Whose country is it anyway?

Earlier this week the Lagos State Government packed 70 people into either a trailer or three buses (the stories differed) and drove them overnight under heavy police escort to Onitsha, where they dumped them. According to their own testimonies, they were arrested on the streets by officials of Kick Against Indiscipline ‘for alleged wandering and other minor offences’ and taken to a warehouse-like structure in Ikorodu Town, where they were initially held for a number of months. Some among them were said to be insane, unable to remember their names or where they originated from. The idea seems to be that they were all beggars although at least one among them claimed to be a petty trader and another an office worker. A terse statement by Lateef Ibirogba, the Lagos State Commissioner for Information, denied deporting anybody on the grounds that ‘everybody has the right to live in any part of the country’ while nevertheless ‘emphasizing that people must live within the law’, a non-sequitur if ever there was one and the reason why I choose to disbelieve him, especially since he is contradicted by, amongst others, the Red Cross officials who attended to the deportees.

 

Besides, this is not the first time the Lagos State government has shown its disdain for legal niceties, an irony given that it is headed by a SAN. It wasn’t so long ago that a different set of officials from Alausa descended on Epe and demolished over 200 houses while the matter was still pending in the courts. But we need not labour the point. This is the nature of the Nigerian ruling class with its disdain for the people from whom it derives its mandate - and never mind the claims of the party concerned. A ‘progressive’ in Nigerian politics must be measured in relative terms, which is why we are happy when a few roads are repaired and a few trees are planted, desirable though they are. It is one of the tragedies of Nigeria - perhaps the mother of them all, as it were - that our standards have fallen so low that we celebrate what others take for granted.

 

Nor need the story be literally true in order to resonate with so much that is wrong with Nigeria that it might as well be true, beginning with the vexed issue of who is and who is not an indigene, and whether any of it makes any sense. As the unforthcoming Lagos State commissioner acknowledged, any Nigerian citizen is free to live anywhere they like in Nigeria although bitter experience has shown otherwise; and it is hardly surprising that many of the comments in the few newspapers which carried the story should draw the obvious conclusion: ‘This is the beginning of sorrows, kill them in the North, deport them from Lagos...’ The only mitigating factor, perhaps, is that there is at least one Igbo representative in the upper echelons of the offending state but then he’s a ‘Lagos boy’ and a politician to boot, hence his silence, at least in public.

 

Then there is the matter of uniformed officials wandering about the streets arresting their fellow citizens under the pretext of a colonial relic we thought we had jettisoned but made worse in this case by the area-boy nature of the exercise. Since when did state officials usurp the powers of a police force which the state government itself has no authority over, much to its chagrin, and rightly so in a federal structure. And not only arrest but detain for months on end. This would amount to kidnapping in saner climes, and a capital offence in the US we pretend to model ourselves on, although given what the US itself gets up to, what with forcing down foreign presidential aircraft for wandering about the open skies, the lesson in hooliganism might have been learnt only too well.

 

But all this is wearisomely familiar. The police themselves are just as casual about the rights of Nigerian citizens who they routinely kidnap for ransom, as a visit to any police station in the country will demonstrate. This much is given and only made possible by the passivity of those they do this to. After recounting her harrowing story, the office worker quoted above thanked her God (always God) that, ‘I am now free and I want people to help me so that I can find my way home’, grateful perhaps that she wasn’t among the 29 she claimed she saw die during her incarceration. And there the matter ends. The media which broke the story have moved on to the next outrage, the human rights community is otherwise busy with more pressing concerns (pressing, that is, according to the criteria of their foreign funders) and the insulted and injured have little faith, less money and no time to invest in a criminal justice system which can in any case be safely disregarded by those who have done this to them, as who should know.

 

And then, of course, there is the all-pervasive, ever-present ethnic factor, exemplified by this very case; as another commentator put it: ‘Keep on fooling yourself with false propaganda that Igbo developed Alaba and Idumota, just go back and developed [sic] your Eastern region, Yoruba should not waste their resources to cater for miscreants and destitutes [sic] from Igbo States.’ In fact some of the deportees were apparently from other parts of the country, and few in any case were from Anambra itself, but these are just the details. In the meantime, the Senate President is trying to explain how it was that he and his overpaid colleagues were blackmailed (his word) into approving underage marriage, and the First Lady is seeking to impose her preferred candidate as the next governor of Rivers State even as she battles the incumbent with the help of the police commissioner. Why, it’s enough to make your head spin.

 

© 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

In the name of religion

There was a story recently about a 20 year-old man who allegedly raped a nine-year-old girl to death.  According to him, he was walking her home when he was suddenly overcome with lustful thoughts. ‘I discussed with her and she accepted so I took her to one of the abandoned buildings that has [sic] been overtaken by weeds, where I told her to remove her underwear and she complied.’ Because the place was filthy – ‘The uncompleted building is now used as a toilet’ – he turned her around and told her to bend over so they could do it standing up. When she started to cry out in pain he thought she was ‘pretending’. The next thing he knew she had slumped.

 

This case was unusual only because the victim died. According to reports, the rape of underage girls has been on the increase over the last few years although, as with all statistics in Nigeria, nobody really knows.  What is certain, in any case, is that there must be many, many more than we read about in the pages of the newspapers for obvious enough reasons. The sole consolation, such as it is, is that the culprits can be charged to court under the country’s criminal laws, although given the state of the criminal justice system – corruption everywhere you look, as we recently saw in the case of the last chief justice of the FCT – this isn’t necessarily saying much. But now even this recourse of ‘the common man’, as the saying has it, is about to change by making such rapes legal.

 

To Nigeria’s great shame, the Senate recently amended the 1999 Constitution – an illegal document to begin with but we must work with what we have – to allow for underage marriage. According to Ahmed Yerima, who caused nationwide uproar in 2009 by marrying a 13-year-old Egyptian in contravention of the Child Rights Act, such a provision was un-Islamic because ‘any woman that is married is of age and if you say 18 years you are going against Islamic law’, and, further, that a woman or girl who is married shall be considered ‘of age’ by virtue of her marital status. In other words, even an infant can be considered ‘of age’ once she has been taken in wedlock. The vote was passed by 65 votes to 30, which gives an idea of the moral bankruptcy – to say nothing of the darker desires - of those charged with making laws for the good governance of the country.

 

By all accounts, the session was rowdy. David Mark, the Senate president and one of the dissenters, tried to deflect the discussion by pointing out that the relevant clauses had already been put to the vote in the ongoing constitution amendment exercise and that standing policy was not to revisit them. Yerima promptly accused him of ‘double standards’ by citing two previous exceptions, whereupon Mark conceded that ‘it could be revisited another time after Islamic scholars can argue it’ before finally capitulating ‘[b]ecause of the sensitivity of issues on religion’. It is a measure of how distorted our politics has become that the ‘issue’ of religion should come up at all given the secular provisions of this same Constitution which is forced to recognise – albeit with certain provisos – the multiplicity of faiths attempting to rub along in what is already a delicate balancing act foisted on an unwilling populace.

 

That Yerima himself should invoke Islam in order to justify a degenerate lifestyle is hardly surprising. During the controversy over his Egyptian bride he had claimed his allegiance to the Koran ahead of the Constitution he had otherwise sworn to uphold, but perhaps he was merely obfuscating in order to deflect attention from the constitutional provisions he was intent on not upholding - but which he nevertheless now wants to amend. Islam may indeed permit the paedophilia he assiduously practices - in 2006 he married a 15-year-old he plucked from school before going for an even younger model – but if so surely not in such specious terms: a girl is of age once she is married and so doesn’t have to be 18 in order to be of age. Why not just say that you want to violate little girls?

 

In fact the ‘issue’ is less about Islam than the excuse to indulge the irresponsible antics of a power-drunk ruling class for whom religion –and not only Islam – is a convenient cover. But to accuse those who make up this class of simple hypocrisy would be to miss the point. It is telling how often we are exhorted to respect ‘duly constituted authority’ in order that the likes of Yerima might continue as they do, being themselves bound by a higher authority which itself cannot be questioned, a sort of divinely appointed chain of command with God – or Allah – in His Heaven and all’s right with the world. It was for this reason that the Senate president was quick to trample on the Constitution he had also sworn to uphold by seeking the opinion of Islamic scholars on one of its provisions, as if what they thought mattered any more than would those of your local pastor. Both have a role to play, no doubt, but not when it involves the fundamental human rights of Nigerian citizens, which alone are sacrosanct.

 

For Yerima, of course, the girls he would violate – does violate – are no more real than pets he might want to acquire as playthings, to be discarded when no longer needed. The only question is: how much? For the Egyptian girl it was $100,000, but then she was a more exotic creature than the 15-year-old he promptly divorced in order not to violate – so many violations – the Islamic injunction on the number of such pets you may keep under your roof at any one time. Before long Boko Haram will be telling us that murder is also sanctioned from above.

 

© 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

Mummy said

The presidency is an opportunity that fell unto us on a platter of gold.
                                                                                    Dame (Dr) Patience Jonathan

Everything seems to come back to Mummy, as in, ‘Mummy told me to support Wike and I have told Mr Speaker, otherwise I would have supported Oruwar.’ Thus the Honourable Evans Bipi, a member of the Rivers State House of Assembly, explaining the extraordinary scenes we recently witnessed when he physically assaulted a fellow Honourable with a fake mace, the original having been removed for safe-keeping by the embattled Governor, the ultimate object of this unseemly spectacle if we are to believe what we hear.

 

For a certain kind of Nigerian, educated, citified, probably been abroad, Dame Patience Jonathan is too bush – ‘an illiterate Okrika woman,’ as one commentator unkindly dubbed her – on account of her many grammatical gaffes: ‘My heart feels sorry for these children who have become widows by losing their parents for one reason or another’, ‘We should have love for our fellow Nigerians irrespective of their nationality’, ‘The people sitting before you here were once a children’, but there is no intrinsic reason why she should be able to speak the ‘Queen’s English’, this not being her first language. Nor, for that matter, is it the language of most Nigerians, for whom the snobbery of being able to speak through one’s nose, as the saying has it, can only endear her to them the more. She is of the people - she speaks their language – and is all the more dangerous for that, and not necessarily for any fault of hers, or at least not consciously so.

 

Dame Patience’s excesses are, of course, the stuff of legend. As everyone else has pointed out, she has taken the unconstitutional post of First Lady to new levels of ostentation and vulgarity. Where her predecessors concerned themselves with improving the lot of their rural sisters, she behaves as though she is the other half of the presidency. The most bizarre occasion was an official trip to New York to attend a UN meeting soon after ‘we’ took office when she charged out of the aircraft and was photographed shaking hands with the assembled dignitaries on the tarmac while the hapless husband was still negotiating the steps. She also consistently outdoes him on the domestic front. In the last month alone, she shut down Lagos for eight hours - on a working day – in order to attend a naming ceremony. Later, in her native Rivers State, she cordoned off the GRA for eleven days in order to campaign for her husband’s 2015 ambition, during the course of which she also found time to attend the wedding ceremony of her pugilistic ‘son’, Bipi, who was moved to call her ‘Jesus Christ on earth’. As Wole Soyinka put it in his own inimitable English: ‘This is getting to a state where an unelected person, a mere domestic appendage, can seize control of a place...and as a result of her presence, the governor of that state was told by policemen that you cannot pass here because the queen was there. What sort of jungle are we living in?’

 

‘A mere domestic appendage’ was perhaps not the wisest choice of words given the scandalous under-representation of women in the public sphere, to say nothing of the brutal facts of life endured by the non-English-speaking rural women to be gleaned from any number of UN reports. Besides, Dame Patience herself is assuredly no ‘mere domestic appendage’, the problem being that she is a particularly odious specimen of her tribe even as her husband is a particularly weak specimen of his – woman wrappa, as we tellingly like to taunt the backsliders whose wives have pocketed them – but then so, presumably, is the Honourable who was man enough to fight a fellow Honourable on the orders of ‘Mummy’. The level of infantilism is at odds with the swagger that reached its apotheosis – also, tellingly enough, under the military - when the First Lady syndrome made its initial appearance. Dame Jonathan – Mummy - has merely taken it a step further and in the process revealed the swagger for what it is, in itself another reason why she is so reviled by the educated scribblers in the pages of the newspapers.

 

Regarding Rivers State particularly, there is little doubt that Dr Patience – she also seems to have acquired a doctorate from somewhere or other - is the one calling the shots, but the real test of her power will be whether she can actually unseat a sitting governor she publicly upbraided two years ago. ‘Listen to me, you listen to me,’ she shouted him down before explaining why he mustn’t use the word ‘must’ in her presence. It had to do with some houses he was proposing to demolish in her hometown in order to make way for a school. The issue was clearly close to her heart although the governor might himself be faulted for inviting her to the flagging-off ceremony in the first place. It was also during this period, still flush with her husband’s recent victory, that she ‘stormed’ another state on a thanksgiving tour and was duly received by the entire State House of Assembly – of an opposition party at that - who shut down business for the day in order to stand under the sun and listen to a ‘mere domestic appendage’ who nobody ever voted for.

 

This time around in Rivers State she even went as far as to assure a delegation of chiefs – all 135 of them – that she had not come ‘to fight the Governor...because he is my brother,’ before discussing the issue of his replacement, given that Amaechi is serving out his second and final term, but perhaps the prospect of even his remaining two years is too much for Mummy. Whatever the case, the Governor ought to be a worried man and doubtless he is. What is certain, in any case, is that it will all end in tears, for us no less than for them.

 

© 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

 

Between a rock and a hard place

The Jonathan administration has been notably lacklustre in its foreign policy, especially where Africa is concerned, a far cry from the time when Nigeria was considered a front-line state in the war against apartheid, or when, later, we sent troops to Liberia and Sierra Leone. By contrast, we did nothing while civil war raged in Côte d’Ivoire until the French took it upon themselves to sort out the mess in its former colony. And when Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi vowed to exterminate the ‘cockroaches’ he had ruled for nearly three decades, it was President Jacob Zuma of South Africa who was to be seen everywhere speaking on behalf of the continent. It is true that we contributed our quota to the turmoil in Mali but the initiative came from elsewhere and the French (again) had in any case made the area safe for democracy - to say nothing of the remaining historical artefacts.

 

Insofar as Jonathan has a foreign policy, it seems to be anchored on ‘attracting investment to support the domestic programmes of government with a view to achieving not only our Vision 20: 20202, but to bequeathing an enduring...legacy of economic prosperity’, as he put it in a speech he gave in New York late last year. This seems to be a particularly myopic approach for at least two reasons. The first is that we have - or ought to have - more than enough money (and in dollars at that) to engage all our unemployed youths to undertake the ‘domestic programmes’ so desperately needed but for our obsession with buying houses in England and educating our children in Switzerland, both of whose banking systems we seem so intent on aiding. The second is that the West Africa region we insist we have an economic relationship with would seem to offer huge potential for growth, as indeed countless Nigerian traders have long known, bemoaning as they do the unhelpful attitude of their home missions, which appear to regard them as a nuisance, perhaps because they have better things to do.

 

So it was a surprise to discover that we actually had an opinion about the latest events in Egypt, to wit: ‘The unfortunate development is a gross violation of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which prohibits unconstitutional change of government. It constitutes a serious setback of the remarkable progress which Africa has made in fostering [a] culture of democratic governance in the continent.’ One might pick holes here and there, for instance the ‘remarkable progress’ we have supposedly made in ‘democratic governance’, at least here in Nigeria, where, for instance, a would-be national statesman with his sights set on unseating the ruling party come 2015 insists on foisting his daughter on a local association of market women, having previously installed his wife as a senator. As for the ‘unconstitutional change of government’, we know perfectly well who crafted the 1999 effort we are currently labouring under but it was assuredly not ‘the people’ it lays claim to, ‘the people’ themselves being an expendable commodity.

 

Still, one can understand the unease of those whose lifestyles invite their own overthrow but for our collective experience of military rule which would make any such intervention deeply unpopular. Clearly, the jubilant Egyptians never suffered under the likes of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha - and Goodluck to them. I don’t like Islamic fundamentalism with its myriad hatreds but it is hard to argue with an apparently free and fair election in Egypt, certainly freer and fairer than we have managed here since we began this new experiment in democracy, and which seems doomed to remain forever ‘nascent’.

 

For the first – and perhaps only – time I find myself in agreement with Nigeria’s official position on the goings-on in a fellow African country, however popular the coup in Egypt has so far proved, especially among those who initially fought for a modern, secular state that is ultimately the only option we have in the brave new world we inhabit. No army, anywhere, should ever intervene in their country’s domestic political arrangements. The Brotherhood is right to reject this abrogation of the people’s will, as we would be here if our own army were to oust the current crop in the National Assembly on the grounds that they are corrupt and self-serving. Indeed, Buhari once did just that, with what results we had to endure for the next fifteen years, which is why Nigerians are hardly likely to follow the Egyptian example, even if we also crave a mass movement that will frighten the government into taking itself and the country more seriously.

 

The deeper problem we have in Nigeria, any why I recommended boycotting the 2015 elections in a previous blog, was the constitution’s insistence that political parties must show national spread – offices in two-thirds of the 36 states - before they can be registered. My own take is that people with a common interest should be free to come together and contest for any position they like, from local to state to federal, the more so in a country with any number of minorities. This is what democracy means. The current arrangement only perpetuates the ‘money-bags’ politics that excludes ‘the people’ in the interests of the cabal that has ruined the ‘giant of Africa’ over the last half-century of our so-called independence, but which has proved just another form of servitude. Unfortunately, the so-called constitutional review recently undertaken by the National Assembly has merely confirmed that everything stays the same. Given this, we may indeed be faced with the Egyptian scenario come the 2015 elections that has long been viewed as the trigger for the country to descend into the chaos which successive governments have only just managed to contain. Like our Egyptian brothers and sisters, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

© 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