Michel Foucault and the narrative of “genocide” in Nigeria

The French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, was one of the most original and controversial intellectuals of the 20th century. His work straddles across many fields in the social sciences and humanities, from anthropology to psychology and sociology and from history to literary and cultural studies. Foucault was primarily interested in the connections between […]

The French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, was one of the most original and controversial intellectuals of the 20th century. His work straddles across many fields in the social sciences and humanities, from anthropology to psychology and sociology and from history to literary and cultural studies. Foucault was primarily interested in the connections between power and knowledge and how both shape social interactions and institutions.

Unlike many thinkers before and after him, Foucault thought that power is everywhere diffused in society, not just concentrated in a few centres like government or politics. One such space in which social power is to be located is language, or what he calls ‘discourse’. For Foucault, the way we speak about things and the things we say are themselves contexts in which power is produced, transmitted or exerted by one social actor on another. Discourse, therefore, reinforces and reproduces social domination. When we say “women are less intelligent than men”, for example, we are effectively reinforcing the power of men over women.

Consider, for example, the way the “international community” speaks about Africa. “We want to help Africa”; or to “develop Africa”, or as in the current American political climate, “to save whites in South Africa and Christians in Nigeria”. This mode of speaking, repeated countless times in varying contexts by the historical institutions of Western imperialism like their governments, media, civil society, and multilateral organisations like the World Bank and IMF, express only the unequal power relation between Western and African countries, and no more. The whole discourse will change once we speak of how Africa ‘helps’ or ‘develops’ Europe.

The foregoing is probably a poor rendition of an abstract and complex idea, but since reading Foucault many years ago, I have wondered if he were not writing about Nigeria specifically. Nigerian politics and society are filled with dominant discourses about not only what can be said, but also what can be believed, and what can be accepted as true or as having happened, regardless of the evidence. If I said that there was a “Massacre” during the EndSARS protests or that there is a “genocide” of Christians in Nigeria, then I would be hailed as a “hero”.

On the other hand, if I said there have been no such things because no one has given any convincing and verifiable evidence of either to date, then chances are that I would probably receive plenty of online abuse, be unfriended by many, or worse. Yet, the latter position is true and the former is false. In other words, the power of discourse is greater than even the power of truth, which is precisely what we are witnessing in the current dangerous noise about genocide of Christians in Nigeria.

The discursive power in this context is at work right now in Nigeria. A lot of Nigerians genuinely believe that there is a “genocide of Christians” here and they are not crazy or hateful. The uncomfortable truth is that most Nigerian Christians see Boko Haram members, bandits, and “Fulani herdsmen” as one and the same with almost all northern Muslims, after all, Boko Haram members proclaim their terrorism as being in the name of Allah. The idea that all northern Muslims are guilty of Boko Haram terrorism by association is deeply entrenched in the psyche of most Nigerians Christians, whether they would admit or not.

So, when Boko Haram terrorists or bandits in Zamfara kill dozens of worshipers in a mosque, or kidnap, rape or even traffic northern Muslim women and girls, most Nigerian Christians don’t see victims in these situations because for many, only Christians can be victims. This is why many believe the crude and clearly false narrative of Christian genocide in Nigeria.

If, to give yet another easy example, I said that the federal government must pay compensation to the families of the protesters who were killed by the military during the #EndSARS protests last year, my statement will be considered normal, appropriate and the right thing to say, whether or not it is rooted in verifiable fact. But if in the same vein, I said that the federal government must also pay compensation to the families of farmers and fishermen killed in Yobe or Borno state arising from their ‘accidental’ shooting by the Nigeria Air Force, my statement would sound unusual, unheard-of, and even unacceptable to many of the same people who had praised me for my earlier speech on the victims of #EndSARS.

This is how political discourse is configured and patterned in Nigerian politics, and it illustrates the effective power relationships between different Nigerian groups. You can say the worst possible things about certain groups of Nigerians—northerners, Muslims, Hausa-Fulani, herdsmen, etc—and, even without evidence, a lot of people will believe you. But you cannot do the same, even with evidence, about other groups of Nigerians.

This is power in the discursive sense as Foucault conceives it because the only difference between each pair of my statements above is the people involved in each case. Compensation resulting from state aggression is acceptable if the victims are X, but not if they are Y. Discourse, in this sense, can determine who gets what and who does not, and its function as a form of power should no longer be in doubt. After all, victims of police brutality have received or at least been awarded compensations by the Lagos State judicial panel. No one in Nigeria, however, has even thought of constituting a judicial panel to investigate the excesses—intended or not—of the military, let alone compensation for the victims of those excesses.

This discursive power is rampant in Nigerian politics and is daily entrenched by a media that should otherwise know better. Consider, for another example, a small story tucked away in the inside pages of the Punch newspaper of October 15, 2021 that the House of Representatives has passed bills for establishing developing commissions for four geopolitical zones in the South East, South West, North Central, and North West, because “the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) already exists for the oil producing states… and there is also the North East Development Commission”, for areas under Boko Haram insurgency.

Moreover, each of the bills sought to justify its enactment via claims that are quite intriguing, if also comical. The bill for the SEDC, for example, seeks the commission to, according to the story, “serve as a catalyst to develop the commercial potentials of the South East, receive and manage funds from allocation of the federation for the rehabilitation, reconstruction and reparation for houses and lost businesses of victims of the Civil War, and address any other environmental or developmental challenges; and for related matters.’ This further illustrates how discursive power sets the boundaries of what is politically possible or not in Nigeria. Everyone wanted a zonal development commission just because the North East got one.

The Civil War ended 55 years ago and was followed by a significant programme of reconstruction, even if unfaithfully implemented. Why use that as a basis for a development commission now? Because there is one in the North East. What conflict justifies a development commission in the South West? When the NDDC was established by a northern President years ago, nobody thought of a similar agency for the South East or anywhere else then. Why? Because the NNDC wasn’t for the North to benefit exclusively. Thus, the unstated discursive power at work here is the deeply entrenched narrative that northerners are already taking more than they deserve from the Nigerian federation.

It is time to begin tearing down all of Nigeria’s false but dominant narratives, one by one. Nigeria cannot endure or grow with them.

This updated piece was first published on Monday 25 October, 2021.