Independence Day

In a couple of days we will be 53. As is the custom, Mr President will say a few comforting words about the nation’s imminent greatness as seen from the safety of Aso Rock, which is where he will deliver this year’s homily, what with the recent carnage in Nairobi and the miraculous resurrection of Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram leader otherwise presumed dead. As on a previous occasion, he might allow himself to be dressed up in military fatigues, being the commander-in-chief and all, although any self-respecting general might have wanted to use the occasion to make a point about where he can and can’t go in his own country, to say nothing of justifying this year’s N1tr security budget. It might even be that Mr President will believe all the fine words in his prepared speech and why not? There’s little point being head of the seventh largest etc etc unless you think you’ve actually done something; and so, as we look forward (or not) to this year’s offering, it might be worth revisiting last year’s.

 

We can safely skip all the stuff about how ‘our founding fathers’ of blessed memory restored our ‘dignity and honour’ when they ‘won’ independence for our ‘great’ country, and of how, since then, Nigerians have demonstrated ‘unfailing optimism and resilience’ in the face of enormous challenges (no kidding!), the result, apparently, of that ‘special spirit that enables us to triumph over every adversity as a people’, thereby remaining ‘proud of our national identity’. All of this is to presume a great deal and might even be thought inadvisable given the levels of hunger in an over-endowed nation but then he could hardly have said otherwise and power was ever thus, especially in Nigeria, where 600 people recently followed him to New York so that he could deliver a lacklustre speech to the UN.

 

But rhetoric is easy so let us stick to the facts. Here was Mr President last year commending his administration’s success in at least one of the goals of its so-called Transformation Agenda (those abstractions again!), to wit:

 

The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has disclosed that, as at July 2012, 249 new members across the country had joined the Association, and that capacity utilization has also improved. The multiplier effect of this development on our job creation programme cannot be over-emphasized.

 

It so happens that just the other day the president of this same MAN gave a speech in which he explained that in the 20 months to last August his members spent over N42bn to fuel 5,480 generators, representing 40 per cent of their overheads and generating between them 5,150MW against PHCN’s 1,018MW; and added:

 

This amount is apart from the average monthly PHCN bills paid by members, which again run into hundreds of millions of naira per month. This has resulted to low production capacity and inability to compete effectively with our foreign counterparts; inability to contribute optimally to the Gross National Product, which currently stands at about four per cent; poor return on investment; closure of factories and migration to greener fields by manufacturers as well as uncertainty on investment in Nigeria.

 

Clearly, there is a mismatch here, but what then will we say of the following?

 

We have put an end to several decades of endemic corruption associated with fertilizer and tractor procurement and distribution. We have exposed decades of scam in the management of pensions and fuel subsidy, and ensured that the culprits are being brought to book.

 

I am not personally aware of any corrupt official in Nigeria who has been ‘brought to book’, as Mr President would have it, although I would welcome being disabused of what one person recently called my cynicism in all matters of politics PDP-style; as for the notorious subsidy, our Harvard-educated, World Bank-employed coordinating minister recently disclosed that the seventh-largest etc etc will spend a whopping N971bn on imported fuel this calendar year, while at the same time losing $5bn to stolen crude in Mr President’s own backyard, this backyard being the sole justification for his presidency in the first place, as certain ex-militants never tire of reminding us now that they are also safely ensconced in the Aso Rock which their oil built.

 

In the meantime, there is fire on the mountain, at least if we are to believe the claims of Mr President’s own party, which is now in comical disarray at the first sign of a serious opposition party otherwise unfairly dubbed by one commentator (although I agree with him) the Association of Past Criminals:

 

As at today, the states are being owed N336bn, with the N75bn being the balance of the July 2013 arrears, N121bn from June augmentation and over N90bn as July augmentation. The implication of this unfortunate development is that the 36 states have become impoverished and unable to meet up with basic obligations, including the payment of workers’ monthly salaries, which many of the states have been unable to do due to lack of funds.

It is perhaps meaningless to call this administration the most corrupt ever, as many have done, if only because such comparisons have by now become themselves meaningless. He stole, she stole: they all stole. Jonathan’s gang is no different from any of the others, only that our ‘unfailing optimism and resilience’ is at last beginning to run out, and brought into sharper relief by that other birthday we are about to celebrate in a few weeks from now: the centenary of our amalgamation, Nigeria being in the unusual position of having two separate birthdays, perhaps itself the reason for our identity crisis as a nation. Many events have been planned to celebrate this ‘historic moment’ because, as Mr President opined, ‘The unity of Nigeria is indivisible and non-negotiable, we must remain the forward-looking people that we are,’ which is a clear enough case of piling on the rhetoric even as things continue to fall apart.

 

Happy Independence Day!

 

© 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//

Over a barrel

A good case could be made for considering Jonathan the worst president Nigeria has ever had. This is hardly surprising given his antecedents as a man who – like Obasanjo – has benefited from others’ misfortunes, although this by itself doesn’t necessarily unfit him. There are doubtless many examples of accidental presidents who ended up doing a good job, with the proviso that a life of happy chance might also entail a degree of character he clearly lacks. It is also true that anybody, no matter how well organized, might have baulked at the enormity of the task following more than half-a-century of kleptomania, and I am not one of those who persist in the myth of Nigeria’s past greatness, which seems to have more to do with the bonanza of crude that once, briefly, put the naira at parity with the dollar. Jonathan can hardly be held to account for the sins of the past but, by the same token, he knew, or ought to have known, what he was letting himself in for.

 

As others have pointed out, what is needed in Nigeria is a war cabinet which might, for example, declare a state of emergency in the power sector, as indeed was once floated - and then quickly forgotten. It is true that Jonathan has lately been making noises about the improvements we can expect following the latest round of privatizations but the gap between where we are and where we need to be is to be measured in light years. Moreover, the story is not new. We have been hearing variations of it for too many years now, including Obasanjo’s $16bn splurge over eight years, while we continue to grope about in darkness amidst reassurances that Nigeria will magically become one of the world’s top 20 economies by the end of the decade. And power is only the beginning.

 

Yet far from rolling up his sleeves and getting down to work, Jonathan appears only concerned with 2015, to which end he seems intent on splitting his own party. Perhaps this was not to be avoided. On the one hand, ‘the system’ as it has evolved can only favour mediocrities; on the other, any party that has been continuously in power for so long invariably succumbs to government by sleaze. And this one might just be the sleaziest of them all. Given the centrality of oil in the economy, the worst culprits will naturally be found there, beginning with the minister, who was recently alleged (amongst so much else) to have blown N2bn on private jets alone in the last two years, although, as always, we must make do with allegations, this being a country where hard evidence is impossible to come by. They will burn the documents, if need be, along with the entire building, although the press itself, for all its supposed vibrancy, has been noticeably tardy about practicing the kind of investigative journalism that brings down governments in ‘London and America’, as we like to put it.

 

Given that nothing much is going to happen between now and 2015, what are Jonathan’s chances of returning? His first hurdle will obviously be getting his party’s endorsement. This looks increasingly unlikely if we are to believe the reported disaffection among many PDP governors; as one of them put it: ‘What most Nigerians do not know is that we suffered a lot to make Jonathan President and today he is using people who did not know how we enthroned him, to harass and intimidate some of us.’ This, of course, is in keeping with Jonathan’s character. A man lacking ideas can hardly have principles, as he demonstrated in 2011 when he repudiated the agreement he was himself party to by contesting in the first place, and which he now wants to extend by another four years.

 

But even if he scales this hurdle, what then? The landscape in 2015 will be very different with APC now on the scene. Indeed, it seems hardly fortuitous that the emergence of a real opposition should have coincided with the turmoil within PDP, as would happen with any gang of thieves suddenly confronted with a possible challenge to the N2bn private jets. Whether the new boys and girls will be any different – if, in fact, they are even new to begin with – seems doubtful for reasons I also discussed in a previous blog but perhaps anything is better than another four years of PDP, with or without Jonathan.

 

Assuming (a large assumption) that PDP doesn’t rig the election (or, perhaps, isn’t allowed to rig the elections), much will depend on the candidate the APC selects. In 2011, Jonathan garnered a lot of goodwill votes from the south especially but also from pockets in the north but which he has now exhausted. He was also fortunate in his opponent. It is only to be hoped that Buhari will not be allowed to repeat that role in 2015, whatever one’s personal feelings about the person of the retired general from the old days. We need younger, more vibrant men and women, which is why one is sceptical about whether APC represents this.

 

What is certain, at any rate, is that we are going to see many signs and wonders between now and 2015, although uninterrupted power will not be among them for the simple reason that the president will be too preoccupied elsewhere. The irony is that delivering this uninterrupted power we have been searching for like the ubiquitous Golden Fleece we once sought (but which didn’t appear to help us) would have done the same for him.

 

What is also certain is that Jonathan’s media fellow has his work cut out but he will doubtless prove himself equal to the task, as he has done up until now with that facility with words we so admired in his previous incarnation. He will need them all and then some. Goodluck, as one might say.

 

© 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

 

Oil and its derivatives

Early last year, I spent a fortnight in Bodo in Rivers State, an hour’s drive from Port Harcourt. I had no particular reason for being there except to spend some time in the oil-producing Niger delta with a view to writing something. I ruled out nearby Bori, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s birthplace, as too obvious and only lighted on Bodo when the bus stopped outside a pleasant-looking guest house where I ended up staying.

It was on my second day that I noticed a crowd of people at the Catholic secondary school across the road although the students were just then on Easter break. A friend I quickly made explained that some lawyers from the UK were taking submissions from the local farmers and fisher folk in order to assess the damage from two huge offshore oil spills from Royal Dutch Shell pipelines in 2008, itself acknowledged by everybody – Shell included - as one of the worst ever in the country’s history, which is saying a great deal.

 

Like the good reporter I aspire to be, I ventured into the school compound and sought an audience with one of the lawyers. I was received cordially by a young woman who broke off from attending to the crowd around her in one of the classrooms. I explained who I was and asked if I might interview her at a more convenient time. Before she could respond a tall, muscular man approached us and cautioned her against saying anything. She smiled apologetically and returned to her work, whereupon her minder told me to get lost.
 

Later that evening, my friend explained that just the previous month a freelance photographer sent by Shell had been unmasked as he prowled around pretending to be who he was not. I gathered he had been lucky to escape a beating. Two or three days later again, he told me that he had received a number of calls from Port Harcourt asking about his white friend who had suddenly turned up claiming to have written about the shenanigans of the oil companies and their ‘native’ collaborators, including the extrajudicial execution of Saro-Wiwa, but it didn’t help my cause with the foreign lawyers. 

 

According to recent reports, Shell has admitted responsibility, although they could hardly have done otherwise. All that now remains is the amount of compensation the company is prepared to pay, which in turn depends on the numbers involved: ‘London-based law firm Leigh Day…says some 16,000 fisherman and 30,000 inhabitants were affected by the spills that leaked 500,000 barrels of oil. Shell says about 4,000 barrels were spilled and that the affected lagoon area did not sustain 16,000 fishermen.’ It’s difficult to know whose figures to believe. It wasn’t only my new-found friend who confirmed that the local people lied when they didn’t exaggerate but who can blame them? It was a miracle that anyone had come to ask them; as to why it had to be foreigners – and from the former colonial power - is another story but nevertheless part of the same story that is the tragedy of this non-country where we quibble over the price of a human life.
 

I saw for myself the usual signs of environmental degradation - the blasted, dying mangrove swamps, the oil slicks lapping at the water’s edge where children bathed, the statistics of which are all over the internet - but what remains with me above all is the humiliation of a conquered people. As I wrote in an earlier blog, it was in Bodo town centre that I saw a contingent of soldiers move swiftly on a scuffle between two okada riders and then proceed to whip the culprits into their jeep as ‘the people’ looked helplessly on. Later, crossing over to Bonny Island in a speed boat, we passed a military bunker with soldiers who required us to raise our arms at gun point as though we were the enemy. On the island itself, I watched an armoured personnel carrier patrol the main street twice a day, morning and evening.

 

At the guest house I caught snatches of conversation about oil bunkering, which was the only game in town and accounted for the considerable number of storey-buildings in the surrounding poverty, although the town itself was neat enough, clean and well-ordered. My friend told me that only the more daring boys went in for it. You could be killed by the soldiers, as happened to Saro-Wiwa for daring to suggest that the oil was already theirs in the first place, or roasted alive, as has happened to a great many Nigerians, and not only in the oil-producing Niger delta because the politics we play in this country ensures that the subjugated must attempt to steal their own resource.

 

As for Shell, the company will settle for as little as it can possibly get away with because, as one of the lawyers remarked, ‘It is entirely depressing that one of the largest companies in the world is acting like the playground bully, trying to batter local people whose lives have been devastated, into submission. We will be doing our damnedest to ensure that Shell pay out a fair amount for the damage they have caused and put the Bodo Creek back into its pre-spill state.’ In Nigeria, this must be measured as progress, whatever obtains elsewhere, for instance in the world both Shell and the lawyers come from, and where the insult would never have been tolerated in the first place. But then Shell can only get away with what it does because the representatives of ‘the people’ – the minister of petroleum resources, for instance - are themselves contemptuous of those same people they supposedly represent.

 

© 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,

Leftovers and Non-people 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

Work in progress 3

Presently, my friend Joké appeared. It was unusual for her to come so early in the day, as if anticipating the drama she relished in her own life - and brought to mine. I had met her soon after I started returning to Nigeria when I dropped in at the National Theatre with some friends. We were on our way to VI for a dinner in honour of our Nobel laureate’s sixtieth birthday just months before the dramatist was chased into exile in fear of his life by the General who drowned baby mice and hanged Saro-Wiwa. She was doing something or other with the National Troupe and tagged along with us. Like me, she had one of those foreign surnames which denoted ‘family’ but things were rough with her. She never had any money and she dressed shabbily and I never did find out what she did for a living. It seems that she was alone in Lagos because her father was dead and her sister was in America, although there was some mystery about her mother, who she claimed was working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia but who eventually turned out to be living in Lagos.

 

As with Prince, who was now acting as my enforcer in my running battle with my recalcitrant tenants, it was difficult to know what to believe; as with Prince also, one somehow never got to see any papers. I couldn’t even be sure of her age but I guessed that she was in her late thirties or early forties. The only thing I knew for certain was that she had lived in London because she was familiar with my old haunts around the Notting Hill Gate/Ladbroke Grove axis, including The Ship restaurant I used to patronize on giro day when I returned from Canada and was writing never-to-be-published short stories in earnest at the rate of one a day in a purple attic bedsit. She was a good mimic and caught the London Rasta accent beautifully and whenever she did so I had the feeling that she wanted to go back but somehow couldn’t, not necessarily because London would have been easier than Lagos but because it wasn’t here. She herself put it down to ‘spiritual reasons’, i.e. that her enemies were blocking her, a line that would appeal to a great many Nigerians anxious to see evil lurking everywhere.

 

From the start, she was keen I consider her a sister, which was just as well because I didn’t find her at all attractive. She had a bulky, misshapen body with pendulous breasts and yams for calves, although she also had one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen, made more so by her perfect dentition. She was also loud, drank too much and had a habit of sitting with her legs apart, leaving nothing to chance. On the plus side, she was a superb cook and kept me supplied in women, although in this as elsewhere she was inclined to overdo things, another trait she shared with Prince. One weekend, for instance, she brought a nineteen-year-old I had noticed at the Shrine only to bring her mother the next, as she later confessed before revealing that the father and husband was high up in the navy at a time when we were still under military rule. I pointed out that I could have been horsewhipped, at the very least, but she just laughed as if it was a huge joke – ‘You too dey fear,’ she said - and perhaps she was right.

 

All the same, she couldn’t have come at a better time. The first of the tenants was at long last being evicted and the bailiffs were busy about their work under Prince’s supervision. Just as I was explaining this to her Ngozi, the evictee, emerged from her flat in tears to curse me for being a ‘bastard’ at the same time as the Alhaji, the next in line, came bounding upstairs to insist that I was an impostor and not part of the Pearce family I claimed to belong to. Joké flew out.

 

‘Shut up your mouth you fucking bitch otherwise I will slap you just now,’ she screamed, hands on hips, her face not two inches from her adversary’s, as pumped up as I’ve ever seen anyone. Even Prince, who had come out to confront the Alhaji, was taken aback.

 

‘Look at her, bleachy bleachy,’ she sneered, but this was merely rhetorical: Ngozi was naturally yellow, without the disfiguring blotches from the skin-whitening ointments supposedly banned but freely available. Chastened, she retreated to her rapidly emptying flat as Prince quietly ordered the Alhaji back downstairs to await his own turn, which he did with surprising meekness.

 

‘See as she dey bleach come talk nonsense for my broda,’ Joké continued. ‘Wo, I go beat am, eh? I go beat all de one wey she bleach commot for him face. Useless bitch. Asewo.'

 

Prince calmed her down and I introduced them. He smiled and nodded and told me to give her money for bread and eggs for the boys, along with enough for another bottle of Chelsea. Joké was delighted. She giggled girlishly as she went about her assignment.

 

By noon, it was all over. I stood on the front balcony watching a distraught Ngozi, still in her nightdress, wandering about in confusion among her goods piled up in the street. It was hard to credit the amount of stuff she had crammed into her flat and I thought I heard her say something about the ice cream in the freezer melting. Presently, Joké joined me.

 

‘See her, she never even bath self,’ she said. She was silent for a moment. ‘Na so her toto go dey smell,’ she added laconically before returning to the kitchen, where she was cooking egusi soup. She surpassed herself that day as she giggled and fluttered while ‘Baba’ Prince wolfed down two large helpings before we all retired to the empty flat he was now 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.