Dysfunctional Lilliputians and distressed political widows

At a recent press conference called to rubbish the pretensions of the proposed mega-party which has vowed to unseat PDP come 2015, Dr Doyin Okupe, Senior Special Assistant for Public Affairs to the Presidency, had this to say: ‘These sets of politicians who want to desperately supplant the Jonathan administration are promoting an incongruous alliance of political weaklings and dysfunctional Lilliputians out primarily to foster their ego and psyche being repeatedly frustrated political mongers...’ This is familiar PDP territory. Back in 1999, when we began this new experiment in one-party democracy, some other such Okupe fellow was pleased to rubbish the ‘lamentations’ of ‘congenital failures’ and ‘distressed political widows’ who complained about the murder and mayhem visited on their members at the polling booths in the ‘do or die’ politics that once led to a civil war and appears set to do the same all over again.  

In an earlier blog, I called Okupe a Rottweiler but then he was only living up (or perhaps down) to his reputation, for which he was employed in the first place, having fulfilled the same role in a previous incarnation. Given that 2015 is still a full two years away, it seems a little early for Jonathan to have unleashed him but then getting re-elected appears to be all that matters to this accidental President, which is why any pretence of governance has ceased. It is as if, having found himself unexpectedly in Aso Rock - and who could have predicted it of a ‘minority’ who walked barefoot to school? - he is perhaps unable to believe himself in his exalted position and can now think of nothing but how to continue there.   

It has been well said that what is needed is a war cabinet which understands the scale of the forces intent on dismembering the nation, instead of which we are saddled with a gang of irresponsible louts mouthing obscenities, but perhaps that was not to be avoided, merely the end result of the deadly politics played out this last half-century of our ‘independence’. It is entirely in keeping with the intellectual barrenness of this administration that Okupe should be equally inflamed by the recent US State Department country report – ‘Impunity remained widespread at all levels of government. The government brought few persons to justice for abuses and corruption. Police and security forces generally operated with impunity’ – which he labelled ‘crap’.

One needn’t be in thrall to foreigners to wonder how his intemperate language registers among those who take themselves more seriously than we do here, although he did concede that ‘[n]ot only judges, magistrates, police, everybody is bribed in this country’. Not Jonathan’s fault, of course, since the problem ‘started way back,’ although he acknowledged – as an afterthought - that ‘the buck ends on his table,’ which is presumably what it means to be President. Cold comfort, in any case, to the victims of Boko Haram – all 3,000 of them, according to yet another US-sponsored report - whose families and friends must now wonder whether bombing churches and police stations is the preferred way to get government’s attention; indeed, to partake of government largesse, hence Jonathan’s insistence on his grandiloquently named Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of Security Challenges in the North, but which Boko Haram itself has rejected on the grounds that it is the federal government that is the terrorist organisation. I daresay there is much to be said on both sides given the activities of the Joint Task Force recently accused of levelling a village on the shores of Lake Chad, a matter Okupe has chosen to remain silent about.

Unfortunately, the proposed mega-party which obsesses this administration so is no more inspiring. Here, at least, one is in agreement with the attack dog in characterizing ANPP as ‘moribund and lacklustre,’ and ACN as ‘a one man owned and controlled political party’ lacking ‘any internal democratic credential [sic] whatsoever’. Both Tinubu and Buhari he considered ‘heavily burdened political liabilities,’ an assessment it would be difficult to refute. In fact, he hardly goes far enough. Tinubu, an accountant by profession, seems to be fixated on amassing as much wealth as he can, which is why he is widely seen – whether true or not – as a major beneficiary of the demolitions in various parts of Lagos State that have turned a good number of Nigerians into refugees in their own country. If so, this is a far cry from the Awolowo legacy he claims to emulate, but then this has been the case with successive Yoruba ‘leaders’ since the sage died. Whether Buhari himself has any connection with Boko Haram, which Okupe may or may not have claimed, is a moot point, although we recall that it was Boko Haram itself which once proposed the retired general as a mediator when a previous amnesty programme was in the air. In any event, Tinubu and Buhari make strange (I almost said alarming) bedfellows, as many others have already remarked.

But even more disheartening than any of this is the absence of younger faces in a country where over sixty per cent of the population is under twenty-four, a tribute to the enduring power of the gerontocracy we practice in the name of ‘African culture’. As a friend once remarked, when you say Your Excellency the fellow (invariably male, also the consequence of African culture) hears Kabiyesi, he whose word cannot be questioned. Oga says it’s that and it’s that. Many of these young men and women are beginning to pour out of our proliferating universities to walk the streets in search of non-existent jobs. This is the time-bomb sitting under all of us as we practice the politics that is lighting the fuse. It is also worth pointing out that these ‘teeming youths’ were born long after the civil war and might be inclined to think that another, more comprehensive one wouldn’t be a bad idea, always assuming that the war – or at least the questions it raised – ever really ended.  

© 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, and Dream Chasers.

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

Culture go hang

Just last week, Chinua Achebe was honoured by the New York Senate and Omotola Jolande-Ekeinde made Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Reading the comments flying around the internet there’s no escaping the importance we continue to place on the good opinion of foreigners, even though Omotola's elevation appears to be problematic to a certain section of Nigerian society anxious about ‘protecting the natural women [sic] dignity and virtues’ against the ‘disgusting appearances’ of ‘models’ who ‘dress shamelessly in the public arena’ and thereby betray ‘African values’. I never quite thought of it like that, having watched a number of Omotola's films, but it is as well not to get distracted by those who have the luxury of believing that they live in a country where said women's 'dignity and virtue' is not hostage to those who make it their business to make it so, as a visit to the nearest university campus will confirm.

Still, Nigeria has been recognised for achievement and that is enough given the country's reputation in the same US which saw fit to celebrate these two icons of Nigerian culture, for instance Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State - and almost that country’s first 'black' President – for whom Nigeria is 'a nation of 90 million marvellous scammers' on account of 'their national culture,' so perhaps the Senators in New York and the editor of Time magazine were simply attempting to balance the books, as it were, and why not? Our scammers aside, Nigeria is still nonetheless a member of the international community, whether it will or no, and it doubtless needs all the help it can get, only a pity that African womanhood should be called upon to maintain ‘appearances’ lest we be found out, but then we are all responsible for what we have become as a nation.

Achebe. of course, is unassailable, although irony, his stock in trade as a writer, might very well be his parting gift to a nation whose irresponsible leadership 'robbed us of the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-range developing nation in the twenty-first century,' as he put it at the end of the civil war, a civil war we appear intent on fighting all over again - are, indeed, fighting all over again – but in a more protracted manner. His famous novel, Things Fall Apart, was published two years before we were ‘granted’ our ‘independence’ and began the descent into the anarchy raging all around us; his memoir, There Was a Country, was published two years before our imminent centenary in 2014, by which time there may very well no longer be a country called Nigeria. The tragic symmetry of things falling apart in a country that once was would appear to be irresistible given the current end-game the ‘father of African literature’ anticipated but was mercifully spared.

As for those who have a problem with scantily-attired Nollywood goddesses, the salient fact is that Nigeria is only taken seriously because of its creative artists, however otherwise they might be intent on destroying a culture which seems to find nothing 'disgusting' in stealing with impunity, defiling 13-year-old girls and fathering children on one’s daughter-in-law, such is the scale of the hypocrisy we daily witness in the name of governance, only a further pity that, for all the fanfare, Nollywood itself seems reluctant to interrogate the consequences of the social mores it purports to examine. On the contrary, any number of home movies persist in the pleasant fiction that Nigeria is a society where virtue – however under-dressed - is invariably rewarded when the society itself daily proves the exact opposite. In other words, it’s not a question of Nigerian artists going too far in the vexed matter of African culture as not going nearly far enough, which is why the federal government was happy to announce a N25bn grant for the industry now that Time magazine has given it its imprimatur.

Achebe proved a more awkward customer given his rejection of two successive national honours on the grounds that his beloved state had become a ‘lawless and bankrupt fiefdom’ with ‘the connivance, if not the support, of the presidency’. But never mind. The awkward voice has been stilled forever and so it is now safe for that same state government to get up a committee to ensure the safe homecoming of his corpse, and with it the opportunity to squander yet more money that would be better deployed building schools, clinics and all the other necessities of the modern state we claim we want but do nothing to realise.

All of which leaves us with the vexed issue of African culture, so easy to evoke, so difficult to elucidate because it was never about culture but the lack of it. This is at the heart of Nigeria’s ongoing dilemma. In a country where the notion of culture is reduced to what women do or don’t wear in the movies, politics fills the vacuum. And not just any politics but the murderous kind practiced by those who nevertheless seek to corner the moral high ground by promoting themselves as the guardians of all that is good and wholesome. The only wonder is that we ever gave them the time of day. That this is no longer the case is the lesson of the militants in the Niger delta unwilling any longer to acquiesce in the theft that goes by the name of governance, and the Islamic fundamentalists for whom any government is anathema. And so, at last, as we approach our centenary, we might very well find ourselves contemplating the country that might have been, a fit subject for Nollywood if ever there was one.

© 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

 

Reclaim Naija

What constitutes treason in the Nigerian context? I ask because the question was raised by a couple of people following my last blog in which I called for civil disobedience to end this farce called government in Nigeria. The alternative is the violence being perpetrated by the Niger delta militants on the one side and Boko Haram on the other, although I am loathe to bracket them together. As I remarked in an earlier blog, the rage of the former is more than understandable, whatever your take on armed resistance; the latter are merely mindless, even as the federal government offers amnesty to both as proof of its impotence. As I also said in an earlier blog, the militants only targeted soldiers, not Sunday worshippers celebrating Christmas, a time for peace if ever there was one.

I don’t believe in violence. I especially don’t believe in the solipsism that claims it as a means to an end given that the means are as likely as not to dictate the end, which is even more bloodshed, the revolution devouring its own. One need look no further than Somalia, as General Buhari continually reminded us during his last presidential campaign. At the same time, what currently subsists in Nigeria is intolerable - an affront -  and must be stopped. Indeed, that it will come crashing down about all our ears, and soon, was never in doubt, which is why we, the people, must take matters into our own hands, if only to minimise the fall-out. For that reason, I suggested we stop pretending that a government exists in Nigeria in any commonly accepted sense. What does exist is rule by the Mafia, which is why the Godfather films are so popular, available from any street vendor, although the idea of Goodluck Jonathan as Don Corleone is somewhat surreal but never mind. It is not Jonathan himself but the coterie around him who are evidently calling the shots.

That this Mafia will fight back is a given. What is at stake, after all, is the free money from the Niger delta which they blow as though it were their personal asset. We all know the stories about the girlfriends who regularly fly first class to shop on Oxford Street as if they couldn’t get the exact same goods in Balogun, or the children who must attend Eton and Harrow in order that they might become black Englishmen, the better to pose before the natives back home with their fancy accents. What price independence?

But my concern is not with the government so much as my fellow Nigerians. As I also wrote in the earlier blog, we seem loath to believe that things are as bad as they are and so keep hoping against hope that they will miraculously improve, and that our federal legislators, for instance, will suddenly be seized by an attack of collective conscience and vote themselves a pay cut. Then again, pigs might fly, as so many appear to apparently believe, which was why an influential church in Lagos saw fit to invite President Jonathan to deliver the Easter Sunday sermon and then clapped when he prayed that God would solve the electricity problem we created in the first place and which only we can solve. Or why my fellow residents in my close – just fourteen buildings – resisted the suggestion that we unilaterally refuse to pay our NEPA bills in order to underline our disgust at their antics instead of just griping about it, as is the Nigerian way. As for the proposed mega-party, which is all the talk now, only the most hopelessly naive would imagine that anything good could come out of recycled politicians – Buhari, Tinubu, Ikimi – who showed themselves no different from the current gang now in power when they were themselves in positions of authority.

So all that remains is to confront the monster that has made nonsense of the independence that has turned out to be even more oppressive than the denigration it replaced. This should go beyond refusing to pay our utility bills for services we hardly even get in the first place, to boycotting the 2015 elections on the grounds that trooping out to vote only serves to legitimise a process that is past remedy. Besides, the system is already rigged in favour of the Mafia by excluding independent candidates, as otherwise recommended by the Uwais Commission. Nigeria may indeed be dominated by the Big Three but that still leaves roughly half the population - all 80 million of them if we are to believe the last census – bundled together as ‘minorities’ without effective representation, but that is the subject of another blog.

With 2015 in view, we need to start organising now. Our great asset, of course, is the social media that played such a significant part in the Arab Spring, hence this blog. All it requires is for everyone to re-post this on their facebook and twitter accounts in the hope of starting a mass movement. Call it Reclaim Naija because true revolution begins with interrogating language itself, in our case a name – Niger River, Niger area, Nigeria – imposed by the colonialists who dreamt up the fiction which has now become the nightmare we are all struggling to escape, some by fleeing into the desert, most by praying to a God who is doubtless merciful but must wonder why so many have allowed themselves to be chanced by so few.

So much, at any rate, is my modest proposal but does it amount to treason? Not in the usual sense of advocating the overthrow of the existing order by force of arms but, well, advocating for its overthrow all the same. We shall see. This particular administration prides itself on following the rule of law, as the president’s parrot ceaselessly tell us but, well, pigs might indeed fly.   

© 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 and The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories.

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

Darkness visible

Once upon a time I believed what government said. For instance, I believed government when it said that power outages would become a thing of the past. I wasn’t alone in my delusion. Like most of my fellows, I didn’t want to believe that the problem was as bad as the evidence seemed to show it was, and that without fundamental change of the root-and-branch variety we would drift into the anarchy that has now come to pass. My conversion came at the end of Obasanjo’s second term in 2007 when it transpired, during hearings at the House of Representatives, that the $16bn earmarked for the power sector over the previous eight years of his administration had been looted, and that the main culprits were Obasanjo himself, his three successive relevant ministers and assorted local and foreign contractors, all of whom were recommended for prosecution. As if this wasn’t sensational enough, the chair of the House committee, who made much noise at the time about getting to the bottom of the scandal, was himself charged to court for fraudulently enriching himself through one of the unfulfilled contracts. And there the matter died. Nobody was prosecuted; no money was returned. Seven years later again, we are still groping about in the dark as the current administration, in keeping with its predecessors, makes promises it has no intention of keeping, couldn’t keep if it wanted to, if only because President Jonathan is too busy amassing his war chest for 2015, which is all that appears to interest him.

It was with this in mind that I once suggested to my local residents’ association that we stop paying our NEPA bills. By all means, let them come and disconnect us. What did we have to lose? We were already shelling out ten times what they charged each month to fuel our generators. Moreover, our example might energise others to do the same and then where would NEPA be? My fellow residents agreed with me readily enough – we were just then going through a particularly severe outage – but I should have known better. No sooner did the ubiquitous brown NEPA van rock up in our close a week or so later than everybody dutifully trooped out to present the receipt for their latest bill. Leading the pack was my most vociferous supporter at the meeting but then she sold drinks for a living and even two hours of electricity a day was something. Besides, hadn’t I noticed that things had improved? And hadn’t the President himself just taken the entire government on a week’s ‘retreat’ in order that they might ‘chart the way forward’?

Nigerians are like the patient who needs radical surgery, has been shown all the evidence that this is so, but prefers instead to patronise a quack selling a ‘miracle’ cure in the hope that they might thereby avoid the day of reckoning. So it was that, in the course of President Jonathan’s Easter Sunday message in the kind of well-appointed church that Boko Haram regularly blows up, he enjoined us to be prayerful if we want to survive as a single entity - ‘For me, I believe all we need is to believe in the message of Christ, which centred on love and peace. And I believe with love and peace, this country will remain one’ - whereupon NEPA promptly plunged them into darkness. Being an easy-going sort of bloke unfazed by evidence of his own failures, he sought to make a joke of it: ‘I believe they (those behind power supply) know that I am here that is why they took light. At least, to remind me that I must not sleep until we stabilise power. God willing next year, they will not take light again.’ According to the following day’s reports, the congregation spontaneously thundered ‘Amen’ in the manner Nigerian congregations invariably do with the energy they ought to reserve for more practical endeavours, if only because God has nothing to do with delivering stable electricity. One might go even further and say that asking God to do what we should be doing ourselves with the wherewithal that this same God has given us – oil, gas, sun, rain...  - amounts to a species of blasphemy; and that, like the man in the Bible who failed to make use of his talents, we will forfeit even what we have.

So the time has come to get off our knees and begin to confront the self-styled leaders in the only way available to us without taking up arms. This extends to more than just refusing to pay NEPA bills but also water rates, land use charges and all the rest of it (we will get to the issue of boycotting the elections in a later blog: first things first). In other words, we need to treat the government for what it is: a band of brigands whose only legitimacy depends on our willing collusion. My guess is that the whole rotten edifice will collapse quicker than we would have believed possible. In any case, five million people, which must be the upper limit of those who constitute the government – the federal and state legislators, the civil servants, the police, military and various other organs of what pass for the state – can hardly withstand 160 million united behind a common cause. After all, this same government, with all the tools of violence at its disposal, has no answer to the militancy in the Niger delta, much less the greater threat posed by Boko Haram short of offering amnesty to criminals who take life with impunity, security being the first condition of government. Alas, that Nigerians are not yet ready for what is hardly a bold move was borne out by the timidity of my fellow residents to seize the initiative, and the concomitant enthusiasm with which otherwise well-informed citizens chanted ‘Amen’ to the prayer offered by the very man they should be vilifying, having invited him to come in the first place to publicly insult them - even as NEPA took light.

© 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 and The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories.

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