If the shoe fits

It seems there is to be a diplomatic row between Nigeria and her former colonial ‘master’. The issue concerns a proposed N723,000/£3,000 bond payable by Nigerians intending to travel to the UK, which will be forfeited if the traveller overstays their welcome and thereby becomes a potential burden on the British taxpayer. The external affairs minister has summoned the British high commissioner to ‘explain to government if the plan is true and why Nigeria is a target,’ worried as he apparently is ‘about the highly discriminatory policy which tends to portray the country in a bad light.’ He was quickly followed by  the chair of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, who opined that it would ‘not foster true relationship’ between either country because it was against ‘the spirit of the Commonwealth’.

 

Perhaps the first question to ask is why so many Nigerians – at least of the well-heeled variety - are so obsessed with travelling to the UK given that the world is full of countries only too ready to have us visit them with our hard-earned foreign exchange – and cheaper to boot. In fact, all it does is betray our continuing subservience to the ‘mother country’ that is the raison d’être of the Commonwealth which the House chair sets such great store by, being merely a more acceptable nomenclature than the one it replaced, with its bogus connotation that we are all the same now, no more the coloniser and the colonised - but with the Queen of England as its head. The only consolation is that we are not alone in this ignominious league. Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are also included as those countries which constitute ‘the most significant risk of abuse’ to the UK’s extensive social security system.

 

In a swift reaction, Professor Itse Sagay, the constitutional lawyer, argued that the proposed new visa regulation showed that the British authorities ‘have a wrong idea of their importance to us’ on the grounds that, ‘[w]e are more important to them than they are to us,’ which simplifies the matter somewhat. The British do indeed know that this is the case given that they were among the recipients of the estimated $120bn lost in capital flight from Nigeria between 2001 and 2010, UK banks being perhaps the least scrupulous about accepting dodgy money, and also the least likely to repatriate said money (Switzerland included). This is to say nothing of the $16bn Okonjo-Iweala caused to be transferred to the Paris Club in one fell swoop in 2004 in order that Nigeria might be ‘forgiven’ the original $8bn lent to corrupt military regimes prior to 1999, the country having already paid $11bn but for our tardiness in meeting up with the terms of the repayment schedule under the rubrics ‘principal’, ‘interest’ and ‘late interest’, a 419 if ever there was one. As I have argued elsewhere, the once and present finance minister was clearly a stooge sent by her World Bank employers in order to plunder the nation’s treasury. No self-respecting country would have deemed her worthy of such a sensitive position, instead of which we lauded her patriotic zeal in freeing us from the foreign debt we have begun amassing all over again when the current administration, overwhelmed by her credentials and anxious to be in the good books of the lords of poverty, begged her to come back and was duly grateful when she accepted ‘because considering the position you were holding at the foremost World Bank, it is difficult for you to come back to serve as minister in a country’. We wonder whether colonialism has ended; we should wonder instead whether slavery has ended.

 

In other words, the British authorities are not mistaken about our value to them even as they gratuitously insult us over the proposed visa levy. They know an abject people for what they are having had ample time to study those they forged in their own image. They also know that all the huffing and puffing by both the minister and the House chair amount to playing to the gallery. For one thing, neither of the aforementioned will be affected by the proposed policy given their privileged positions in the scheme of things; for another, both of them know perfectly well what to do if they are serious about forging a country in which such a scenario will be inconceivable. Nigeria can only be insulted because we have invited it upon ourselves by what we have done as much as by what we have left undone. It wasn’t the British – or anyone else, for that matter – who contributed to the ‘squandering of riches’ over the five decades of our so-called independence that has brought us to this pretty pass.

 

As things stand, it is by no means certain that the UK authorities will go ahead with the proposed visa levy, especially since India, a far more important country, has also expressed its outrage. If so, the underlying problem of what we have become – have allowed ourselves to become - in the eyes of the world (and not only the UK) will hardly be obviated. In terms of potential alone, Nigeria is far more endowed than the ‘mother country’, as all the statistics readily testify: more oil, more gas, more land, more people. Indeed, if not for the hash we have made of the independence we clamoured for, it is Nigeria, not Britain, which should be the one imposing the levy. Besides, given the evident eagerness of Nigerians to patronise the UK banking system with money meant for the development of Nigeria, it might be in order for the Nigerian government to impose the levy on its own citizens wanting to travel to the UK but for the fact that it is government officials who are themselves the culprits, as the UK authorities well know. Either way, we can well do without the sanctimonious outrage of our ministers and legislators.

© 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

OMG, I'm gay!

Righteous indignation is always to be discouraged in politicians. Their crimes are bad enough as it is, especially in these parts. And now the House of Representatives, following in the footsteps of the Senate two years ago, has gone and passed a bill stipulating 14 years’ imprisonment for same-sex marriage, along with10 years for those who arrange, enable or support same. All that now remains is for Goodluck Jonathan to sign it into law. He himself is not known to have expressed an opinion on the matter although he recently pardoned a certain army major convicted for sodomy, which may or may not say something but probably not since he also pardoned the disgraced former governor he was deputy to in the days when he could hardly have dreamt of such an unlikely scenario.

 

According to David Mark, the Senate president, the bill merely reflects ‘the wishes of the generality of Nigerians desirous of living within our cultural bounds,’ which is true enough. In a much-cited opinion poll, over 90 per cent of Nigerians approve the bill, and one only has to read the comments on the few blog sites which have broached the subject to understand the virulence many harbour towards those they regard as indulging in ‘unnatural acts’. But then many Nigerians believe many things. They believe, for instance, that wife-beating is acceptable and even necessary in order to keep women in line, and it’s only a pity that Mark and his fellow senators seem comfortable with a colleague who took a 13-year-old Egyptian as his fourth wife despite the provisions of another bill outlawing child abuse.

 

In other words, by playing to the gallery, which is what the legislators are doing, they raise the question of just what, exactly, constitutes ‘our cultural bounds’.  As I wrote in my last blog, Mark himself was alleged to have pocketed $70m in his previous incarnation as communications’ minister under IBB and now we hear that he’s building a private university, no small undertaking, even with the over-bloated salaries our morally upright legislators voted for themselves, yet another bill they were quick to pass. This is to say nothing of the legislator who was filmed emerging from an oil magnate’s house in the early hours of the morning flush with dollar bills in return for doctoring a report implicating said magnate in dodgy business practices that rip off Nigerians, this being the only way to make serious money in this country. One could go on but to what end? Nigeria did not earn its reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the world because the world irrationally decided to make it so, but then maybe that’s OK, maybe stealing is one of ‘our cultural bounds’.

 

As the few brave spokespeople for the gay community have pointed out, targeting a minority which poses no threat to anybody would seem to be a particularly vicious undertaking in a country with so many other pressing bills to be attended to, beginning with a basic social security system in the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter. It is unseemly to want to incarcerate consenting adults for what they do in private while public officials openly accused of gross corruption (complete with the sums involved) throw the kind of lavish parties that has made Nigeria the second-largest importer of champagne in the world, and Nigerians the third highest spenders in London.

 

But why the hatred of a severe minority of fellow-Nigerians who merely desire to express their sexual preferences outside what is considered the ‘norm’? One needn’t concern oneself with the much-touted argument that such a union is necessarily fruitless and therefore a sin, as the pastors have been queuing up to testify, being themselves politicians under a different guise with an equal penchant for private universities. A childless couple are no less married for that, and Nigeria is awash with abandoned babies in need of good homes that is the price of that champagne. As for homosexuality being un-Nigerian, which some are keen to peddle, why, then, the need for legislation? Besides, I went to boarding school here in Nigeria and we all knew what went on after lights out. Nor can I begin to count the number of times I’ve been groped over the years on long journeys in shared taxis.

 

In fact, what really obsesses Nigerian homophobes, who are less concerned with lesbians (when they don’t get off on them, if certain rumours are to be believed, but let’s not go there, life being complicated enough as it is), was posed by one Dele Blog: ‘why shld u fuck a fellow man's ass?’ Indeed so, the problem being that this is the condition of the Nigerian male who is daily fucked in the ass, for instance by a man accused of looting $70m who then proceeds to parade himself – is permitted to parade himself - as a guardian of public morality even as we cheer him on. One doesn’t have to look far to unearth the trouble with Nigeria, the leadership being the least of our worries (and all apologies to the recently departed). 

 

As I have argued in previous blogs, the time has come for us to wake up, like the Egyptians did yesterday and as the Brazilians are doing today. With that in mind, let me say it once and for all so that those who would lecture me on what they claim are ‘our cultural bounds’ can come and arrest me: I would be honoured to arrange, enable and support any of my fellow citizens desirous of expressing their fundamental human right to marry whoever they choose. I’m gay for it, you might say. Ten years? Well, fuck you, too, as it were.

 

© 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 constitutional amendment

Should the president and governors have a single, six-year term or should we stick with the current two, four-year terms? Jonathan was at first vociferous in maintaining the status quo (he’s that sort of fellow) and then quickly changed his mind (he’s also that sort of fellow), with the proviso that any such constitutional amendment should not come into force until 2019. In other words, his position was solely dictated by whether or not he would be eligible to contest in 2015, after which the legislators were free to do as they liked. In the meantime, he is yet to make up his mind about whether he does in fact want a second term, except that everyone knows he does. So the Nigerian ship of state is buffeted this way and that while those who claim to be at the helm obsess over how they can remain there at whatever cost to the nation (and ultimately themselves), but that is hardly a new story.

 

What is a new story - and has been since we began this adventure called Nigeria by the geography books - is the vexed issue of the sovereign national conference, which everyone knows is the only hope for negotiating our way out of the stormy waters we have spent half-a-century precariously navigating, lucky to be still afloat - if only just. And that goes for everyone, even – or especially – those who profess to believe that tinkering with what was a bogus constitution to begin with will somehow fix the problem of too many feeling too aggrieved in a system which delivers only hardship. State police or not state police, the legislators pretend to ask themselves, before coming down firmly on the side of everything staying the same, and yet these same legislators know better than anyone that the present arrangement is not working, hence the state of emergency they recently rubber-stamped in three unfortunate states now being rampaged by soldiers answerable only to themselves, at least judging by the silence of (again) these same legislators amid reports of murder and mayhem. But nobody ever voted against their bank balance, at least in Nigeria, and so any hope that the few who continue to benefit from the present arrangement will suddenly wake up and do the right thing is like asking Obasanjo to forgive his enemies, Baba being perhaps the one who could have made the most difference but for the fact that his enemies turned out to be the people of the nation he ruled over twice, both times by an accident of fate.

 

As I have argued in earlier blogs, the time is long overdue since we, the people, should have taken matters into our own hands if we are at all serious about ‘moving the nation forward’, a venture which might even now be too late. The first thing to forget about is the 2015 elections even as the INEC chair assures us of a better outing than 2011 but which can only mean that we just might be lucky enough – enfranchised enough, if you please – to swop one set of rogues for another. It is noticeable that, in all the brouhaha surrounding the proposed constitutional amendments, and which has taken all of fourteen years to get thus far, nobody has raised the issue of independent candidates contesting under parties which do not have to conform to ‘federal character’, the concept itself being one of the greatest wheezes ever devised by any government anywhere.

 

Unfortunately, we still seem unable to grasp just how fragile this ship is, or how many rocks we haven’t been smashed up on, this apparently being because ‘God is a Nigerian’, as IBB once joked when referring to the bigger joke that was June 12. Take, for instance, The Patriots, the prominent group of ‘elders’ who came together many years ago to fight for ‘good governance’ but who lately resorted to begging the president and the legislators ‘to take all necessary steps for convening a national conference for the people of Nigeria to deliberate and agree on the terms and conditions on which they are to live together in peace and unity.’ It’s only annoying that they continue to feature so prominently in the pages of the newspapers, testimony to their perceived relevance in a society paralysed by the worship of authority and exemplified by The Patriots themselves.  Only recently, they hit upon the idea of calling on twelve ‘fathers of the nation’ to intervene with the presidency in their noble cause of restructuring Nigeria by sleight of hand. I’m sure the president will be delighted to give audience to the likes of Shehu Shagari, Grace Alele Williams and Maitama Sule in order that they might discuss their various failures that is the reason for the meeting in the first place. It will be noted, in any case, that the all-important ‘sovereign’ is necessarily excluded by the logic of the exercise, but which happens to be the only thing that matters.

 

What, then, stops this ‘sovereign’ – you and me, our friends and relatives – from coming together to write its own constitution, as the South Africans did even before Mandela embarked on his twenty-seven years?  Not a lot now that we can call each other on the telephone, a development which the current Senate President once famously thought laughable when he served as communications minister in a military regime, during which time he was reputed to have pocketed $70 million, enough to buy everybody a telephone except that telephones weren’t meant for the masses since they didn’t own golf courses in Ireland. Perhaps swapping khaki for agbada has made a democrat of him - if not a patriot – but, as William Hazlitt put it, ‘miracles occur, to be sure, but they are not to be had wholesale, or to order’. We will have to do it all by ourselves, just like our brothers and sisters did in the South Africa that Nigerians are now flocking to.

 

© 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

All quiet on the north-eastern front

During the long years of military rule the Nigerian press was consistently singled out – along with civil society organisations – for fulfilling its role as ‘the people’s parliament’ in its opposition to what Wole Soyinka called ‘this denigration of the popular will’ that had reduced Nigerians to ‘a second-class breed of humanity’. The military itself was quick to return the compliment. Those were the days when newspapers were proscribed by decree, journalists were imprisoned for coup-plotting and the concept of ‘guerrilla journalism’ entered the national lexicon.

 

All that changed with the advent of democracy in 1999. In place of a once vibrant press, which was sometimes forced to publish on the hoof in order to evade the security forces on their trail, we now appear to be saddled with little more than mouthpieces for power-drunk politicians waving brown envelopes - when indeed they don’t own these same newspapers. In a ‘normal’ country, which is to say one that is at relative peace with itself and with a more-or-less coherent road map of where it is going, this would be alarming; in a country which is very much at war with itself and without any sort of map, road or otherwise, this is tragic.

 

Consider the following from The New York Times (5 June 2013): ‘The military just opens fire and kills people, and throws bombs and kills people, for no reason... That is why you see these people here... That is what is happening now in Nigeria.’ The ‘here’ referred to by the speaker, a shoe salesman, is a border town in neighbouring Niger, where up to 10,000 people have fled the fighter jets and helicopter gunships of the avenging military in full flow against Boko Haram insurgents. But you wouldn’t know any of this from the Nigerian press, for instance the ‘flagship’ Guardian (6 June 2013), which simply quotes the Chief of Army Staff - ‘It would... interest you to note that the communities in places where these operations are being conducted are very happy and they have been expressing their joy to the officers’ – in the course of his visit to Ebonyi State to sort out some obscure community clash that got out of hand. Coincidentally – but perhaps there is no such thing as chance – the military has also flooded Onitsha in order to ensure that the MASSOB-directed stay-at-home this Saturday is averted, the better ‘to ensure that lives and property of the people are protected’ given the people’s propensity to loot their own homes.  But that’s Nigeria for you, wahala everywhere.

 

More worrying still is the seeming indifference of a populace which believes itself immune to the incipient civil war in its midst on account of the fact that President Jonathan, in declaring the current state of emergency in three north-eastern states, has at last shown the resolve it feared he lacked – if only! - even as his peace and reconciliation committee continues to trundle around the country looking ever more foolish. No doubt everybody is heartily sick of Islamic fundamentalists who think nothing of blowing up churches and generally terrorising innocent people going about their business in what is already a harsh economic environment, but giving the military carte blanche merely results in the same terrorism which is otherwise deplored. Moreover, as many have already observed, a previous emergency in selected local government areas only resulted in greater hardship for ‘the people’ who had to stay at home whether they would or no. As for the terrorists, they simply relocated elsewhere, as indeed they appear to be doing now.

 

The problem isn’t only a Nigerian one. The War on Terror has justified any number of human rights abuses against natives and foreigners alike by supposedly more enlightened countries, including, above all, the US, which is now anxious to assist us to get rid of this scourge in our midst. Again, according to The New York Times article quoted above: ‘They are killing people without asking who they are,’ said Laminou Lawan, a student who said he had fled here 10 days before. ‘When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot. They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.’ As many have also pointed out, nothing is more calculated to drive the insulted and injured into the arms of the terrorist group they are supposed to be fighting.

 

The apparent quiescence of the populace in what is being done in its name, aided and abetted as it is by what appears to be a supine media, can hardly bode well for the civil liberties of all Nigerians as we approach the 2015 elections that some have seen as the tipping point in what is already a fragile polity. Jonathan has not hidden his second-term ambition, hence his current struggle to unseat the chair of the duly elected governor’s forum, and now the way is left open for him to use the military to achieve his ends almost a decade-and-a-half after we thought we had jettisoned this ‘denigration of the popular will’.

 

Seen from this perspective, the activities of the terrorists provide the perfect cover for him to achieve his ends. Indeed, there is nothing to stop him from deliberately fomenting trouble in any part of the federation and then imposing a state of emergency in the interests of ‘peace and stability’. To that end, he will also be able to count on the support of an international community which has proved itself inimical to the values it claims to hold most dear when confronted by anyone deemed to be a terrorist on mere suspicion alone. One might even go as far as to say that the real threat to our corporate existence – always assuming this to be a desirable thing given our experience so far – is not the terrorists but our own complacency.

© 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