion’’.
Before and after he assumed the presidency of America, much was made of Barack Obama’s connection with Edward Said. This was arising from the one semester in 1982 that the future president spent as a literature student under Professor Said at Columbia University, and from a photograph taken in 1998 showing the Obamas and Said at a fundraising. Some of the more strident and unconvincing of Obama’s rightwing critics swore on the basis of these tenuous connections that he had acquired his alleged socialist leanings, his alleged Islamophilia, and his alleged anti-Israel attitudes from Said. But this is to misunderstand the nature of Barack Obama the politician { whose biographer David Maraniss tells us viewed Said as a ‘flake’}, who is more a pragmatist than an ideologue of any hue, sloughing off quite adroitly and cold-bloodedly any stances, any associations, any residues of principle that could prove an impediment to the pursuit and possession of power. This is also, quite fundamentally, to misunderstand Edward Said’s intricate and nuanced positions. To oppose and document the tragic consequences of imperial power and capital is not automatically to become a socialist. Said, an ‘’Arab Christian Protestant….by birth’’, understood the pitfalls of being explained by others when he wrote that ’’ despite my extremely anti-religious politics I am often glowingly described in the Islamic world as a defender of Islam’’. He was a vocal critic of Israeli apartheid and an eloquent spokesman for Palestinian rights, but the rhetoric of outrage was accompanied by an obverse note of accommodation. He wrote with sensitivity about the Jewish history of suffering, writ large in the Holocaust, but saw no reason to visit the sins of Nazi Germany on the Palestinians. Said was as critical of Israel’s dispossession and murderous occupation as he was of what he called the revolutionary adventurism that did nothing to advance the Palestinian cause politically’’. Nevertheless, he could be dismissive of the disingenuousness of those who presumes ‘’ that Hamas flourishes gratuitously’’. As an academic Edward Said offered exegeses of everyone from Fanon to Foucault, Conrad to Camus, but his name was made with the publication in 1978 of Orientalism. His literary interest in narrative led him to find parallels too in the construction of national narratives. In Orientalism he argued that representations of Islamic culture and society in the writings of European scholars, writers and travellers greatly misrepresented the reality of things. He would argue later on that ‘’ even so relatively innocuous a thing as language can have a tremendously wounding effect on the subject of … description’’.
This is as true of Chateaubriand’s anti-Arab writings as it was of Conrad or the Israelis. Said himself was labelled by Edward Alexander as ‘’ the professor of terror’’, and by the Jewish Defense League as a ‘’Nazi’’. There were those who liked to allude to the fact that Said had attended an elite British college in Cairo, and was born into a prosperous Palestinian-American family, as if these facts somehow invalidated his claims to speak for the oppressed in the refugee camps. As with Berlin’s Zionism, Said’s Palestinian advocacy illustrated the difficulty of articulating a political or intellectual stance uninflected by biography, by the personal. The fact that Said was not a blinkered partisan can be seen in his resignation from the Palestinian National Council in 1991, and his principled, unwavering attacks on Yasser Arafat’s corrupt, dictatorial, shambolic, and ultimately acquiescent rule in the Palestinian territories. He was the sort of patriot who loves his country always and his government when they deserve it. He understood the unfairness {to the Palestinian side} of the Oslo accord, and remarked that he was ‘’ immediately branded anti-peace’ because{ he } had the lack of tact to describe the Oslo treaty as deeply flawed’’. Friends and former students have testified to the force of his intellect and his charismatic style, but also to what appears in several accounts as a thin skin, sensitive to actual and perceived affronts. The smears and affronts were very real, of course, but he could not be silenced. It is as well that he is said to have relished Antonio Gramsci’s dictum about ‘’ pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the will ’’. Said could be scathing about ‘’ shamelessly pro-colonial renegades like V. S. Naipaul’’, while also acknowledging him as a remarkably gifted writer and novelist. He lauded Soyinka’s pointed critique of negritude but decried the Nobel Laureate’s later ‘’ unfortunate attack on Islam and the Arabs as the defacing African experience’’.
As one of the early, perceptive readers of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, he alerted the author to its potential for incitement. In a published conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Said deplored the growing focus in the academe on specialization and isolation of disciplines, with less and less room for eclectic styles of vision and interpretation like his. Edward Said’s name has survived what he described in respect of his own tentative efforts at writing a memoir as ‘’ the sleep of self-satisfaction and the finality of death’’. Columbia University, his academic perch for 40 years, has endowed a professorial chair on his name, currently occupied by Rashid Khalidi. The Palestinian national orchestra is named the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. In 2005, the University of Adelaide, in Australia, established the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered over the years by such thorns in the flesh of orthodoxy and Zionism as Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Ilan Pappe. His days may have been finite, but his life and work have escaped that finality to which he so poignantly alluded
Edward Said’s Orientalism: Forty years later By Hamid Dabashiby
There is a video – tucked away somewhere deep in the attic of the internet – of me 15 years ago, convening an international conference on Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, at Columbia University. Said at that time was still with us. In this video, you can see me briefly introduce him (not that he needed any introduction on our campus) before he takes up the stage to share his very last thoughts on his groundbreaking masterpiece.
There is another video from just a few months ago, in September 2017, in which I was interviewed by a young colleague in Geneva offering my latest thoughts on the significance of Orientalism today. In between these two events I wrote and published my own book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2009).
These three dates – 2003, 2009, and 2017 – are very much typical of the temporal trajectory of critical thinkers of my generation and their enduring debt to Said and his magisterial text that turned an entire discipline of scholarship upside down and enabled a mode of thinking hitherto impossible to fathom in postcolonial thinking around the globe. In Orientalism, Said unleashed our tongue and unsheathed the sword of our critical thinking.
Orientalism hit the right note at the most momentous occasion when the postcolonial world at large most needed it – when the condition of coloniality needed a thematic and theoretical decoupling from the framing of capitalist modernity at large.
There is another crucial date I need to record here: October- November 2000 when the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University hosted the eminent founding figure of the school of subaltern studies, the Indian historian Ranajit Guha, to deliver a series of lectures that were subsequently published in the book, History at the Limit of World History (2003).
On this occasion, my other distinguished Columbia colleague Gayatri Spivak and I organised a two-day conference around Guha’s lectures that we called, “Subaltern Studies at Large”. Said was present at this conference and gave a keynote speech at its first plenary session.
The Empire writes back
These among many other seminal hallmarks of the two interrelated fields of Postcolonial and Subaltern studies, as defined by towering critical thinkers like Said, Spivak, and Guha are indices of a seismic groundswell in transforming modes of knowledge production that have historically framed and provincialised the received Eurocentrism of our understanding of the world around us.
Before these seminal thinkers, the world of colonial modernity was at the receiving end of European scholarship.Their writing enabled generations of scholars to think in terms contrarian to the epistemic foregrounding of Eurocentric social sciences and humanities.
There are a number of crucial texts at the epicentre of this historic reorientation of critical scholarship in social sciences and humanities – chief among them Spivak’s powerful essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” But no other text has assumed the iconic importance of Said’s Orientalism for a number of substantive and circumstantial reasons.
Orientalism was the right book at the right time by the right author. Solidly established as the pre-eminent literary theorist of his generation, Said wrote many books and articles before and after Orientalism.
But Orientalism hit the right note at the most momentous occasion when the postcolonial world at large most needed it – when the condition of coloniality needed a thematic and theoretical decoupling from the framing of capitalist modernity at large. We on the postcolonial edges of capitalist modernity needed a defining text, a totem pole, a worldly testimony, to bring us all together – and Said was born to write that text and build that edifice.
Like all groundbreaking texts, Orientalism has attracted many significant critical encounters – chief among them two seminal essays by Aijaz Ahmad and James Clifford. In my own Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015), I have found myself seriously diverging in some crucial ways from Said’s positions.
Like all other seminal thoughts, Orientalism has a number of important precedents in the work of Anouar Abdel-Malek, Talal Asad, and Bernard S Cohen. But all such precedents and critical encounters, in fact, come together to stage and signify Said’s Orientalism even more than if it were denied such encounters.
Even those abusive readings of Orientalism that have turned it into a diatribe against “the West” have had their contributions to making the book the defining moment of a discipline. Said’s own courageous and pioneering defence of the Palestinian cause was, in fact, paradoxically instrumental in facilitating such abusive readings. As the borderline between useful and abusive readings of Orientalism blurred, the text loomed ever larger as a classic thriving on its own mis/interpretations.
Re-writing the world
Against the background of all such cacophony, Orientalism was and remains a cogent critique of colonially conditioned modes of knowledge production. It is a study of the relation between knowledge and power, and as such, deeply rooted in and indebted to the work of Michel Foucault and before him Friedrich Nietzsche.
There is an even longer and more substantive critique of the sociology of knowledge that goes back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The German Ideology and comes down to such seminal sociologists as Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and George Herbert Mead. Said himself was not fully conscious of this veritable sociological trajectory, for he was primarily a literary critic and his critique of Orientalism was primarily a critique of figurative, tropic and narrative representations.
The enduring lesson and abiding truth of Said’s Orientalism is in its clinical precision diagnosing the pathological relationship between interested knowledge and the power it serves. As I have argued in detail in my Post-Orientalism book, today, the relation between power and knowledge about the Arab and Muslim world, or the world in general, has gone through successive gestations.
The classical age of European Orientalism eventually degenerated into American Area Studies and further down to the rise of mostly Zionist think-tanks in Washington, DC, and elsewhere writing the interests of the Israeli settler colony into the imperial interests of the United States. Today, Arabs and Islam are no longer subjects of knowledge and understanding, but objects of hatred and loathing.
Today, two notorious Islamophobes with a sustained history of the hatred of Muslims and their faith, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton are the US secretary of state to US President Donald Trump and his national security adviser. We are no longer in the field of Orientalism as Said understood and criticised it.
Today in Europe, their hatred of Judaism and Jews has successfully transformed itself to the hatred of Islam and Muslims. At its height, classical Orientalism generated a monumental scholar like Ignaz Goldziher, who, at great personal cost to himself refused, to yield to the pernicious power of Zionists trying to recruit his knowledge into their ranks. Today, a Zionist propagandist like Bernard Lewis is the chief ideologue of the Neocons’ hatred against Muslims and imperial designs on their homelands.
Today, a close and critical reading of Said’s seminal masterpiece requires an even more radical dismantling of the European project of colonial modernity and all its ideological trappings. Said paved the way and pointed us in the right direction. The treacherous path ahead requires not just the sparkles of his critical thinking but also the grace of his courage and imagination.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
If I relied on rights advocates, I would no more invest in Rwanda than North Korea By Ashish J Thakker
As I watched President Paul Kagame take the presidential oath of office at his inauguration in Kigali a few days ago, I couldn’t help but go back 23 years ago to a starkly different time. My family, lucky enough to have British passports, were airlifted to safety from Kigali during the early days of the 1994 genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. I was 13 at the time and my family had found refugee in Hotel de Milles Collines — better known today as Hotel Rwanda.
If you had told me then that the country we see today was even the remotest possibility, I would have considered you delusional beyond help. The notion that I would spend a good part of my life as an adult investing and working in the country would have seemed no less far-fetched.
We left behind a failed State the world had allowed to disintegrate in an explosion of unfathomable violence.
It felt as though nobody could survive what we had witnessed. As if hell had found its place on earth. However, I do not invest in Rwanda out of nostalgia. I do it for the same reasons that lead entrepreneurs everywhere to new and exciting markets.
Strong growth prospects, stable governance, low levels of corruption, and a young, growing and vibrant population.
Harder to quantify, but just as important, is the resilience and optimism that permeates throughout the country.
If I relied on the assessment of London and New York-based human rights advocates and breathless newspaper editorials, I would no more invest in Rwanda than North Korea. But this is a cartoonish misrepresentation of the country, as anyone who sets foot here can see for themselves.
What I witness first-hand every day is a nation unified behind a vision of progress and inclusion. I encounter government officials committed to expanding economic opportunity by facilitating investment, eradicating corruption and building capacity among its citizens. I see a health system that has become the envy of the developing world, resulting in a doubling of life expectancy in under three decades.
Of course, there’s much more to do, and no room for complacency.
Rwanda is a work in progress, but progress has been real and significant. This is also the case with the rest of our continent – work in progress, but with real progress despite the perception being put out there. History is littered with investments in developing markets that fall over due to an insufficient grasp of local conditions. In the absence of such hard-earned knowledge, it is human nature to fall back on old prejudices and faulty assumptions.
In business, this is fatal — and you pay a steep price.
But, for critics who lob grenades at Rwanda and Africa as a whole from the safety of Western capitals, there are no such consequences. In fact, the more outlandish their fictions, the greater their reach. In business, we call that a perverse incentive.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), which today more or less operates as the unofficial opposition to President Kagame, did heroic work documenting the 1994 genocide. But then, as former US diplomat Richard Johnson spelled out in a book on the subject, the organisation’s longtime chief, Ken Roth, became inexplicably enamoured with a critique of Rwandan democracy proffered by exiled Hutu Power elites.
“HRW’s discourse on Rwanda over the past twenty years,” Johnson wrote in The Travesty of Human Rights Watch and Rwanda, “has been viscerally hostile to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which defeated the genocidal Hutu Power regime in 1994, and systematically biased in favor of letting unrepentant Hutu Power political forces back into Rwandan political life”.
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Uganda's virus recoveries rise to 49, Museveni to address nationWhereas Roth’s determination to re-impose ethnic politics on Rwanda once caused anger and consternation, it barely inspires mild exasperation these days, “There he goes again” is about the sum of it. Criticism is vital to any democracy but overheated rhetoric and name calling serve no useful purpose. What we ask for is fair, well-informed and balanced treatment. Look no further than the double standard evident in the reaction to Kagame seeking a third term compared to, say, Chancellor Merkel standing for her fourth. “Do what we say, not what we do” is the all too familiar catch cry.
I have several friends who support HRW along with other human rights groups, and my plea to them is this: Leaders like Roth, hopelessly stuck in the past, are undermining your cause.
As any good investor would, supporters should demand factual and measured analysis from human rights groups.
Meanwhile, such groups could do worse than hiring people who understand the culture, languages and political challenges facing countries in our region. They will find no shortage of willing and qualified applicants who can play a key part in transforming their sector into a genuinely global force for good.
I wrote a book, The Lion Awakes, on the burgeoning promise of Africa, and how outmoded narratives have held us back long enough. What we live and breathe every day is so far at odds with Western portrayals of the African experience, it is time to step up and tell our own story.
Until we do that, the disconnect between those of us who live, work and invest in Africa, and those who like to issue proclamations about the continent, will soon become an unbridgeable chasm. With my family’s history dating more than a century in Africa and despite witnessing the genocide in Rwanda, I can tell you confidently and wholeheartedly – this is our time as Africa!
Mr Thakkar is an entrepreneur and austronomat.
He is also founder of Mara Group.