Why did a fairly obvious observation by two white American scholars about Nigeria being a failed state cause controversy? It is because their conclusion departs from a familiar arc of Western commentaries on Nigeria and Africa, which tend to favor platitudinous waffling over candor and critique, and because it aligns with the much-critiqued dominant Western narrative of African dysfunction.
Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s viral critique of un-nuanced Western narratives that homogenize Africa as a hotbed of chaos and tragedy has become the staple reference for discussions on Western portrayals of Africa. But this critique has, in its virality, made it difficult to recognize and engage the other end of the spectrum of Western reportorial engagements with Africa and Africans, the flipside of what Adichie clinically critiqued: the tendency of Western commentators to dress up African tragedies in the patronizing logic of relativism.
Much Western commentary is steeped in a benign, avuncular racism that understands Africa as a delicate entity whose dire conditions must be minimized as the inevitable travails of developmental infancy. But Africans need informed, truthful, and nuanced commentary, not denialist, feel-good platitudes that gaslight them on what plagues their countries.
Paternalistic Western narratives about Africa work in two different but equally suffocating ways. One strand is quite familiar, seeking to inculcate Western values into Africans deemed to lack and need them, a neo-civilizing enterprise that seeks to remake Africans in the image of the West in total disregard for the cultural and aspirational singularities of Africans.
A second strand claims that Africans are not to be judged by Western standards of good governance, security, and citizen rights because Africans are allegedly culturally conditioned to find joy in small things, are happy even when beset by problems, and have more modest aspirations than Westerners.
In the old colonial days, this was the myth of “merrie Africa,” which is explained in detail in Curtis Keim and Carolyn Somerville’s book, Mistaking Africa. Today, the same construct of Africans being happy and content amidst adversity is so prevalent in Western commentary that when a Western opinion on the continent bucks that narrative, it rattles stakeholders from citizens to governments.
This was the case when Robert Rotberg, the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Interstate Conflict, and James Campbell, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a recent essay published by Foreign Policy that “Nigeria is a Failed State.”
The authors were echoing the verdict of most Nigerians, restating what many Nigerians had been saying for several years as they watched their country come apart under the watch of President Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling All Progressive Congress (APC).
Although the Nigerian government predictably reacted to the publication with denial and bluster, and the presidency’s spokesperson even attacked the credibility of the authors—these overreactions demonstrated the government’s unfamiliarity with candid and critical Western assessments of the Nigerian situation—the essay resonated widely in the Nigerian media ecosystem.
The message that Nigeria is a failed state was not new to Nigerians because it merely, and faithfully, relayed their predicament under the devastating impact of several armed insurgencies and widespread violent criminality, which have effectively rendered Nigeria a failed state in their eyes.
The essay’s authors’ social scientific explanation of what it means for a state to be considered failed may have fleshed out their argument, but Nigerians already knew that their government was unable to protect them. The key indicators of this state failure are the helplessness of the Buhari administration in the face of growing insecurity, the number of internally displaced persons camps, and the large number of Nigerians who have fled to neighboring countries for refuge.
While the “failed state” message was not a surprise to Nigerians, the authors’ blunt delivery of it was uncharacteristically punchy. It was a departure from the familiar style of Western interlocutors and experts on Nigeria, who, much to the frustration of many Nigerians, often refrain from accurately naming the country’s dysfunction, let alone laying blame on erring incumbent leaders.
Nigerians are long-accustomed to platitudinous Western commentary on their country’s problems. They are used to Western reluctance to criticize the failures of Nigerian governments. They are familiar with Western experts who rationalize failings they would not tolerate in their own countries. They are acquainted with the tendency of Western commentators to relativize Nigeria’s problems because of what is known in American political debates as the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Many Western experts on Nigeria are in the habit of gaslighting Nigerians about the problems their country faces, which, in many cases, these Nigerians must navigate daily as matters of life and death.
Two weeks before the publication of Rotberg’s and Campbell’s essay, a British expert on Nigeria, Nic Cheeseman, along with a Nigerian coauthor, Fola Aina, published an essay titled “Don’t Call Nigeria a Failed State” in Foreign Affairs. In the essay, they managed, with a perplexing analytical logic, to turn the multifaceted calamity unfolding in Nigeria into an alternate reality of a nation on the rise and on the path of greatness.
I was one of many Nigerians who found their conclusion both depressing and mendacious. It made many of us who grew up in Nigeria, have daily informational pipelines to the country, and are called upon to help family and friends cope with the current crisis, question whether we knew what we knew about our own country.
These different strands of Western commentaries on Nigeria’s current conditions raise a broader issue, namely the responsibility of Western scholars and commentators to empathize with and defer to the sentiments, anxieties, and aspirations of Africans—or the extent to which they should let the perspectives of Nigerians and other Africans inform their analyses and arguments.
Although Rotberg and Campbell’s conclusion struck a chord with Nigerians because it reflects how they feel about the ongoing insecurity crisis in their country, the essay is anchored on the esoteric social scientific criteria the authors discuss, not on the viewpoints and feelings of Nigerians.
The main problem remains the reluctance of Western interlocutors to represent African realities accurately, or to consider the opinions and experiences of Africans. There are several reasons Western experts recuse themselves from faithfully discussing African realities or echoing the experiential perspectives of regular Africans, and why, when their conclusion aligns with the sentiments of Africans, it comes across as surprising.
When Western entities criticize failings in African countries, they are sometimes told to keep off or, worse, are accused of haughty interference, such as the Buhari administration’s reaction to CNN’s criticism of its crackdown against #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria last year.
No event illustrates this African backlash against Western pontifications on African affairs than former President Barack Obama’s 2009 visit to Ghana, during which he gave a speech to the Ghanaian parliament that many African observers considered preachy and condescending. Obama’s subsequent address to the African Union in 2015 was similarly criticized for its tone of “insult” and arrogant, prescriptive lecturing.
While some African critics accused Obama of talking about Africa and African leadership in the mold of a colonial headmaster self-righteously scolding his “wayward” pupils without acknowledging the reality of colonial domination and intrusion, others praised him for what they regarded as his unvarnished, “tough love” truth telling about the dysfunction in most African countries.
These dueling African perspectives on Obama’s engagement with Africa illustrate four interrelated points. First, Western interlocutors, even those with sentimental affinities to the continent, struggle to find the right frame to engage with Africa and its issues.
Second, there is a tendency to pigeonhole Western commentaries on Africa into two categories of hostile and friendly opinions. This binary opposition, despite the emotional and intellectual energies invested in defending it, produces dead-end debates because it leaves out many nuances that defy these categories.
Third, debates on Obama’s Africa rhetoric skirt the critical question of whether or to what extent Obama’s evaluation and even his rhetoric accorded with or departed from the sentiments and quotidian narratives of non-elite Africans on the problems of their countries.
Finally, the debate over how Obama talked about and to Africa was shaped by the tendency of some African elites to become instinctively defensive in responding to Western criticisms of African leadership and state failure, a reflex that makes it seem like Africans are afraid to take responsibility for their failures, to be self-reflexive and self-critical, and to accept critique.
Contrary to this perception, Africans are able to separate tendentiously patronizing Western criticism from genuine concerns about leadership failure and dysfunction in their countries. Africans desire well-targeted criticisms from Westerners who are concerned without being conceited, critical without being condescending.
It is a delicate balance between minimizing and pathologizing African dysfunctions. A Western interlocutor who desires to study and engage credibly with Africa needs to painstakingly learn that balance and the…
