Being text of an inaugural lecture delivered by Prof. Olatunde Bayo Lawuyi, professor of Anthropology, Faculty of Science, University of Ibadan (UI) at the univesity on Thursday, March 22, 2012.I STAND on the platform of Science to speak to a science of human relations; that which through its interpretive paradigms is equally well-rooted in the humanities. I speak today to ' sceptical public, the public managers and the decline of the moral public on the Nigerian public space', as the summary of some of the significant publications in my academic career, the proposal to a new understanding of our society, the insight to my contribution to knowledge. I owe a lot of this contribution to Karin Barber and her discourse on public culture (1997, 2007) and to John B. Thompson (1995) on the media, drawing from the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, for ideas on the relationships between publics and the public space. As they may, themselves, acknowledge my position is a radical departure from theirs and, in this wise, a distinctive contribution in its own right. I welcome to this assembly the public managers presiding over this discourse and the sceptical public seated before me that is thinking about what I would say, and already putting up some insinuations about my person and competence. Regrettably, I can not see a moral public here; since I may be wrong, let me cautiously reserve my greetings to them. It is my view, nevertheless, that: The challenge of a 21st century developing nation is that of managing democracy. A western concept, now sold as a global concept, and imperialistically imposed as a sine qua non of development, developing nations grapple with it as a special challenge to the norms of tradition and global acceptability, not just because of the sensitivity of the West and the moral, political, and economic insulation that she imposes by its absence, on nations, in some instances, but equally the wish of these nations to reject their past as inadequate and problematic without it. They practice democracy, as it were, as a social process, initiated by the inauguration of democratic structures that would provoke and supply the necessary answers to questions of individuality and rights presumed under the notion. The dynamic frame of reference, of what is democracy, accounts for many of the crucial properties of policy, accountability, ideological symbols and associations: that is, in the multivocality of the concept, ambiguity, open-mindedness, and primacy of feelings and willing are entertained over thinking contrary. Basically, in Nigeria's evolving political and development culture the growing cynicism or scepticism on the public space about governance and development is triggered off and tailored to claims of being democratic or wanting to be, and the tendency for democracy to ramify into various and varied semantic systems while its multivocality, un-grappled, allows for groups and individuals to relate to the same signifier or instrument in a variety of ways, sometimes contradictory and confusing. Our take is that uneasy apprehension of the rooting, or loss, of democracy informs the rise of public scepticism and the assault on harmonious-seeming ideologies, cosmologies, legal codes and political institutions. Such apparent scepticism, however, masks a deep recognition of human freedom with a veiled threat even though it may be a useful antidote to those moves and initiatives that subject all human actions to the powerful will, to which feeling and right are ancillary.Recently, literature and intellectual musings on governance have been concerned with the role of the public in managing development and cultural process. Karin Barber and the rest in her school of thought argued persuasively about the public as a specific history, determination, and forms of constitutionality, and relations serving a crucial role in the appreciation of art, cultural transmission, and development. It is their common view that a public provides a rich basis for identifying the social capital and manipulation of ideology, and is instructive on the contrived events which cast it in the role of a watchdog, feared and hated in a respectable society. The publics- since there are many in a society- are engaged in all kinds of activities and not in the least those of audience to information, public drama and other performances, discussants of public related issues, and organizers of support for and against positions, led by, sometimes, capricious individual or group desire rather than the right social or cultural membership. There is no denying that this renewed interest in the public creates curiosity about the nature of the connection between culture, cognition and perception, and between these and democracy, as these connections are revealed in public affairs.In Nigeria where major public affair is how to relate democracy to development, the challenge is between three major players: the sceptical public, the public managers, and the moral public. The managers survey the public space to monitor and direct development, analyze situations, and devote special attention to ideas and ideals and to the contextual differences between planned and spontaneous forms. Their role in one regard is administrative, as when they preside over ceremonial occasions and institutions such as this, and on the other hand symbolic, as to extol virtues and promote harmony between contending parties. But then they hardly rise to the level of the moral public that serves as the ultimate critical and binding authority, the conflict resolution body endowed with social responsibility and accountability that a composite community can develop. There is, of course, an interchange of roles and status between the two public domains; such that the public manager can also be a member of the moral public. So it is that there is also the possibility of a member of the moral public also losing significance and relevance (what is termed popularity) and acting only on the public space as a public manager. He could even drop further into the sceptic public circles and refuse to play any or both roles. Such a drop in social cognition is not rare, but it comes with some indignity in the sense that such a person could become a personal non grata in some social circles, more as a result of the publics having lost confidence in him or her. Therefore, he could be refused the role of a public manager when he desires it and even be snared at as lacking the moral for leadership or public office. The membership of a moral public involves the immersion of most of private self totally in public affairs, resolving differences of opinion in the public, and without the slightest suggestion of selfishness and instrumentality. The moral public is empowered by society with ritual of renewal and affirmation of 'national/community ideology,' repeated several times in a community life, and finds itself within organizational modality primarily because it charts such paths and passages that others would leave to chance or consider a risky business (Myerhoff 1975).The democratic society, as that in Nigeria, offers numerous examples of ideology, which contend for loyalty in circumstances which confront the necessity for shared meaning and violate the ideology in two ways: that there must be a consensus and truth must be discernible. Thus, failing these, individuals must be ready to confess they have fallen short of the ideal, when it is necessary to do so, chastised themselves as biblical king David, the biblical hero, often did, and repent, with pledges to do better next time. This becomes of-course, difficult for the sceptical publics, always unable or un-willing to transcend their adopted positions and much willing to fight for the enthronement of their position. Within the context of this development, what this amount to is that they would not even mind if lies are paraded as truth and society becomes engulfed in one conflict or the other, or rolled on from one conflict into the other, that seems intractable as long as the moral public couldn't play any active role of mediation and reconciling differences in opinions.The crisis in the Nigerian judiciary of late brings home the varied dimensions of the latent moral crisis both related to and inseparable from social and political crisis in Nigerian society. And the sceptical publics have had a great role to play in its unending scenario. The Nigerian judiciary, as many writers that comment on the Salami-Katsina-Alu imbroglio noted, is on trial; one that has to do with morality and bureaucratic norms. Salami was the President of the Nigerian Court of Appeal while Katsina-Alu was the Chief Justice of Nigeria. The former occupied the lower rung of the hierarchy to the later on the judicial administrative scale. The imbroglio finally brought into the open the scepticism Nigerians have nurtured for a long time on the integrity of the judicial system they have watched over the years characterized by judges partying, womanizing, bickering, and pandering to politicians' wishes. There had been rumours too of many of them been lobbied into given unnecessary injunctions and common is the insinuation of bribery that cumulatively provoked in Tayo Agunbiade of Compass (August 26, 2011:47) the rhetorical questions bordering on scepticism: Can we get back to those old days' How can the corridor of the judiciary be swept clean of this mess' An equally disenchanted Nigerian Tribune in its 'The Friday Edition' of 26th August, 2011 made the following remarks on what it described as the mess in the judiciary: Judiciary at a crossroad; Salami: End of an era'; Messy judicial affairs in Retrospect; What becomes of judiciary'; Ayo Isa Salami: A judge and his many controversies; and ended with, putting a question mark on the judiciary. These screaming headlines in the papers highlight and explore what happens to a community when public managers fail and divisiveness, conflict and competition, arise in an ideological milieu with confused sense of morality.The community was divided for Salami and Katsina-Alu along political line, with the government opposition in support of Salami's actions while the pro government forces were against him. Salami had alleged that his administration of the judiciary was meddled with by Katsina-Alu, substantiating his case with alleged CJN interference in the Sokoto governorship appeal case. But Salami himself was in the eyes of the public storm on the allegation that subsequently became a petition that he was corruptly influenced in two appeal cases by the opposition against the incumbent powers in Osun and Ekiti, which he chaired. The Nigerian Judiciary Council (NJC) sat on the petitions, with Justice Dahiru Musdapher presiding. Katsina-Alu, who should have presided as the CJN, excused himself to avoid conflict of interest. The panel cleared the CJN of the allegations levelled against him by the PCA and indicted the PCA for having lied under oath. It, however, cleared the PCA of the allegations of financial inducement and the conviviality levied against him by the governors relieved of their positions by his judgment in the cases involving them. The facts led to the setting up of another panel headed by Justice Ibrahim Auta of the Federal High Court. The panel recommended that the PCA should apologize to the CJN for false complaints. He refused and went to court. The NJC then recommended to the President of Nigeria that he should be relieved of his post. The President did just that; and the sceptical public took to the streets.Whether they were right to do so or not is not the issue for discourse in this paper, but it is well within the norms of democracy. It is instructive to note, however, that no where in the story did the moral public played a significant role in the conflict resolution because those who could have become co-opted into the fold of the sceptical publics, speaking on behalf of one or the other of the combatants. The lines of division were clear, as the sceptics situate their positions on the axis of whether this is an institutional crisis or interpersonal conflict; an administrative flaw or a matter of ideological difference and morality. The sceptics have their own truths, which correspond to an experience of their own-namely, their experience is unique and unassailable. The public managers had presumably had their integrity doubted as the conflict acted out as systematic suspension of familiar reality and regulation despite the highly structured and traditional nature of the judiciary. For all its disorderly possibility and expression as demonstrated in protests on the streets and an avowed intention of anchoring democracy, individual freedom, and rule of law, scepticism, Nigeria style, seems to be unregulated as a cultural justification of lies and prejudices. It is equally significant to know that the conflict started as disagreement between the public managers, here exemplified in the offices of the PCA, CJN and the NJC, and the sceptical public, the protest groups, merely make dogmatic statements about formal ideologies, and rendered them as adequate account for social situations and historical recorkning. Their primal identities were not completely lost in the myriad of the dynamics of the development; as one observer noted:Right now the Labour Congress, the Nigerian Bar Association, the National Association of Nigerian students, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, the Nigerian Medical Association, and all manners of human rights groups are joined in opposition to the illegality of the NJC and the President. They cannot all be wrong; they cannot all be politically motivated or instigated by the ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria) and other opposition parties. But would commonsense prevail, or is it already too late' (Tunde Fagbenle: Justice Salami and unjust system-Sunday Punch, August 28, 2011:80)The sceptical publics, as mentioned, are the professional bodies and the political parties that can claim to be in the opposition. Whether they can or cannot be wrong are another issue, and one that is not for discussion here. However, a peculiar character of these sceptical publics is that they are in frequent opposition to official position within and outside of bureaucracies; think of their opposition as natural and commonsensical, and view any action from the public managers that may come later as rather late, prejudicial, sinister, incompetent and suspicious. The solidarity of these sceptical publics is inherently negatively based; but they are unstable in their constitution and reconstitution, and their solidarity lasts only as long as they share notion of perceived enemy. Each member, each group, is, fundamentally, free at any time to carve out a sphere of autonomy, to create a space where it can express the creativity, integrity and power denied to it elsewhere on the public space or in the bureaucratic structure maintained by the public managers.Given the circumstances of error, mistake, indiscretion, instability of the polity and inexperience of performers, it is inevitable that the various sceptical publics would clash with public managers, as the bureaucratic organizations in the developing countries are frequently led by strong, opinionated, men that make it difficult for the dreams of the masses to be realized, for them to achieve many of their demands, or even have access to resources. The members of the opposition, reconstituting at will into sceptical publics, wait to respond to any development and engage the structure creatively or violently, relying on the play of imagination and the richness of utopian thought for their assault: 'the truth value of imagination relates not only to the past but also to the future: the form of freedom and happiness which it invokes claim to deliver the historical reality' (Turkle 1975:87). They act when a potential for repression or disadvantage is perceived in a body of thought and, or action that vigorously voiced the freedom and liberation of man. But their reaction itself always border on the denial of their own or others humanity as many of what they criticize they also do within their own circles and bureaucracies- which is, indeed, a ground to be suspicious of their own motives. Moreover, there is a sense of general will they canvass, which is suspect because the bodies they draw their opinion from are themselves not truly representative of the diverse interests in the body polity.Since the existence and justification of the sceptical public lies in its oppositional value, which could in fact slip into a contempt and disdain for whoever the disliked is, we can also expect the public managers to turn into a sceptical public particularly when their actions are consistently read negatively by some publics and are rejected and their status have been classified and labelled to impugn a certain level of competence, intent and integrity. But, then as the war goes on, the victims are the unsuspecting public falling into the traps of ignorance, lies, drama of the absurd and ego play and becoming a sceptical publicTHE UNSUSPECTING PUBLICWhen the public manager has become a sceptic he refuses appointment or promotion for the worker that was perceived to be in the opposition- for, who knows, he can be dangerous! He works on the privileges that are due the opposition and denies him any position within or around his office- for that could be the instrumentality to fight him back later and hastens the process of a structural or political reform that ensures immediate threat to his position. The cultural reality in the system, over which he preside becomes oblique, removed, and tendencious; in an apparent effort to satisfy the self or the public he represents, but which results in a draw-back, as it puts the established conceptions of merit and performance into new questions. It is, in fact, the suspicion between the public managers and the sceptical public on performance, reform and morality that breads most of the conflict that flow into the public space as a discourse and rallies, because both engage each other in an unrelenting effort to prevail, and so work with a certain determination, and theatres of language, in which a great number of unsuspecting publics are co-opted, and doubtless for sometime ignorantly.The Public Opinion as Arbiter of ConflictThe conflict within the social system works out in two ways: among the public managers, about authority, responsibility, power and the nature of empowerment, and between them and the sceptical public, about the sense of accountability, empowerment and level of corruption. Once the conflict starts, it marks off the intellectual and social landscape, differentiates the field of discourse, and privileges an ontological status of culture and philosophy through which each parties trace its position and difficulties in constructing and deconstructing the route and descriptions to the problematic of generating consensus. There is immediately a search for hero/heroine, where this is getting tough to resolve; in other words, figures that indicates contextualized, positional and relational location such as an Awoist, Salami, Katsina-Alu, within political affiliation, ideological leanings, epistemological perspectives and philosophical orientations. The hero/heroine is contextualized, in a way as to define the distinctiveness of position; as each takes account of new evidences for and against each other that account for the circumstances in which knowledge is valued, and relationships are read subjectively, more often than objectively. Positioning themselves as often as they do in paradigms, symbolic complexes, space and time, differentiates them as democrats or conservatives, the two publics that make representations to the society about development from self-declared locations of authority, and benefit, while relativity of views is indicated in their locations of the different and the hero/heroine. To one group can be brought the charges of treating people as objects, of hearing the words but not the music and to the second the case is one of impressionism, of treating people as puppets, of hearing the music and not the word, and, of course, of parochialism. Small wonder that none of the two parties think, right from the start, that the conflict is resolvable even when the legal process is used. Hence, in the Salami-Katsina- Alu imbroglio, even after Salami went to court, the opposition continued to use public protests to register their disenchantment, ostensibly believing that public opinion has more credibility. They may not be totally wrong! But, whose opinions do they have in mind- that of the media they vigorously, insistently but corruptly seek or that of the ordinary masses outside as rented crowds'The Yoruba worldviews, especially those coded in their Alo, folktales, provides a position. These folktales contain the human struggle to reclaim the representations of the self or the collective through trials, conflict, of most often zoomorphic figures. A major catalyst, of what is, in fact, an attempt to locate conflict in ideological setting and praxis of positionality and relativism, is the general dissatisfaction of one or the other in the conflict or even the public with the status-quo, with positivism, and the contextualization of norm and standard. The corresponding embrace of subjectivism, and relativism, open up representation and act to interrogation by the sceptical publics. This point has been increasingly brought home in the character that Ijapa, tortoise, exemplifies, as one who dares to take on authority, objects to formulaic positions, reconstitutes expectations, transgresses boundaries and subjects all representations to new interpretations. With Ijapa in a story, you cannot assume that through one person you can get at the truth and you cannot expect to locate the truth, as you want to, in a particular position; you would have different versions of the truth in the story, in the public domain, as exotic, as comic, as arbitrary, and as legal; but the relevant one is always the choice of the public of the ordinary masses and that itself cannot be prejudiced, cannot be predicted.But then Ijapa's story sometimes highlights the value of the sceptical public. Take the example of the Ijapa-Igbin (Snail) conflict which centred on the stealing of yams from the former's farm. Igbin is an in-law to Ijapa, and both were ordinarily successful elite in the society. But there was famine, and whereas Igbin could survive, Ijapa was threatened with not only negative status mobility but also death. One of the options available to him was to steal. And he succeeded for a while doing so until he was trapped and caught by his in-law(sounds uncanny and familiar'). The in-law would not brook the nonsense, which is a violation of the ground norm of decency and integrity. He meted out his punishment, which left Ijapa in a sorry state ' actually close to death. The passers-by that witnessed the scenario at dawn, just immediately Ijapa was caught, supported Igbin's penality for the crime. But by the evening, returning home from the 'market' where they have gone to transact their daily businesses, realized that Ijapa still serving the penality, is being brutalized beyond measure and ought to be freed. They reversed their support for Igbin and condemned the inhumanity in him. Ijapa was freed.The point is that the moral as well as the physical development that problematize representation is critical toward arbitrariness and conflict because they immediately create space for multiple realities. Both the moralists, sceptical publics, and the apologists, the public managers, for instance, can juxtapose old representations against new ones from the margins. They can, strategically, use the evidence before them as a tool of and for counter discourses of subjects and objects, which are often the basis for political and economic exploitation. They do so, positing a difference between 'we' and 'they' within the larger context of freedom. The contours of the moral and physical development move towards the need for freedom as defined by rejection of pain of lack and of the restriction of voice/movement, as the basis of anticipating or celebrating release from the moorings of structural locations and representations ' the opportunity to reengage representation, through hegemonic presence, created from an authentic position. Undoubtedly, in any conflict, public opinion matters, and although this may start off as public managers' initiative, and turned into the court of the sceptical public later, the final opinion as we read in the Ijapa-Igbin case, finally rests on a moral position that is not basically of the truth of the motivation, or that of the institutional order, but of a construct of an abstract good. Such a truth may not be seen in men, in their physicality and the physicality of their situation, but in what proves truly liberating: i.e. the truth that the Jews were once in bondage is that they fought their way to a trophy, the Canaan land; that Nigeria is not developed, is that there is pain unrelieved at physical and spiritual levels; that there was crisis of confidence in Yoruba society was that Ijapa stole ' this kind of truth destabilize identity, de-essentialize representation and renders it heterogeneous, plural and uncertain (Anyidoho 2006:160).
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