In God's name, shut the f**k up!

How I wish that Obasanjo would observe the virtues of silence now that he has twice ruled this country and made a hash of it both times, but then I also wish the media would cease giving him the column inches. Speaking recently at the maiden convocation ceremony at the Afe Babalola University, he opined: ‘I know that those who are thinking that Nigeria has no future will today have a change of heart. This is because one person, Chief Afe Babalola, has been able to make a difference in the field of education. This is an indication that hope is not lost on Nigeria.’

 

Chief Babalola, Obasanjo’s long-time lawyer, could have counted on his customers’ nuisance value, although the ex-General might do well to enrol in one of the undergraduate courses on offer at this shining citadel of learning and thereby justify his newly acquired honorary doctorate. Perhaps he could take up criminology in the absence of philosophy (the courses offered are relentlessly utilitarian), where he might benefit from elementary logic and thereby grasp the absurdity of claiming that the existence of yet another private degree-awarding high school, where pupils are required to dress ‘decently’ and forbidden from using mobile phones, has somehow ‘made a difference in the field of education’, in the process proving that Hope Nigeria was not lost.

 

Given the ongoing ASUU strike, now about to enter its sixth month, this was a particularly insensitive moment to remind hopeful Nigerians that the federal universities he once oversaw don’t even rank in Africa, but then Obasanjo is not universally known for his tact, which is why he might also profit from a course in diplomacy. There was the time in 2002 when the Ikeja Cantonment blew itself up, resulting in over 1000 deaths, and the then commander-in-chief, turning up some hours later, shouted down the assembled sympathisers (‘shut up, shut up, I don’t even have to be here’) when asked why high-calibre bombs, grenades, shells and bullets were kept in a densely-populated part of Lagos unless the powers that be felt they might be needed against the enemy within.

 

And yet, whatever one’s private irritations, Obasanjo is a fact of life in Nigeria. There is no escaping him. Even his most trivial utterances – and they are legion – will be given the prominence they don’t deserve. Given this, it might be as well to ask what he symbolizes in the life of the nation. Soyinka, his fellow Egba, once called him ‘a child of fortune’ and this is indubitably true. But much the same can be said of Nigeria itself when, during his first coming, he helped to oversee the unearned bonanza of oil that he and his kind very quickly turned into a curse. The result is the great army of unemployed graduates from our sub-standard universities – private or otherwise - wandering the streets without hope of ever finding a job while other multi-everything fallouts of empire in the same predicament at the moment of independence – Indonesia, for instance – set about making something of themselves.

 

‘You have had a good beginning, having graduated from a good university. But this is not enough; you have to build on it. If you don’t, the good beginning becomes nothing,’ our former Number One citizen twice over lectured the assembled graduands, as if his stewardship of the nation on either occasion did anything other than guarantee their wretchedness in an over-endowed nation otherwise described as too rich to be poor. One might go even further and posit that he and his ilk deliberately sacrificed their own children on the altar of power that was never earned, only assumed by an accident of fate, chance, good fortune - what you will. It was Obasanjo’s own son who publicly averred that he knew ‘for a fact’ that his wife ‘committed adultery with and had an intimate, sexual relationship with his own father...due to her greed to curry favours and contracts from him in his capacity as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’. He further averred that his wife ‘confided in him severally while they living together (sic) that she had been sexually abused and defiled by her father, Otunba Alex Onabanjo on several occasions.’

 

Only the parties concerned know whether any of this is true or not but then only the concerned parties know whether, for instance, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, the former governor of Obasanjo’s Ogun State, really did administer oaths, including ‘blood, cow heads, calabash and other fetish materials’ during the course of which each participant ‘swore to upholding opposition to Daniel at all times and submitted to the death of their first born, should they renege on the oath.’ There was also the case of Ngige, the former Anambra State governor, who did or didn’t swear to an oath at a shrine: ‘I took my Bible with me and followed them. When we got there, I noticed they didn’t have guns; then I said I wasn’t going in. One of them said he could swear for me, I said go ahead, so he did it for me. But I did not believe in what they were doing because I am a staunch Catholic.’

 

Obasanjo himself refers ceaselessly to God, who must be weary by now of the multiple blasphemies uttered in His name, but it was ever thus with hypocrites – ‘Let me make a solemn pledge before all of you, before the whole world and before God, that I will devote all my energy and all I possess in my power to serve the people of Nigeria and humanity’ – and the devil, they say, has no shame. Unfortunately, we are ourselves prone to seeking God’s intervention for what we should do by ourselves and relegate them to where they belong, instead of which we continue to genuflect before them. Until that day – and may it come soon – we will continue to wallow in our wretched condition.

 

© 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

Deflowering Nigeria

During the time of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa almost 20 years ago now, when we were still under military rule, The Punch newspaper bravely published photographs of two women in Rivers State being flogged and raped. There are four photographs altogether. The first shows a woman being beaten. The second shows the same woman being raped. The third shows another woman being beaten. The fourth also shows that woman being raped. Both soldiers are in full battle dress, one wearing a floppy hat, the other with a bandanna around his forehead. One of the victims said that she was raped in public ‘so that I cannot hide it any more’.

 

‘I deflowered my wife’ was the headline in a recent edition of The Punch. The fellow in question is apparently a comedian – literally, that is - who goes by the stage name of Holy Mallam. I had never heard of him before but perhaps that wasn’t surprising, although why he should want to subject his wife to such prurient public speculation which concerns nobody but the couple concerned is as perplexing as why the deflowered was happy to collude. Equally mystifying is why a national newspaper should want to run such a headline but that is a question for the editor to answer, especially since she happens to be a woman herself, not to say the recent winner of a CNN award for her services to journalism.

 

‘It was three days after the wedding because I was too scared,’ the deflowered wife further explained in the course of the interview with her comedian; ‘[b]ut...my husband said, “we can’t continue like this. I have paid and have done everything”.’ It’s a pity we weren’t given an exact figure – the reporter was not doing their job – given our ringside seat at the moment of deflowering (‘I read it on the internet and was ready to guide him’), and we recall the furore over a certain senator’s purchase of a 13-year-old Egyptian girl for $100,000 but I don’t suppose the sums much matter: each according to his pocket. Woman as chattel – literally, in the case of some age-old traditions: ‘How can a property inherit a property?’ as one man said of his brother’s widow as he proceeded to divest her of all she had struggled to build with her late husband – but then so is the country to those with the wherewithal to plunder it as they like.

 

I suppose one lesson we are enjoined to take from the interview is that the deflowering comedian’s wife wasn’t ‘spoilt’ – damaged goods - before he had his wicked way with her, an obsession with many Nigerian males, which is presumably why it was considered a suitable story in the first place. This is said against the background of an apparent upsurge in cases of rape, especially against minors, to wit: ‘CPN has recorded over 50 cases of child rape across Gombe State, but more cases have not been reported. Bauchi State recorded 11 cases of rape with a particular case of one police officer raping nine under-aged girls and a lecturer of one of  the tertiary institutions  raping a teenager.’ It also explains why, amongst other things, most rapes in the country remain hidden, the victims and their families reluctant to admit to a stigma that will lower their price in the matrimonial marketplace.

 

The double standards involved in all of this are hardly worth dwelling on given that the question of our Holy Mallam’s own pre-marital sexual peccadilloes (we can’t put it any higher than this) is treated as entirely irrelevant, in keeping with the prevailing mores. We also know that the police are notoriously tardy in prosecuting such cases when they aren’t themselves complicit in them, as in the example quoted above, but we needn’t get distracted on that score. As I argued in a previous blog, the police are themselves part of the system we have chosen to make of our cherished independence but who just happen to be the most visible symbols of our decadence, the ones who stand on the public highway collecting N20 and shooting those who refuse to pay up. We hear about – but don’t see – all the billions stolen by our public servants (as they sometimes like to flatteringly call themselves in moments of expansiveness), in addition to their obscene salaries, which is merely theft by other means.

 

We can continue to rape the nation if we like, and however we want to disguise it. Nobody will stop us. It is our prerogative. They will only wonder why we want to do so, why we want to persist in our clownishness, deadly as it is. This is said against the current speculation concerning President Jonathan’s announcement of a proposed national dialogue. There is no doubt that such a dialogue is way overdue but what is it that we are going to talk about? We bandy about fine concepts like ‘resource control’, ‘true federalism’ and ‘devolution of powers’ but what does it all amount to when we treat each other and the gifts we have been given gratis with levels of contempt that few other nations would tolerate?

 

In truth, nothing much has changed since the days when soldiers were unleashed to rape and plunder at will. The underlying mores which made all of that possible remain the same now that we are supposedly a democracy. Restructuring Nigeria politically, desirable though that is, is more than just a matter of tinkering with the constitution but interrogating the way we treat each other and, by extension, the country we have inherited. This is the real challenge we face but the one we have barely understood. Until we begin to do so, we will continue to rape when we don’t deflower as though, for all the world, it was a perfectly normal way to go about our daily lives, even boasting about it in the pages of the newspapers, which themselves ought to know better.

 

© 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

Beloved!

‘I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'
                                                                                                                 Romans 9:25

Mr President gave a conciliatory Independence Day speech. Gone for the most part were last year’s fictitious claims of his administration’s laudable achievements in this or that sector, although a few porkies did nevertheless creep in, for instance that ‘we have built an economy that is robust and erected enduring infrastructure and institutions of democracy’, that ‘our social system is now more inclusive, open and compassionate’, and that ‘we are waging a steady battle against poverty, unemployment, and corruption’. This must have been news to the vast majority struggling to put food on the table even as we continue to be inundated with yet more stories of venality in high places but otherwise the mood of the speech this year was sober, even statesmanlike if one didn’t know any better. We were no longer ‘fellow’ Nigerians but ‘beloved’ ones on account, apparently, of our impending centenary; as Jonathan put it: ‘today of all days, we should not be scoring political points. On the contrary, in this last year of the first century of our Union, we should be addressing our future as a Nation and a people!’ The sentiment certainly deserves an exclamation mark, along with the capitalisations, only a pity that the ‘people’ weren’t so honoured (beloved or not) along with the Union and the Nation, an oversight which might or might not have betrayed the underlying cynicism on the part of a president anxious not to ‘make political capital out of a state occasion’, which is as maybe.

 

More to the point was his announcement of an impending ‘National Dialogue or Conference’ whose mandate will be debated by an ‘Advisory Committee’ (those capitals again) in order to ‘design a framework and come up with recommendations as to the form, structure and mechanism of the process’. The committee, which has one month to deliver its verdict, is headed by Dr Femi Okurounmu, an engineer and former senator who has long agitated for some sort of conference, and has even outlined how it should be constituted: one delegate from each of the state house of assembly constituencies voted for on the basis of ‘their communities, not their political parties’, making 1,000 in all, which he considers ‘not too large a number for a country the size of Nigeria’ but in which all the minorities will be properly represented.

 

Already, some opposition politicians from Dr Okurounmu’s own constituency – Tinubu most notably – have raised fears that this latest talking shop (let us call it by its proper name) is merely a ‘deception’ designed to truncate the 2015 elections, but if so this would seem to be a rather Byzantine way of going about it, the product perhaps of an overheated political imagination desperate to reclaim centre-stage. Besides, we have been here before. After much prevarication, Obasanjo, himself desperate to remain centre-stage as his tenure was coming to an end, convened such a conference (or dialogue) with the proviso that the unity of Nigeria was a ‘no-go area’, which immediately rendered the exercise pointless, as indeed it proved for all but the lucky few who were fed and watered from the public purse.

 

As for the impending centenary of our amalgamation, there seems to be some confusion concerning whether or not the original document signed by Lord Lugard will expire on 1 January 2014. According to a ‘public secret government document’, which only those in the deepest recesses of government have ever seen, Nigeria will cease to exist as a legal entity on that date, a fact which has apparently ‘been causing panic particularly among the Northern elites’ fearful of losing the beautiful bride who has kept them in luxury these 50-odd years of our ‘independence’ within an amalgamation that was a fraud to begin with. It is a measure of our continuing subservience to ‘duly constituted authority’ (as our former military usurpers liked to proclaim before proceeding to loot the treasury) that we imagine the debate worthwhile in the first place. Who cares about the spurious legality of a possibly phantom document concocted by a foreign conquering power intent only on its own administrative and economic interests? Better to write our own document, which is what we have been avoiding all these years, and which is not answered by conferences (or dialogues) in which the sanctity of this artificial creation is taken as a given.

 

The pity of it is that Tinubu’s mega-opposition party, which is apparently set to rid Nigeria of the ‘termites and rodents [who] promote corruption, unemployment, destitution, lies and, unfortunately, ineptitude in government’, was bought at the price of the country’s viability. Multi-everything Nigeria may or may not be able to cohere as a nation but we can hardly know this beforehand. One would have thought by now – as Tinubu supposedly once did – that the case for a Sovereign National Conference (duly capitalised) was past discussion, meaning that everything is up for grabs, beginning with the very name Nigeria and ending with everything in it, lock, stock and (as it were) barrels of oil.

 

And so, as we wait to be ‘briefed’ on the ‘nomenclature, structure and modalities of the Dialogue’, and as we ‘stand as one, with absolute commitment and resolve to resist any force that threatens us and the sanctity of our union’, we recall that all this is at the behest of an indigene of the very area which once – and rightly - called for an end to ‘this fraudulent contraption’ and backed words with action, in the process showing up the sham for what it was. Evidently, things look very different from the perspective of the driving seat, only a pity that the vehicle itself is rushing headlong into oblivion as it fails to negotiate all the booby traps that are consequent on what Awolowo -  Dr Okurounmu’s mentor – rightly dubbed ‘a mere geographic expression’.

 

© 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