Kole Omotosho, the Nigerian-born but South Africa based celebrated activist, author and academic in the course of a recent visit to Nigeria visited Vanguard during which he shared experiences with Vanguard Editors on a wide range of issues including his experience of South Africa’s transition from apartheid enclave to nationhood, Governor Segun Mimiko’s bid for a second term in office as governor of Ondo State and the problematic image of Nigeria and Nigerians in South Africa. Excerpts:
HIS South African experience and lesson for Nigeria
We are in a situation where a new word has come into the South African vocabulary which is called tenderprenuers. Not entrepreneurs but tenderprenuers, people who make their money out of tenders from government and they are mainly members of the ruling party. I stopped teaching at the university level about two years ago. I got tired of marking papers and teaching students who don’t want to learn anything.
I am tired of people, who see certificate as an end rather than what can train their minds. In that period, I tried to work with different universities on specific projects and I found that we were not producing post graduate students.
And if you are not producing post graduates, it meant that the universities would still have to depend on white intellectuals, white teachers either from within or from outside. In the meantime, thousands of graduates from the black universities are released into the community and they have no work to do.
It has led to a situation where the African National Congress, (ANC) on the occasion of 100th year of founding, because it was founded in 1913, as a response to the Land Act, which was passed that year by the white minority government.
Omotosho: Corruption is not the problem in Nigeria
On that occasion, they started talking about the need for a second transformation. But the transformation that took place in 1994, which was purely political, has not naturally produced the economic transformation that was needed.
Economic transformation
It was Nkrumah, who said seek ye first political freedom and all other things would be added unto you.
But you know that nothing was added unto you in spite of your political power. In the case of South Africa, there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was set up to look into its history. I happened to have been very lucky to know Archbishop Tutu because my wife worked with him.
We used to have this argument that what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was doing was dealing with the headline issues, the major problems. It didn’t deal with the humiliation that the man on the street felt as a result of the apartheid system. A man who is stripped naked at 4 a.m. in front of his family because a young 18 year old policeman said he might be hiding some arms in his house. Who is going to reconcile that person?
And my argument was that if there is no retribution between truth and reconciliation, there can never be any reconciliation. And in South Africa, there has been no retribution.
That is, the whites have not come out to say apartheid was wrong. I taught at the University of Stellenbosch, which was the bastion of the apartheid system, that is where most of their Prime Ministers and Ministers were produced and anybody who has been to Stellenbosch will tell you this is not part of Africa.
Previous nonsense
Unlike Nigeria where we have each government piling up its own nonsense over the previous nonsense to the point where we don’t even know where to start cleaning the nonsense, in their own case, it is a case of not doing anything to undo what the apartheid system did.
Yes, I can go anywhere, I live in the suburb of Fourways in Johannesburg, my neighbours are all whites, but down the road in Soweto, about 20minutes drive from where I live, things are bad. At Alexandria, things are worse. And people are beginning to demonstrate.
On a Monday, you could hear on radio ‘if you are coming in to Johannesburg or Pretoria don’t take this particular way because there is a protest taking place.’
It is usually done by putting tyres on the road and throwing stones at people’s cars. The system is trying to deal with it. One of the most effective ways of dealing with it is the public protector’s office. It is an office that has existed since about 1994 but until two years ago we didn’t have an effective person to run it, that is somebody who didn’t have any respect for the politicians.
Recently, we had a woman at the head of it and it is very interesting how this woman has dealt with the ANC leadership without any respect to anybody.
And this has led to the fact that the first black commissioner of Police is in prison serving a 15year term for taking bribe from a mafia boss. Another black man has just been sacked because he approved a block of offices for the police without going through the process. And the newspapers are very effective although they are being cowed.
About six weeks ago, there was an exhibition and there was this portrait of Zuma (South Africa’s incumbent president) with his genitals exposed. Now that picture divided the country. There were people who said no, you can’t do this, and others who talked about freedom of speech and all that. Now two people, one white, one black and it wasn’t coordinated, came and destroyed the painting.
Marching to an isolated cell
Interestingly, they sat the white guy down, they gave him tea and discussed with him why he did it? The black guy was assaulted, pinned down and marched off to an isolation cell. They did the same thing but were treated differently and the persons who assaulted them happened to be blacks.
But I don’t think that things will get as bad compared to other countries in Africa. And I don’t think it as a result of white people, but it is as a result of black people who are beginning to say ‘having a good life does not belong to white people alone.’
It is not a European thing to live well and have a clean environment. It is simply a human situation, therefore they found themselves opposing the ANC with all its ‘struggles’ credentials.
On Mimiko and the Ondo Election: Mimiko was a student when I was teaching at Ife. Although he was a medical student, he used to attend all our lectures, demonstrations and plays at Oduduwa Hall. Remember this was at a time when people like Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeifo, we were all at Ife trying to create that idea of an alternative situation.
A few years ago, I was at the airport in Akure waiting for a flight to Lagos and he (Mimiko) was returning from Abuja. And he saw me and said ‘Prof I want you to do something for me.’ Within two weeks I got a call from him. That led me to come back to give a lecture in Akure and he drove me round the things he was trying to do.
It was after seeing that, that I decided I wanted to do a book on him and I am working on that book now. That has brought me back to the details of how I grew up in Akure though I went to King’s College here.
To go back to see those places changing, places that haven’t seen any government intervention for decades except when there is about to be election.
So I asked myself if I was really going to come back to this country, do I want to buy generators? No! I am not going to buy generators, I am not going to bring solar panels.
And my friends in Akure said ‘you are not ready to come here’ and I said (yes) And how many of us are saying ‘I will not use generator in this country’ because the reason the government has failed to do anything for us is because we do these things ourselves.
And we are quite happy to do it. And we have no problem with it. Anybody who grew up in the Western region during Awolowo’s time would remember the sense of belonging because you got something out of it.
It is happening in Ondo State. You have a Mother and Child Hospital where you pay nothing and that hospital has been going on for three years. About 20percent of the people who use the hospital come from outside of the state.
What I am saying is this, we take on large issues and we seem to ignore small things. And it is these small things that matter at the end of the day.
Nigeria‘s battered image in South Africa? I happen to be lucky to be part of what you call the new South Africa. Before me, there was no prominent black person in any advertising campaign. But what is interesting is that many South Africans will tell you that Kole Omotosho is from Zulu land and not a Nigerian!
We have not looked enough at the psychology of oppression. The psychology of oppression is an underdeveloped study in most of our societies. Where people are oppressed, they tend to oppress themselves.
It has taken 18 years but it is happening and people are beginning to demand…and for instance, the ANC cannot take it for granted that it is going to win an election. The Democratic Alliance, which has been basically white organized is getting a lot of black members. The ANC cannot do what the ZANU PF did in Zimbabwe which is that ‘we brought you freedom, therefore you must keep us in power for ever’. The ANC cannot get away with that.
Modern attitude
If you go to Soweto, they will tell you that their lives have not changed, nothing has happened. More and more people are becoming desperate for a change. Nothing has changed in the lives of the black people. There is a modern attitude for a positive change. You cannot be negative if your commitment is to modernization. You cannot be irrational if your idea is to modernize. Not obeying rules cannot make management possible.
Not only that there is a great anti-intellectualism going on in South Africa. You remember what happened to us here during the military? When you would go to a class to teach and you wouldn’t know which of your students was from the security agency?
Successful politicians
How can Nigeria be a failing state and all our heads of state are hailed as successful politicians? It is only in this country that people, who have led this country to failure are being hailed. Look at Obasanjo and Babangida saying that the country must not be allowed to fail. Really? Why shouldn’t we allow it to fail? What did they do when they were there?
Corruption is not the problem in Nigeria, but it is the unpunished corruption that is the problem of this country. When you punish corruption something will happen. And those of us who thought that a new generation was coming, now found that the children of the corrupt ones have now taken over.
On progressivism in the Southwest: I am still a very crazy leftist. Among my colleagues, I am possibly the only one, who spent time in the Soviet Union, spent time in Cuba and I have no apologies about my left leaning attitudes. But those left leanings are expressed at the level of welfarism and caring for people.
If being progressive is destroying Makoko and sending people without any alternative place to stay, then I don’t want to be that kind of progressive. And I don’t think Mimiko will want to be that kind of progressive. What Mimiko is doing for Ondo State is basic to the people and there is no way Action Congress of Nigeria, (ACN) can win that state.
Mimiko had his own revolution in the spirit with a father who cared very much. In his growing up, he had a father who cared because he was the first Manger of a Sawmill in 1954.
And that is where Mimiko was born, in the Sawmill. I wrote a piece that Awolowo in 1954 in a letter to Action Group said that you don’t have to belong to the same political party to have the same vision. So the same applies now. Why must we have one party system in South West?
Hostility from South Africans: One of the problems Nigeria had with South Africans is that the Cape Town gang stars were complaining that the Nigerian gang stars have taken up their turf.
Another reason is that the White people also object to the presence of Nigerians. I met a white guy who said ‘we have our black people. But the way Nigerians walk down the street as if they own it, our black people will now be copying them.’ What a Nigerian needs do is to move on with his life, that is self celebration.
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