Happy Amalgamation

‘Yes, Nigeria was amalgamated by our colonial masters in 1914. By 1st January next year, Nigeria as a state will be 100 years old. But I totally agree with our man of God that it was not by chance, it was ordained by God.’

                                                                                         President Goodluck Jonathan

According to one reading of history, we will be one hundred come tomorrow. That was when the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was amalgamated with the Northern Nigeria Protectorate to realize the country we now have. The Jonathan administration is set to mark it in grand style, which means that a coterie of the usual suspects is in for another bonanza. Meanwhile, there is much discussion concerning whether the document which amalgamated us has an opt-out clause; and, if so, whether that means the end of Nigeria as presently constituted. Nobody seems to know the details, including the many professors in our proliferating universities who should have long since provided us with footnoted tomes on what would appear to be an issue of some importance, at least on the surface, which is what Nigeria is all about anyway, hence the impending celebrations with nothing to celebrate.

 

More troubling again is that nobody seems particularly perturbed by the secrecy surrounding what should otherwise be regarded as a fairly basic document given its implications for our future, especially since the amalgamation itself has been controversial since it was first enacted. It is indicative, for instance, that not a single newspaper appears to have considered invoking the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy, content as they are to merely repeat what everybody else is saying, and so much for their reputation for confronting ‘duly constituted authority’, as the saying has it.

 

As to whether there is such a thing as a north-south divide is open to question. Indeed, one may go further and see it as one of the many myths we labour under in a nation that is itself a fiction, hence our inability to cohere in any meaningful way. The so-called ‘north’ and the so-called ‘south’ were themselves the results of a series of amalgamations of disparate kingdoms (or fiefdoms, or republics, or whatever you will) until they took the final shapes they did in order to be finally brought together under one jurisdiction, the logical end of the imperial project the president now equates with God, rather like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. It is written in stone and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. No wonder only the chosen are privy to its contents.

 

Indeed, the problem isn’t with the document per se, which might stay in the British Foreign Office (or wherever it is archived) for the next century for all it ought to matter to us, only it does matter, which is at the heart of the tragedy of a country which promises so much but delivers so little. Nor is it the only illegitimate document which continues to hoodwink us. Absolutely everybody is in agreement that the ‘We, The People’ preamble to the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is easily downloadable in PDF, tells a lie against itself, including the fact that we somehow operate a federal republic modelled on America, where every local government maintains its own police force, while our own state governments are even forbidden from counting the people (I almost said citizens) they are supposed to govern.

 

Not that the majority of Nigerians believe in any of this, not being able to read anyway, as was designed to be the case, and which will yet backfire on this coterie which perpetuates the myths it feeds on, the senate president himself being either north-central or middle-belt, depending on the source of your livelihood. Call us a wretched people if you like, which everybody else believes anyway. And why wouldn’t they, what with the domestic epistles flying about that are our excuse for the long-awaited national discourse we are intent on evading, perhaps waiting on God – or ‘our colonial masters’ – evoked by a president who appears to believe them synonymous; who believes, in other words, in the sanctity of a document which apparently birthed us, and under which we have been labouring an entire century in order to deliver a stillbirth.

 

So what is to be done? This was the exasperated question Lenin asked on the eve of the Russian revolution, whereupon the revolution happened. Few would doubt that Nigeria is ripe for such an eventuality, caught as we are between an impervious, decadent ruling class and the teeming, impoverished masses with precious little hope in any forward movement that will alleviate their blighted lives any time soon. Added to the frenzy already attendant on the approaching 2015 elections, which can only be expected to ratchet up once we slip into 2014, and the likelihood of an implosion next year seems like an attractive bet.

 

Not that I would wish for it. Any student of history knows only too well that the terror always follows quickly in its wake but then the study of history is not something we have encouraged in this country (and deliberately so), which is why we don’t appear bothered by the absence of even the most rudimentary documents that brought us together and are content instead with speculation and hearsay – and any number of opinions - over the facts.

 

On that note: Happy Amalgamation.

 

© 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

My baby she wrote me a letter

The former president, Olusegun Obasanjo (that name again!), recently wrote an 18-page letter – almost 7000 words - to the current president, Goodluck Jonathan, which has excited much controversy. Even more controversy was generated by a subsequent letter purportedly written by Iyabo, the former president’s first daughter, which, at just over 4300 words, was equally garrulous, defined here as ‘excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters’.

 

To be sure, Obasanjo made one serious charge, that Jonathan was ‘training snipers and other armed personnel secretly and clandestinely acquiring weapons,’ which he compared with the bad old days of General Abacha when death squads were deployed to assassinate awkward voices, often in broad daylight on the public highway. Indeed, this was the one issue in Obasanjo’s epistle which many have pounced on (as well they might), and have asked the House of Representatives to launch an investigation, which they are bound to do anyway, at least if they take their responsibilities seriously. Not that anything will come of it even if they do. Nigeria is a country of rumour and hear-say where hard evidence rarely if ever comes to light, like the story that Obasanjo himself kept a killer squad in Aso Rock which eliminated Bola Ige, Funsho Williams and Marshall Harry (among others). The fact that nobody in these and the other cases was ever charged would seem to give the rumour substance.

 

For the rest, Obasanjo’s letter was full of generalisations which only served to indict the person who wrote it. Accusing the Jonathan administration of corruption is laughable against, for instance, the $16bn his own administration looted in the process of not giving us electricity, as the interested parties publicly confessed to the House of Representatives. Worse again was casting aspersions on his successor’s ‘honour’ for wanting to contest for a second term after privately promising otherwise when his own honour allowed him to try for a third term against the provisions of the Constitution he had publicly sworn to uphold. But Obasanjo is the avatar of the Nigerian condition, one who embodies everything that is wrong with this awkward colonial creation; as his daughter’s purported letter put it: ‘Nigeria has descended into a hellish reality where smart, capable people to “survive” and have their daily bread prostrate to imbeciles.’

 

Which just about sums it up and this whether Iyabo did indeed pen her fortuitous epistle in her unlikely, melodramatic prose:‘This is the end of my communication with you for life’. At least one person has insinuated that it bears all the hallmarks of a certain garrulous (that word again!) ‘sycophant’ of the current president’s inner circle who writes the opposite of what he used to when he was on the outside, itself testimony to the harsh reality of survival in a country ruled by imbeciles. Or perhaps it is just a manifestation of the ‘greed’ she also deplored in the national psyche. Besides, the letter describes her as ‘a child well brought up by [her] long-suffering mother in Yoruba tradition’ with its injunction of not insulting your elders (but especially your father), which is what allows our fathers to continue to chance us with ‘impunity’. In his own letter, Obasanjo deplores the current administration’s non-effort to tackle the corruption he helped foster, and corruption in a deeper sense than he ascribes to his successor. It was the same Obasanjo whose own son accused him of sleeping with his daughter-in-law in exchange for oil contracts, which might very well qualify as ‘oil stealing’ but in any case could hardly be expected to ‘improve the present poor management of the industry’ - as Obasanjo faults Jonathan.

 

Jonathan’s reply, a full nine days later (and coming in at a tad under 5000 words), was altogether more respectful – he addresses his adversary as ‘Baba’ five separate times – but also suggested the iron fist: ‘Your letter is clearly a threat to national security as it may deliberately or inadvertently set the stage for subversion.’ He also refutes the allegation of training snipers to assassinate political opponents as ‘incomprehensible’ and comes clean on 2015:

 

You will recall that you serially advised me that we should refrain from discussing the 2015 general elections for now so as not to distract elected public officials from urgent task of governance. While you have apparently moved away from that position, I am still of the considered opinion that it would have been best for us to do all that is necessary to refrain from heating up the polity at this time. Accordingly, I have already informed Nigerians that I will only speak on whether or not I will seek a second term when it is time for such declarations.

This is somewhat disingenuous given that not declaring is itself ‘heating up the polity’, a cliché in the Nigerian lexicon first used by General Abacha when he was equally anxious about extending his tenure, tenure extension being the sole ambition of Nigeria’s rulers, Jonathan no less than Obasanjo, hence the corruption Obasanjo makes such a great song-and-dance about, thereby leaving the way open for Jonathan to desecrate the memory of the late Fela: ‘That corruption is an issue in Nigeria is indisputable.  It has been with us for many years. You will recall that your kinsman, the renowned afro-beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti famously sang about it during your first stint as Head of State.’

 

But reading all these 18,300 words, one question kept nagging away at me: Does any of this matter? Does all this English grammar help ‘move the country forward’, another of the clichés our rulers glibly trot out? I fear not. Indeed, at the end of it all, I felt as if I had been privy to a marital squabble which had little or nothing to do with me unless I made it so, but to what end? Where is my own in all of this, itself the tragedy of a nation that has sunk to this level of banality.

 

© 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 South Africa's snub

Nigeria was the first African country the late Nelson Mandela visited after his release from prison in 1990. The front-line states apart, which had no choice in the matter, Nigeria was far and away his most generous supporter, a fact he was merely acknowledging. On his previous visit three decades earlier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had given him £10,000 to help prosecute the armed struggle that would land him 27 years. Only Tunisia, with half that amount, along with Liberia and Guinea, put their hands in their pockets. He never even got to meet Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the self-styled pan-Africanist. In the years that followed, Nigeria worked tirelessly to isolate the ‘racist regime’, even nationalising two British concerns – Barclays Bank and British Petroleum – for trading with them. Countless black South Africans were given scholarships to come and study here. By all accounts, they lived well.

 

The fairy tale happened. Four years after his second visit, Mandela became president of a free, democratic South Africa. Now he is dead and his Nigerian counterpart was snubbed at his memorial service which netted the most heads of state and government in the history of the world. Pride of place was given to America, whose CIA provided the intelligence that led to his capture, and our former ‘colonial master’, whose concerns we are now frantically un-nationalising, wasn’t far behind. Nigeria didn’t figure, which is to say that nobody even noticed us amid the celebrations of a life well lived. America shook hands with Cuba, which everybody agreed was in the spirit of the great man’s legacy; America, Britain and Denmark took a ‘selfie’ which went viral as everyone wondered whether Michelle was pouting or smiling, Denmark being very pretty; and Israel and Iran didn’t attend for all sorts of complicated reasons to do with the real politick that had condemned Mandela to a long stretch in the first place.

 

Shortly before his death, having ‘stepped aside’ after just one term (Jonathan, please note), Mandela professed himself disappointed with us in an interview he granted one of our diplomats: ‘You know I am not very happy with Nigeria. I have made that very clear on many occasions,’ he fumed, before launching into a broadside (of which the following is only part):

 

Your leaders have no respect for their people. They believe that their personal interests are the interests of the people. They take people’s resources and turn it into personal wealth. There is a level of poverty in Nigeria that should be unacceptable. I cannot understand why Nigerians are not more angry than they are… What do young Nigerians think about your leaders and their country and Africa? Do you teach them history? Do you have lessons on how your past leaders stood by us and gave us large amounts of money? You know I hear from Angolans and Mozambicans and Zimbabweans how your people opened their hearts and their homes to them. I was in prison then, but we know how your leaders punished western companies who supported Apartheid.

 

As our very own IBB said (as who should know?), ‘Mandela had a moral conviction and his moral conducts was very, very high and powerful,’ only a pity that he himself failed to exhibit these fine qualities when he truncated the very democracy for which his hero had endured the unspeakable; had, indeed, looted ‘people’s resources’ which he had turned ‘into personal wealth’, for instance the missing N12.2bn oil windfall when America invaded Iraq, a war which Mandela called them on: ‘Why does the United States behave so arrogantly... Their friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction but because its [sic] their ally they won't ask the UN to get rid of it. They just want the (Iraqi) oil... We must expose this as much as possible.’

 

But this is the world of real politick where presidents do not willingly step aside, which was what made Mandela unique, and not only in Africa, and why so many wanted to be counted (even taking photos of each other), including Nigeria, which had opened its heart and home – and its bank account – to the cause this man was ready to die for, the same man who told our intrepid diplomat what we all know: ‘The world will not respect Africa until Nigeria earns that respect. The black people of the world need Nigeria to be great as a source of pride and confidence. Nigerians love freedom and hate oppression. Why do you do it to yourselves?’ Why indeed? And what are we going to do about it? The obvious answer would seem to be to do what Mandela himself did when faced with a minority regime which was just as blind, as deaf and as dumb to the majority they were oppressing but which, when all said and done, at least built an economy that now gives the country mouth to talk anyhow to Nigeria. Would that we had done the same with the wherewithal we distributed so generously.

 

Nor is South Africa alone in its contempt for the ‘giant of Africa’. Another much-quoted article pointed out that Liberia had earlier done the same when they elected the first woman president in the continent at the expense of ‘Nigerian limbs’, before letting rip against the ‘fifty something other ungrateful lepers across the continent’ who ‘have been beneficiaries of the bottomless pit of petrobillions of Abuja...only to run to Washington, London...to give thanks’. And how they shone! America kept ‘Madiba’ on the terrorist list until after his presidency. These days, they water-board ‘terrorists’ without due process – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of justice’ – and drone children in Pakistan every Tuesday – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of peace’.

 

Maybe one day we will wake up to the world of real politick, just like Mandela asked us to, being himself not like that.

 

© 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

 

A tale of two countries

Nelson Mandela famously declared in the 1963-64 Rivonia trial that he was ready to die for ‘the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities’, and promptly served 27 years of what was supposed to be a life sentence. Nor was he alone, merely the chosen leader of a remarkable generation of men and women who lived to reap the rewards of their collective sacrifice. I never met Mandela himself although I was once privileged to interview Walter Sisulu, one of his staunchest comrades who did time with him. It was in the heady months following the first-ever democratic elections in 1994 and I was confronted with a modest man who had turned down the opportunity to join the government in any post of his choosing because he wanted to spend the few years left him with his wife, Albertina, whose conduct during her husband’s extended absence was the ideal of Caesar’s wife: above suspicion.

 

At the time I met Sisiulu we here in Nigeria were labouring under the tyranny of General Abacha, who had just then executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, and you could see the pain cross his gentle features when I raised the subject. He said something to the effect that teaching people the virtues of democracy was not easy and left it at that, implying perhaps that we had to figure a way of fighting our own oppressors. Mandela himself was more forthright. He blasted Abacha as ‘illegitimate, barbaric and arrogant’ and called on the opposition to intensify its efforts to get rid of him. Abacha returned the compliment (although he later apologised, as he might have) by remarking that he didn’t blame the freedom fighter who had ‘lost touch with the global socio-political trend’; and one of his ministers, Professor Ademola Adeshina, perhaps wanting to please Oga at the top, wondered how anybody can ‘spend 27 years in prison and still be sane’.

 

It happened that Mandela died when our present Oga at the top, who was quick to praise the dearly departed as ‘a wise, courageous and compassionate leader’, was apparently on a private visit to Germany, where he might or might not have visited a hospital for a possible illness he might or might not have contracted in London following his fifty-third birthday celebrations. He was accompanied by his wife, who was herself treated at this possibly same hospital for seven weeks last year, and who later confessed that, ‘I actually died; I passed out for more than a week. My intestine and tummy were opened.’ Dr Patience then seized the opportunity to mourn afresh the memory of her late sister, Stella Obasanjo, and recalled the ‘painful moment’ when the latter’s corpse was brought home, which would have been how ‘my corpse would have been brought here’, but for ‘God Himself’: ‘I am not Lazarus,’ she gushed, still marvelling at her resurrection, ‘but my experience was similar to his own’, and then promptly pre-empted her Biblical precursor - seven days to his four - but let us not be pernickety.

 

In amongst all this, we recall that it was Stella Obasanjo’s then president husband who justified all the money he pumped into the National Hospital at Abuja so that he, along with ‘the Vice-President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the ministers and top government officials will receive treatment instead of going abroad’, before promptly sending his wife to this same abroad, where she nonetheless died following a routine ‘tummy tuck’. But then even now, after all the billions supposedly expended, patients routinely complain about ‘the long delays’, the ‘sloppiness’, the ‘unprofessionalism’, the ‘lack of coordination between the different units’, the ‘inadequate personnel’, all of which is par for the course, including the lack of transparency concerning just how much of the nation’s resources were not spent achieving succour for the worthy amongst us who can nevertheless go foreign with the forfeited money.

 

President Jonathan himself seemed much taken with the spectre of the Grim Reaper when he expanded on his wife’s miraculous recovery. In his opinion, it put an end to the apparently superstitious belief that nobody ever left Aso Rock with his family intact: ‘The story was that one of us (the President or his wife) will die. Today we are celebrating her’; and added: ‘Her recovery has put an end to that belief. I am not too good in celebrating, but for this particular one, I think we have to thank God for keeping the life of my wife.’ With fifteen months to go before the April 2015 elections, this seems perilously close to tempting fate. It also has the disadvantage of making him sound shallow, especially when we recall Mandela’s famous speech I quoted at the beginning of this blog.

 

All of which reminded me of an amusing passage in Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where he recounts receiving treatment at a Cape Town clinic for TB 23 years into his sentence. The morning after surgery, he was served the full Monty: eggs, sausages, black pudding, baked beans, toast, marmalade... His horrified surgeon happened to be passing and immediately ordered it removed. The patient was to be on light foods to aid his recovery. Mandela, who had existed on ‘mealie pap porridge' for two-and-a-half decades, grasped the tray and declared himself ready to die for the sake of the eggs, sausages, black pudding...

 

Ken Saro-Wiwa was also accused of treason and one wonders whether, had he been imprisoned instead of executed, he would have even survived long enough to be treated at the National Hospital that Stella Obasanjo wasn’t killed in, but let us not be too despondent. According to the (extremely conservative) Economist magazine, ‘since Mr Mandela left the presidency in 1999 his beloved country has disappointed under two sorely flawed leaders, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma. While the rest of Africa’s economy has perked up, South Africa’s has stumbled. Nigeria’s swelling GDP is closing in on South Africa’s. Corruption and patronage within the ANC have become increasingly flagrant.’ Sound familiar?

 

© 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