Happy Amalgamation

‘Yes, Nigeria was amalgamated by our colonial masters in 1914. By 1st January next year, Nigeria as a state will be 100 years old. But I totally agree with our man of God that it was not by chance, it was ordained by God.’

                                                                                         President Goodluck Jonathan

According to one reading of history, we will be one hundred come tomorrow. That was when the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was amalgamated with the Northern Nigeria Protectorate to realize the country we now have. The Jonathan administration is set to mark it in grand style, which means that a coterie of the usual suspects is in for another bonanza. Meanwhile, there is much discussion concerning whether the document which amalgamated us has an opt-out clause; and, if so, whether that means the end of Nigeria as presently constituted. Nobody seems to know the details, including the many professors in our proliferating universities who should have long since provided us with footnoted tomes on what would appear to be an issue of some importance, at least on the surface, which is what Nigeria is all about anyway, hence the impending celebrations with nothing to celebrate.

 

More troubling again is that nobody seems particularly perturbed by the secrecy surrounding what should otherwise be regarded as a fairly basic document given its implications for our future, especially since the amalgamation itself has been controversial since it was first enacted. It is indicative, for instance, that not a single newspaper appears to have considered invoking the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy, content as they are to merely repeat what everybody else is saying, and so much for their reputation for confronting ‘duly constituted authority’, as the saying has it.

 

As to whether there is such a thing as a north-south divide is open to question. Indeed, one may go further and see it as one of the many myths we labour under in a nation that is itself a fiction, hence our inability to cohere in any meaningful way. The so-called ‘north’ and the so-called ‘south’ were themselves the results of a series of amalgamations of disparate kingdoms (or fiefdoms, or republics, or whatever you will) until they took the final shapes they did in order to be finally brought together under one jurisdiction, the logical end of the imperial project the president now equates with God, rather like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. It is written in stone and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. No wonder only the chosen are privy to its contents.

 

Indeed, the problem isn’t with the document per se, which might stay in the British Foreign Office (or wherever it is archived) for the next century for all it ought to matter to us, only it does matter, which is at the heart of the tragedy of a country which promises so much but delivers so little. Nor is it the only illegitimate document which continues to hoodwink us. Absolutely everybody is in agreement that the ‘We, The People’ preamble to the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is easily downloadable in PDF, tells a lie against itself, including the fact that we somehow operate a federal republic modelled on America, where every local government maintains its own police force, while our own state governments are even forbidden from counting the people (I almost said citizens) they are supposed to govern.

 

Not that the majority of Nigerians believe in any of this, not being able to read anyway, as was designed to be the case, and which will yet backfire on this coterie which perpetuates the myths it feeds on, the senate president himself being either north-central or middle-belt, depending on the source of your livelihood. Call us a wretched people if you like, which everybody else believes anyway. And why wouldn’t they, what with the domestic epistles flying about that are our excuse for the long-awaited national discourse we are intent on evading, perhaps waiting on God – or ‘our colonial masters’ – evoked by a president who appears to believe them synonymous; who believes, in other words, in the sanctity of a document which apparently birthed us, and under which we have been labouring an entire century in order to deliver a stillbirth.

 

So what is to be done? This was the exasperated question Lenin asked on the eve of the Russian revolution, whereupon the revolution happened. Few would doubt that Nigeria is ripe for such an eventuality, caught as we are between an impervious, decadent ruling class and the teeming, impoverished masses with precious little hope in any forward movement that will alleviate their blighted lives any time soon. Added to the frenzy already attendant on the approaching 2015 elections, which can only be expected to ratchet up once we slip into 2014, and the likelihood of an implosion next year seems like an attractive bet.

 

Not that I would wish for it. Any student of history knows only too well that the terror always follows quickly in its wake but then the study of history is not something we have encouraged in this country (and deliberately so), which is why we don’t appear bothered by the absence of even the most rudimentary documents that brought us together and are content instead with speculation and hearsay – and any number of opinions - over the facts.

 

On that note: Happy Amalgamation.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

My baby she wrote me a letter

The former president, Olusegun Obasanjo (that name again!), recently wrote an 18-page letter – almost 7000 words - to the current president, Goodluck Jonathan, which has excited much controversy. Even more controversy was generated by a subsequent letter purportedly written by Iyabo, the former president’s first daughter, which, at just over 4300 words, was equally garrulous, defined here as ‘excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters’.

 

To be sure, Obasanjo made one serious charge, that Jonathan was ‘training snipers and other armed personnel secretly and clandestinely acquiring weapons,’ which he compared with the bad old days of General Abacha when death squads were deployed to assassinate awkward voices, often in broad daylight on the public highway. Indeed, this was the one issue in Obasanjo’s epistle which many have pounced on (as well they might), and have asked the House of Representatives to launch an investigation, which they are bound to do anyway, at least if they take their responsibilities seriously. Not that anything will come of it even if they do. Nigeria is a country of rumour and hear-say where hard evidence rarely if ever comes to light, like the story that Obasanjo himself kept a killer squad in Aso Rock which eliminated Bola Ige, Funsho Williams and Marshall Harry (among others). The fact that nobody in these and the other cases was ever charged would seem to give the rumour substance.

 

For the rest, Obasanjo’s letter was full of generalisations which only served to indict the person who wrote it. Accusing the Jonathan administration of corruption is laughable against, for instance, the $16bn his own administration looted in the process of not giving us electricity, as the interested parties publicly confessed to the House of Representatives. Worse again was casting aspersions on his successor’s ‘honour’ for wanting to contest for a second term after privately promising otherwise when his own honour allowed him to try for a third term against the provisions of the Constitution he had publicly sworn to uphold. But Obasanjo is the avatar of the Nigerian condition, one who embodies everything that is wrong with this awkward colonial creation; as his daughter’s purported letter put it: ‘Nigeria has descended into a hellish reality where smart, capable people to “survive” and have their daily bread prostrate to imbeciles.’

 

Which just about sums it up and this whether Iyabo did indeed pen her fortuitous epistle in her unlikely, melodramatic prose:‘This is the end of my communication with you for life’. At least one person has insinuated that it bears all the hallmarks of a certain garrulous (that word again!) ‘sycophant’ of the current president’s inner circle who writes the opposite of what he used to when he was on the outside, itself testimony to the harsh reality of survival in a country ruled by imbeciles. Or perhaps it is just a manifestation of the ‘greed’ she also deplored in the national psyche. Besides, the letter describes her as ‘a child well brought up by [her] long-suffering mother in Yoruba tradition’ with its injunction of not insulting your elders (but especially your father), which is what allows our fathers to continue to chance us with ‘impunity’. In his own letter, Obasanjo deplores the current administration’s non-effort to tackle the corruption he helped foster, and corruption in a deeper sense than he ascribes to his successor. It was the same Obasanjo whose own son accused him of sleeping with his daughter-in-law in exchange for oil contracts, which might very well qualify as ‘oil stealing’ but in any case could hardly be expected to ‘improve the present poor management of the industry’ - as Obasanjo faults Jonathan.

 

Jonathan’s reply, a full nine days later (and coming in at a tad under 5000 words), was altogether more respectful – he addresses his adversary as ‘Baba’ five separate times – but also suggested the iron fist: ‘Your letter is clearly a threat to national security as it may deliberately or inadvertently set the stage for subversion.’ He also refutes the allegation of training snipers to assassinate political opponents as ‘incomprehensible’ and comes clean on 2015:

 

You will recall that you serially advised me that we should refrain from discussing the 2015 general elections for now so as not to distract elected public officials from urgent task of governance. While you have apparently moved away from that position, I am still of the considered opinion that it would have been best for us to do all that is necessary to refrain from heating up the polity at this time. Accordingly, I have already informed Nigerians that I will only speak on whether or not I will seek a second term when it is time for such declarations.

This is somewhat disingenuous given that not declaring is itself ‘heating up the polity’, a cliché in the Nigerian lexicon first used by General Abacha when he was equally anxious about extending his tenure, tenure extension being the sole ambition of Nigeria’s rulers, Jonathan no less than Obasanjo, hence the corruption Obasanjo makes such a great song-and-dance about, thereby leaving the way open for Jonathan to desecrate the memory of the late Fela: ‘That corruption is an issue in Nigeria is indisputable.  It has been with us for many years. You will recall that your kinsman, the renowned afro-beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti famously sang about it during your first stint as Head of State.’

 

But reading all these 18,300 words, one question kept nagging away at me: Does any of this matter? Does all this English grammar help ‘move the country forward’, another of the clichés our rulers glibly trot out? I fear not. Indeed, at the end of it all, I felt as if I had been privy to a marital squabble which had little or nothing to do with me unless I made it so, but to what end? Where is my own in all of this, itself the tragedy of a nation that has sunk to this level of banality.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

Much ado about South Africa's snub

Nigeria was the first African country the late Nelson Mandela visited after his release from prison in 1990. The front-line states apart, which had no choice in the matter, Nigeria was far and away his most generous supporter, a fact he was merely acknowledging. On his previous visit three decades earlier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had given him £10,000 to help prosecute the armed struggle that would land him 27 years. Only Tunisia, with half that amount, along with Liberia and Guinea, put their hands in their pockets. He never even got to meet Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the self-styled pan-Africanist. In the years that followed, Nigeria worked tirelessly to isolate the ‘racist regime’, even nationalising two British concerns – Barclays Bank and British Petroleum – for trading with them. Countless black South Africans were given scholarships to come and study here. By all accounts, they lived well.

 

The fairy tale happened. Four years after his second visit, Mandela became president of a free, democratic South Africa. Now he is dead and his Nigerian counterpart was snubbed at his memorial service which netted the most heads of state and government in the history of the world. Pride of place was given to America, whose CIA provided the intelligence that led to his capture, and our former ‘colonial master’, whose concerns we are now frantically un-nationalising, wasn’t far behind. Nigeria didn’t figure, which is to say that nobody even noticed us amid the celebrations of a life well lived. America shook hands with Cuba, which everybody agreed was in the spirit of the great man’s legacy; America, Britain and Denmark took a ‘selfie’ which went viral as everyone wondered whether Michelle was pouting or smiling, Denmark being very pretty; and Israel and Iran didn’t attend for all sorts of complicated reasons to do with the real politick that had condemned Mandela to a long stretch in the first place.

 

Shortly before his death, having ‘stepped aside’ after just one term (Jonathan, please note), Mandela professed himself disappointed with us in an interview he granted one of our diplomats: ‘You know I am not very happy with Nigeria. I have made that very clear on many occasions,’ he fumed, before launching into a broadside (of which the following is only part):

 

Your leaders have no respect for their people. They believe that their personal interests are the interests of the people. They take people’s resources and turn it into personal wealth. There is a level of poverty in Nigeria that should be unacceptable. I cannot understand why Nigerians are not more angry than they are… What do young Nigerians think about your leaders and their country and Africa? Do you teach them history? Do you have lessons on how your past leaders stood by us and gave us large amounts of money? You know I hear from Angolans and Mozambicans and Zimbabweans how your people opened their hearts and their homes to them. I was in prison then, but we know how your leaders punished western companies who supported Apartheid.

 

As our very own IBB said (as who should know?), ‘Mandela had a moral conviction and his moral conducts was very, very high and powerful,’ only a pity that he himself failed to exhibit these fine qualities when he truncated the very democracy for which his hero had endured the unspeakable; had, indeed, looted ‘people’s resources’ which he had turned ‘into personal wealth’, for instance the missing N12.2bn oil windfall when America invaded Iraq, a war which Mandela called them on: ‘Why does the United States behave so arrogantly... Their friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction but because its [sic] their ally they won't ask the UN to get rid of it. They just want the (Iraqi) oil... We must expose this as much as possible.’

 

But this is the world of real politick where presidents do not willingly step aside, which was what made Mandela unique, and not only in Africa, and why so many wanted to be counted (even taking photos of each other), including Nigeria, which had opened its heart and home – and its bank account – to the cause this man was ready to die for, the same man who told our intrepid diplomat what we all know: ‘The world will not respect Africa until Nigeria earns that respect. The black people of the world need Nigeria to be great as a source of pride and confidence. Nigerians love freedom and hate oppression. Why do you do it to yourselves?’ Why indeed? And what are we going to do about it? The obvious answer would seem to be to do what Mandela himself did when faced with a minority regime which was just as blind, as deaf and as dumb to the majority they were oppressing but which, when all said and done, at least built an economy that now gives the country mouth to talk anyhow to Nigeria. Would that we had done the same with the wherewithal we distributed so generously.

 

Nor is South Africa alone in its contempt for the ‘giant of Africa’. Another much-quoted article pointed out that Liberia had earlier done the same when they elected the first woman president in the continent at the expense of ‘Nigerian limbs’, before letting rip against the ‘fifty something other ungrateful lepers across the continent’ who ‘have been beneficiaries of the bottomless pit of petrobillions of Abuja...only to run to Washington, London...to give thanks’. And how they shone! America kept ‘Madiba’ on the terrorist list until after his presidency. These days, they water-board ‘terrorists’ without due process – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of justice’ – and drone children in Pakistan every Tuesday – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of peace’.

 

Maybe one day we will wake up to the world of real politick, just like Mandela asked us to, being himself not like that.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

A tale of two countries

Nelson Mandela famously declared in the 1963-64 Rivonia trial that he was ready to die for ‘the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities’, and promptly served 27 years of what was supposed to be a life sentence. Nor was he alone, merely the chosen leader of a remarkable generation of men and women who lived to reap the rewards of their collective sacrifice. I never met Mandela himself although I was once privileged to interview Walter Sisulu, one of his staunchest comrades who did time with him. It was in the heady months following the first-ever democratic elections in 1994 and I was confronted with a modest man who had turned down the opportunity to join the government in any post of his choosing because he wanted to spend the few years left him with his wife, Albertina, whose conduct during her husband’s extended absence was the ideal of Caesar’s wife: above suspicion.

 

At the time I met Sisiulu we here in Nigeria were labouring under the tyranny of General Abacha, who had just then executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, and you could see the pain cross his gentle features when I raised the subject. He said something to the effect that teaching people the virtues of democracy was not easy and left it at that, implying perhaps that we had to figure a way of fighting our own oppressors. Mandela himself was more forthright. He blasted Abacha as ‘illegitimate, barbaric and arrogant’ and called on the opposition to intensify its efforts to get rid of him. Abacha returned the compliment (although he later apologised, as he might have) by remarking that he didn’t blame the freedom fighter who had ‘lost touch with the global socio-political trend’; and one of his ministers, Professor Ademola Adeshina, perhaps wanting to please Oga at the top, wondered how anybody can ‘spend 27 years in prison and still be sane’.

 

It happened that Mandela died when our present Oga at the top, who was quick to praise the dearly departed as ‘a wise, courageous and compassionate leader’, was apparently on a private visit to Germany, where he might or might not have visited a hospital for a possible illness he might or might not have contracted in London following his fifty-third birthday celebrations. He was accompanied by his wife, who was herself treated at this possibly same hospital for seven weeks last year, and who later confessed that, ‘I actually died; I passed out for more than a week. My intestine and tummy were opened.’ Dr Patience then seized the opportunity to mourn afresh the memory of her late sister, Stella Obasanjo, and recalled the ‘painful moment’ when the latter’s corpse was brought home, which would have been how ‘my corpse would have been brought here’, but for ‘God Himself’: ‘I am not Lazarus,’ she gushed, still marvelling at her resurrection, ‘but my experience was similar to his own’, and then promptly pre-empted her Biblical precursor - seven days to his four - but let us not be pernickety.

 

In amongst all this, we recall that it was Stella Obasanjo’s then president husband who justified all the money he pumped into the National Hospital at Abuja so that he, along with ‘the Vice-President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the ministers and top government officials will receive treatment instead of going abroad’, before promptly sending his wife to this same abroad, where she nonetheless died following a routine ‘tummy tuck’. But then even now, after all the billions supposedly expended, patients routinely complain about ‘the long delays’, the ‘sloppiness’, the ‘unprofessionalism’, the ‘lack of coordination between the different units’, the ‘inadequate personnel’, all of which is par for the course, including the lack of transparency concerning just how much of the nation’s resources were not spent achieving succour for the worthy amongst us who can nevertheless go foreign with the forfeited money.

 

President Jonathan himself seemed much taken with the spectre of the Grim Reaper when he expanded on his wife’s miraculous recovery. In his opinion, it put an end to the apparently superstitious belief that nobody ever left Aso Rock with his family intact: ‘The story was that one of us (the President or his wife) will die. Today we are celebrating her’; and added: ‘Her recovery has put an end to that belief. I am not too good in celebrating, but for this particular one, I think we have to thank God for keeping the life of my wife.’ With fifteen months to go before the April 2015 elections, this seems perilously close to tempting fate. It also has the disadvantage of making him sound shallow, especially when we recall Mandela’s famous speech I quoted at the beginning of this blog.

 

All of which reminded me of an amusing passage in Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where he recounts receiving treatment at a Cape Town clinic for TB 23 years into his sentence. The morning after surgery, he was served the full Monty: eggs, sausages, black pudding, baked beans, toast, marmalade... His horrified surgeon happened to be passing and immediately ordered it removed. The patient was to be on light foods to aid his recovery. Mandela, who had existed on ‘mealie pap porridge' for two-and-a-half decades, grasped the tray and declared himself ready to die for the sake of the eggs, sausages, black pudding...

 

Ken Saro-Wiwa was also accused of treason and one wonders whether, had he been imprisoned instead of executed, he would have even survived long enough to be treated at the National Hospital that Stella Obasanjo wasn’t killed in, but let us not be too despondent. According to the (extremely conservative) Economist magazine, ‘since Mr Mandela left the presidency in 1999 his beloved country has disappointed under two sorely flawed leaders, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma. While the rest of Africa’s economy has perked up, South Africa’s has stumbled. Nigeria’s swelling GDP is closing in on South Africa’s. Corruption and patronage within the ANC have become increasingly flagrant.’ Sound familiar?

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

From tragedy to farce

The recent defection of five PDP governors to the mega-opposition APC has certainly raised the ante. APC now controls 16 of the 36 states and, according to some reports, more seats than the ruling party in the House of Representatives. But let the statisticians quibble over the figures. It is enough for our purposes that, after 14 years of ‘demonstration of craze’, as the late Fela put it, we have a possible alternative to a sleaze-ridden party which once vowed to rule for 60 years (why not a thousand?) and is now panicking all over the place at the prospect of possibly losing out in 2015. Well and good. This is doubtless healthy for pluralism, as many commentators have been quick to note, or at least it would be if APC really did represent some sort of alternative, what Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, one of its shakers and movers, called ‘a good rescue mission for our fledgling democracy. It is a must for the country, is very necessary and we are happy about that.’

 

I should begin by saying that I had my doubts about the APC alliance from the outset. Leaving aside ANPP, by far the most junior member and the one with the most questionable credentials (it was once known, under its previous incarnation, as Abacha People’s Party on account of the many late dictator’s cronies within its ranks), I wondered what ACN, a ‘progressive’ party which traces its antecedents to Awolowo, could possibly have in common with CPC, a party founded – and owned? – by Buhari, whose demeanour and utterances (or lack thereof) have led some to justifiably consider him a closet Boko Haram supporter. Indeed, that some believe Buhari a democrat would seem to stretch the meaning of the concept out of all recognition, but then much the same can be said of Tinubu for reasons to do with the way and manner he foisted his wife on the nation and his daughter on the Lagos State market women.

 

My doubts were further strengthened by the recent speculation that the Kano State governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, himself one of the defectors, might emerge the APC presidential candidate come 2015, with the Lagos State governor, Babatunde Fashola, as his running mate. Fashola, of course, would be a popular choice for reasons known only too well, although it ought to be said that his high visibility as a consequence of the so-called Lagos-Ibadan press axis has always worked heavily in his favour. Should it come to pass, Professor Itse Sagay summed it up thus: ‘Concerning the Northern governors decamping to the APC, I really don’t think it is a loss to the PDP. If you look at these rebel governors, with the exclusion of Rotimi Amaechi, you will find out that their agenda is a very narrow agenda, a very personal one. And that agenda is for the North to produce the president so that a Northerner can control the Niger Delta oil and Lagos State VAT and so on.’ I think the good professor is entirely correct in his analysis and ought to provide a warning to the more excitable amongst us who appear to believe that defeating PDP at the polls, irrespective of the beast which replaces it, will somehow prove the panacea to our myriad problems.

 

In light of this, my attention was caught by a recent newspaper report: ‘Police enforcing Islamic law in the city of Kano publicly destroyed some 240,000 bottles of beer on Wednesday, the latest move in a wider crackdown on behaviour deemed “immoral” in the area. The banned booze had been confiscated from trucks coming into the city in recent weeks, said officials from the Hisbah, the patrol tasked with enforcing the strict Islamic law, known as sharia.’ Nor was this a one-off: according to the same report, since September this year the 9000-strong ‘moral police force’ has made ‘hundreds of arrests...following a state-government directive to cleanse the commercial hub’ of said ‘immoral’ practices, including prostitution and homosexuality (but ignoring, conveniently enough, the widespread practise of defiling under-age girls in the name of this same Islamic law).

 

So there we are: a choice between a clearly ineffectual Christian southerner who should never have attained the exalted office he currently occupies but for the twin accidents of religion and geography, and a fundamentalist Islamic northerner whose proposed occupancy of that same office is based on an opposite but equal configuration. This is politics at its most primitive and the reason why we are doomed to keep repeating history, first as tragedy and then as farce, as a philosopher once famously put it. The fact that Fashola, a southerner, also happens to be a Moslem – but assuredly not a fundamentalist one – only serves to underscore ‘the buffoonery and horseplay’, ‘the crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations’ that are the stock-in-trade of farce; and one can already see the mischief-makers, looking for handouts from an increasingly jittery (not to say desperate) President Jonathan, make a meal out of it all. And why not? In the absence of more serious considerations, for instance the fitness of the person for the job, what else is there?

 

But one can hardly blame the politicians. As the English essayist William Hazlitt put it, ‘the march of power is one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like the hues of the chameleon from any object that happens to be at hand; its object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent’s fang.’ It was ever thus and ever will be, but the question is: What are Nigerians going to do about it as we approach what many agree will be a decisive moment in the short history of this awkward entity? Alas, not much given the wishful thinking surrounding the emergence of APC as an apparent alternative to the ‘buffoonery and horseplay’ which have brought us to this pretty pass.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers: New Nigerian Stories.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

Danse Macabre

            Emperor, your sword won’t help you out
            Sceptre and crown are worthless here
            I've taken you by the hand
            For you must come to my dance.

Those who perpetrated the idea that President Jonathan was weak - myself included - were not wrong but culpable nonetheless in encouraging him to be strong, or at least give the semblance of same, which was all that was left to him. This has now become a problem, for him no less than for us.

 

Take the case of Sule Lamido, one of the seven PDP governors opposed to Jonathan’s 2015 transition programme (if we may dub it thus). Lamido is generally considered among the better performing governors. Indeed, he has been compared to Fashola in Lagos and is a self-declared disciple of the late Aminu Kano and his philosophy of service to the downtrodden. To that end, he instituted the first social security bill in the country, under which every physically-challenged person in the state – there are about 4000 – is paid N7000 monthly to stay off the streets; in the governor’s own words: ‘We, therefore, feel fulfilled that...the most deprived layer of the poor...no longer go to bed hungry on account of lack of money...’

 

Lamido has also flayed the culture of impunity whereby ‘a corrupt office holder was arraigned before a court of law for corrupt practices and even pleaded guilty’ but was set free and allowed to contest for public office again in order ‘to be promulgating laws to punish an ordinary thief of a goat or a pick-pocket’. He called this ‘a shame and disgrace’ and advocated scrapping the immunity clause from the constitution. Now, it seems, he is himself guilty of corrupt enrichment, at least if the charges levelled against him and his two sons by the EFCC are to be believed, totalling over N10 billion since he became governor in 2007.

 

Whether the charges are true is impossible to say. Everyone knows that the EFCC is simply a stick with which to flay the president’s perceived enemies. Moreover, being Nigeria, one assumes that all public office holders are corrupt, whatever they claim to the contrary. This is a melancholy fact but there you are. Worse again, those widely perceived to be corrupt but close to Oga at the top are not only not persecuted by the EFCC but actively shielded by him even against his own political interests, as in the continuing case with the ‘embattled’ aviation minister, Princess Stella Oduah.

 

The facts of Oduahgate, as we have come to call it (we love mimicking the nomenclature of our betters, being unoriginal in everything we do except stealing), are well known and needn’t delay us. She is not the first minister to be caught with her pants down, as it were, and she certainly won’t be the last (alas!), but for whatever reason her case galvanised public opinion, with calls from all quarters for Jonathan to sack her. Pigs might fly. Not only has he refused to do so but he eschewed the EFCC in favour of a commission whose subsequent findings – assuming it reached any - he refused to disclose. Meanwhile, the Senate, which made much noise about getting to the bottom of the matter (pigs might indeed fly), made a sudden U-turn and unanimously decided not to grill her. That she will get away with (or perhaps in) her expensive bulletproof cars is not in doubt, itself evidence of the culture of impunity Lamido railed against.

 

As for Lamido, he is not alone in his travails. All the so-called G-7 governors have, in one way or another, felt the wrath of the presidency for their impertinence. One of the most flagrant abuses of executive power occurred a few weeks ago when the police ‘stormed’ (their preferred mode of operation) the Kano State governor’s lodge in Abuja where the disaffected governors were meeting on the grounds that a residential building was being used as an office. One of the ‘outraged’ governors expressed alarm ‘at the way and manner the Nigeria Police treats elected representatives of Nigerians,’ and noted that, ‘if the rights and privileges of these governors and members of the National Assembly can be so threatened, then an ordinary man in Nigeria has no hope and confidence in the Nigerian Police Force,’ a conclusion he might have drawn by simply opening a newspaper.

 

Using the EFCC to prosecute only those who disagree with you, and the police as storm troopers to disrupt meetings held in a private residence, give the illusion of strength but in fact demonstrate its opposite, and underlined by the refusal to use either in the case of a minister you happen to be close to but whose reputation is more odious than most. No doubt this Dance of Death will be the style of a president desperate to renew his tenure at Aso Rock as we move ever closer to the 2015 deadline; and it is unfortunate that his many advisers cannot tell him that all it does is make him look petty and, worse, foolish, but then that is not what he hired them for. The EFCC can’t go after Lamido directly because he has immunity so they target his sons; the police disrupt a meeting of disaffected governors of the ruling party only for the Inspector-General to deny knowledge of any such operation.

 

In the midst of all this, one was almost forgetting that the ASUU strike is now in its sixth month, that one of the largest exporters of crude is still one of the largest importers of refined, that we continue to wait for the electricity long since promised... But the list is a long one, so much so, indeed, that there are those who doubt there will even be a country called Nigeria come 2015, much less an Aso Rock to occupy.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers: New Nigerian Stories.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

 

'A day with Jesus for Nigeria in Israel'

Once upon a time, Nigeria prided itself on its ‘radical’ foreign policy, which essentially meant supporting the Palestinians against the Israelis and the blacks against the whites. South Africa has since moved on, as the Palestinians must now be ruing following President Jonathan’s four-day visit to the Holy Land. The occasion, the first by a sitting Nigerian head of state, was apparently both spiritual and political - the Wailing Wall on the one hand, the Knesset on the other - hence the 3000-strong delegation of honourables and pastors (often one and the same) who accompanied him thither. Whether we ought to conflate the secular with the profane is questionable but then we never tire of telling ourselves that we are a religious people, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

 

As one might have expected, some of our Moslem brothers had a problem. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the ‘outspoken Islamic scholar and Grand Khadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria’, called the visit ‘a big political blunder’ and opined on his Facebook page that, ‘Nigeria along with many other African and world countries has sided with the plight of the Palestinians that were forced out of their homeland, killed and scattered,’ but then proceeded to spoil his case by indulging his anti-Semitism. Claiming that ‘the Jews...are traditionally known to be misers’, and that, ‘Charity is not in there [sic] lexicon’, he wasn’t above quoting Matthew 23:33: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ He should have stayed with his Koran. The Messiah was referring specifically to the Pharisees and scribes (themselves outspoken scholars in their day) who might be more fruitfully likened to our jet-setting pastors: ‘For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.’

 

Significantly enough, our Sheikh was silent on the myriad pilgrimages made by our past heads of state-but-one to Mecca. He might also have mentioned the N4.3bn spent annually by the federal government extending this facility to every street-corner Mallam – ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’ – against the N1.35bn for Christians intent on Jerusalem, itself just one of the disparities that might be expected to harden Pharaoh’s heart, as indeed his disciples have loudly articulated, for instance Asari-Dokubo: ‘Whether they contest or they don’t. If they say the blood of the dogs and the baboons will be soaked in the streets, or salt water in the streets, we will help them in blood in the streets.’ And this from the erstwhile militant who is now said to be building a university in neighbouring Benin Republic, having bemoaned the lack of facilities back home, the reason for his militancy in the first place, but it is now ‘our’ turn to chop and God (or Allah) help Nigeria.

 

As to why ‘My people them go dey follow Bishop/ Them go follow Pope/ Them go follow Imam...’, as the late Fela put it, might be a question our Grand Khadi should ask himself. And whatever one’s views of Israel – whether one believes, for instance, that it has inherited South Africa’s mantle, as Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of separate but equal, claimed: ‘they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state’ – we know at least that the country works. So much so, in fact, that we once imported orange juice from there before it was banned even as oranges rotted by the roadside in Nigeria (and continue to do so), and now we are hearing about the $40mn contract awarded to an Israeli arms manufacturer – Elbit Systems – to monitor all internet activity in Nigeria, including, presumably, the traffic emanating to and from Aso Rock – but they were doing that already.

 

In fact, Jonathan’s trip had less to do with the photo-ops at the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Sea of Galilee and all points in between and everything to do with the War on Terror, which his Israeli counterpart assured him was a matter of mutual concern: ‘This is important for us Mr. President, but I believe it’s important for Nigeria, I believe it’s important for Africa, for the countries of the Middle East, and for the world’. Jonathan concurred: ‘Combating the menace of terrorism is a challenge that we must address in partnership with all peace loving countries and peoples of the world. I seek the cooperation of your country to confront the security threat from terrorist groups that my country is now facing.’

 

There’s no denying that we are deeply embedded in our very own, very self-inflicted war on terror – lower case - but the two can hardly be conflated. Israel’s war is not ours and it is difficult to know what we gain by identifying so closely with a country which flaunts its double standards, currently being played out over Iran’s rapprochement with ‘the West’. Israel assures us that Iran has ‘systemically defied’ UN Security Council Resolutions but remains silent on the many resolutions which it has itself systematically defied. Israel points out that Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and so cannot be allowed to develop the nuclear weapons which Israel, widely believed to be a nuclear power, has itself not signed. Israel argues that Iran now possesses the ability ‘to produce nuclear weapons’ but omits to mention that so do Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.

 

There was a reason why Gowon, a Christian like Jonathan, severed diplomatic links following the 1973 Yom Kippur War (and restored, ironically, by Babangida, a Muslim, in 1992). But why we should tie ourselves so closely to its apron strings is something of a mystery. Bringing Jesus into the matter, as Jonathan insisted on baptising his pilgrimage in the quote which heads this blog, only underlines his muddle-headedness. As for me, I'm a Rastafarian and I want the federal government to pay for me to go to Jamaica.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

Caesar's wife

I never much liked the recently suspended aviation minister. I feel about her much as I do about her ‘sister’ in the petroleum ministry. This is a pity given the dearth of women in public positions and the president’s much-touted intentions to make amends. Tunji Lardner wrote of her ‘condescending imperial haughtiness’ but then much the same can be said of her male counterparts but for the fact that she is a woman. This means, for one thing, that she – along with her sister – is pictured in the newspapers almost as much as the president himself in order that we might admire their respective attributes while we ponder the precise nature of their relationship with Oga. ‘Is Jonathan Dating Stella Oduah?’ was the headline in an online newspaper. As for her sister, Dr (Mrs) Patience Jonathan was once reported to have implored Mama Diezani at a public function to ‘tell your daughter to leave my husband alone. She is married and I’m married. What kind of thing is this?’ Levels dey, as we say. Sadly, this is ours.

 

The petroleum minister especially has made clear her disdain for the danfo-packed masses. During the 2012 fuel crisis, when the price at the pump doubled so we could pay the marketers who import the refined of the crude we export, she cautioned Nigerians against ‘pointing to corruption, if we are not prepared to bear some of the hardship’. It later transpired that she was blowing N1bn annually on private, foreign-leased aircraft, foregoing even the over-bloated presidential fleet. She is also widely alleged to be free and easy with lucrative oil blocks to young men with no previous form, at least in that particular sector. But everything gets mixed up in Nigeria, which is why the oil minister’s aviation counterpart, who is also deep into the oil business, was once accused of swindling Niger delta militants of their N3.2bn bounty to keep this precious oil-we-don’t-refine flowing, and now we are hearing about the two bulletproof cars she purchased for N255mn. Perhaps she has reason to be in fear of her life given the many aircraft that have dropped from her skies, which is presumably why her sister would rather give our money to foreigners, who would at least service the damn thing.

 

Oduahgate, as the affair has been dubbed, galvanised public opinion, with civil society organisations threatening mass action if the president didn’t sack her forthwith - ‘We discussed, argued on it and we decided that we are fighting these people to a standstill. We are not keeping quiet on this’ - but why all the fuss? She did no worse than her sister, whose own travelling arrangements were equally well publicised at the time. Moreover, both are from the same ‘tribe’ so we can discount the ‘ethnic factor’ that bedevils so much of our national discourse by the politicians who profit from the wheeze known as ‘federal character’. Then again, perhaps the aviation minister was simply the easier target. She could hardly match her sister, whose ministry released N90bn in a single day to ensure Jonathan’s victory at the 2011 party primaries, a task which Mama Diezani’s daughter will no doubt repeat come 2015, which is all that matters. Whether, as before, her aviation sister will double as Jonathan’s campaign treasurer, as she did in 2011, remains to be seen.

 

Given the furore over the matter of the armoured cars, it would have been difficult for the president to do nothing so he promptly did nothing.  She is on ‘tactical suspension’, we were informed, as if she was an unruly schoolchild caught out in some misdemeanour, in the process treating us the same way as we await the report of the ‘administrative panel of enquiry’ appointed by Mr President to delve into the matter. As others have pointed out, why a commission to do the work of the police? But we already know the answer to that and have at least been spared – or have merely postponed - the police and assorted thugs paid from the same purse beating protestors in the street, as happened during an earlier, one-man rally to protest the aviation minister’s latest affront to ‘justice and equity’. There is nothing like appointing a commission to avoid moving the country forward, as the recent fracas in Edo State confirmed over the other commission the president also appointed, although the sovereign national conference we ceaselessly demand is a matter for the people and not the government, the people being sovereign by definition.

 

The law the aviation minister is alleged to have transgressed – Section 58 (5) of the Public Procurement Act, for what it matters - stipulates five years’ imprisonment without the option of a fine but that will be the day. For justice and equity we must turn instead to our former colonial master, a melancholy observation so many years after our ‘independence’. Worse yet, any culprit who manages to evade said mother country’s long arm can expect a pardon back home, as the president granted his former benefactor, the so-called ‘general of the oil fields’ who once vanquished the British Empire disguised as a woman.

 

In any case, we can be sure that the panel will find a way to exonerate her so that she might be welcomed back to school. By then, of course, public outrage would have swung to the latest billion naira story by yet another of the public servants they sometimes claim to be in rare moments of self-irony. The more cynical among us will put this down to the short attention span of the average Nigerian but this is not so at all. Nigerians are no different from people elsewhere caught up in the daily struggle to earn a living, only that people elsewhere can rest assured that the powers that be will discharge their responsibilities while the rest of us go about trying to earn that living, but made that much harder in Nigeria by the antics of those same public servants.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU