I have on occasion advocated in this column the use of craniology in our attempt to unravel or account for the unending irrationalities of the rulers of Nigeria. Recent developments in our country compel me to return to that idea in the present treatise. Craniology and its ancillary registers –craniometry, physical anthropology, etc – come to us direct from the racist and racialist pseudo-intellection of 19th and early 20th century Euro-America. European and American thinkers and scientists of that era were convinced that all they needed to prove the cerebral inferiority of non-White races was to collect and measure our skulls.
They were convinced that the Caucasian race had the biggest craniology – and by implication bigger brain matter than every other human race. In the intellectual production of those White thinkers, other races fared better in a descending order until you got to the black race, hovering precariously just one rung above the orangutan.
After fighting two World Wars and killing six million Jews, the White man came to understand that he was capable of bringing home more human heads in conditions of absolute brainless bestiality than Okonkwo could ever hope to bring back to Umuofia. The White man could not look upon the evidence of his carnage in the first half of the 20th century and still conclude that he had a bigger cranial cavity than the rest of us. And so it was that craniology and the philosophical discourses that enabled it came to ignominy and disrepute as far as intellectual orthodoxy goes – and certainly in academe. Today, and ironically so, we only teach 19th century racialist European and American thinkers as evidence of the depravities and superiorist imbecilities that the human brain once produced.
This detour into the ignoble intellectual career of craniology is necessary to underscore how tough it has been for me to arrive at the conclusion that we need that particular scientific procedure to understand what goes on in Aso Rock and other spaces of power in Nigeria. I have been a student of the atmospherics of power in Nigeria for a long time. My career in public intellection has focused mainly on exploring the psychology of the man of power in Nigeria. From the President down to the lowliest Local Government Chairman, this psychology has been uniformly characterized by deviance and a programmatic allergy to ethics throughout our postcolonial history.
Nothing in the broad literature of the behavioural sciences can account for the Nigerian man of power. To account for the broader pattern of this dynamic in Africa, for instance, social scientists have come up with fanciful phraseologies like the “politics of the belly” and the “prebendal relationship” of Africa’s political elite with the state. But all these explanations collapse when applied to the rulers of Nigeria. Prebendalism and the politics of the belly cannot account for the scale of the irresponsibility of the rulers of Nigeria and the amount of money that they steal. Nigeria is where you come to understand that there is such a thing as a difference between responsible and irresponsible stealing. If we cannot even get our political leadership in Nigeria to steal responsibly, we need to find out what is at work for there is undoubtedly something more sinister at work in their behavior.
It is perhaps an indication of the failure of conventional explanations of the psychology of Nigeria’s rulers that a frustrated Wole Soyinka went all the way to psychiatry. He exhorted Nigerians to insist on a psychiatric evaluation of our rulers. Soyinka was not alone. Farida Waziri intervened in support of Soyinka. Says Waziri: “having dealt with many corruption cases, I am inclined to suggest that public officers should be subjected to some form of psychiatric evaluation to determine their suitability for public office. The extent of aggrandizement and gluttonous accumulation of wealth that I have observed suggests to me that some people are mentally and psychologically unsuitable for public office. We have observed people amassing public wealth to a point suggesting “madness” or some form of obsessive- compulsive psychiatric disorder.”
Wole Soyinka and Farida Waziri are only partially right. More than madness or lunacy, I have come to believe that something in the atmospherics of power in Nigeria shrinks the human cranium and reduces the volume of grey matter therein. We need not stop at psychiatric evaluation, we seriously need to consider measuring the cranium of people going into government and repeating the measurement when they complete their tenure. We may make very interesting discoveries that could validate the claims of 19th century craniologists.
Things happen in Nigeria that only diminished cranial size could explain. A President rides into office atop the corpses of youth corpers in a land rendered unrecognizable by violence and insecurity. Boko Haram has almost turned him to the president of only the portion of his country lying below the rivers Niger and Benue. The commercial capital of his country is at the mercy of floods. Nearly 70% of his people are under the age of thirty-five and, if they have never been out of Nigeria, they have never known just one month of uninterrupted electricity in all their thirty-five years on earth; they have no jobs; they have no role models. This president does not have a single kilometer of road anywhere in his country that is fit for 21st century human use; he has no infrastructure; no schools; no hospitals; in short, he has nothing to offer 150 million people except the assurance of a permanent sojourn in Hobbes’s state of nature where life is short and brutish.
And what is his priority, faced with this grim picture? He hits the ground running to tenure elongation. If this does not call for craniology, I don’t know what does.
Somebody is the chairman of our largely dysfunctional and overbearing Governors’ Forum. His name is Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi. He was recently all over the place, vuvuzeling from the rooftops that the states cannot afford to pay the N18, 000 minimum wage. Yet, while one half of his mouth insisted on the continued dehumanization of the Nigerian worker, the other half was busy making a case for the acquisition of a brand new jet for him. And, oh, if it’s any consolation, he merely traded in an older one that had become unsafe. As I write, it’s still morning yet in the profusion of bla bla bla from Governor Amaechi. If this does not call for craniology, I don’t know what does.
Nigerians will ultimately need to understand that there is something seriously wrong with this picture: about 5000 elected crooks with diminished craniums are holding 150 million people with regular craniums to ransom. And we allow it. Rotimi Amaechi got away with the madness of purchasing a new aircraft while denying his workers minimum wage because the people of Rivers state allowed it. President Jonathan and Reuben Abati – who will hear from me soon in this column – are counting on us to reward their chicanery with ignorance and naiveté. Like everybody in Nigeria’s rulership, they have grown accustomed to a followership that allows everything they cook up in their diminished craniums. We must surprise them down the road. For starters, I have an assignment for the two of them: what recently badly burned the ten fingers of President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal?
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