Fuck it!

‘I’m a pan-Africanist. I belong to this continent.’

                                        Binyavanga Wainaina

My friend and brother, Binyavanga Waianaina, recently ‘outed’ himself. He did so partly – or even largely - in response to President Goodluck Jonathan’s anti-gay bill. Bin, as I know him, is a frequent flyer to our shores where, by his own admission, he invariably has ‘lots of fun’. He has vowed to come back as soon as anyone invites him, the occasion of which he said will be an ‘adventure’. Good for him. We stand ready to receive him, only apologetic that he should want to return. His own native Kenya is marginally better only in that it has not made gay marriage a punishable 14 years in prison (or 10 for aiding same), homosexuality being (as in Nigeria) a criminal offence anyway; and Uganda’s President Museveni was only dissuaded from signing a bill that would jail gays for life by the ‘Western’ threat to withhold aid, which might or might not be a good thing, for Uganda no less than for Nigeria – or even Kenya.

 

And, yet, any discussion of the love that dare not speak its name - in Nigeria, at any rate - must acknowledge the popularity of Jonathan’s latest demonstration of craze. It seems that the majority the president would seek to please find the supposed mechanics of male-on-male sex baffling, if not distasteful, getting our asses fucked being our collective experience in this country, which is why lesbians have been entirely absent from the narrative. This no doubt reflects the patriarchal nature of the society where a senator of the federal republic, i.e. one of the authors of the bill, asserts his right to penetrate 13-year-old girls, early marriage being, in his elevated opinion, ‘the solution of about half our problems’, and this from a Western-trained economist apparently willing to sacrifice his six-year-old daughter ‘if I want to and it’s not your business’. Except that it is my business - and therein lies the problem.

 

It is unfortunate that the West should have threatened to end their so-called aid if the bill was passed, whereupon our former colonial master promptly did an about-turn by increasing our ‘development’ from £200mn to £270mn (or two days’ crude oil earnings), thereby giving hostage to those much enamoured of our independence from her decadent embrace.  ‘Culture’ was the abstraction most bandied about by legislators who promote the parallel idea that kleptomania is also among our time-hallowed values, hence the travails of a former governor doing time at her colonial majesty’s pleasure (or is it Her Satanic Majesty’s Request?), along with his wife, his mistress, and his wife’s sister, oga and madam having themselves previously done time for shoplifting.

 

Amid all the brouhaha over what two consenting adults can and cannot do in the privacy of their bedroom, we can safely say that north and south, Moslem and Christian are for once united in an unholy alliance that can hardly bode well for the secular nation we claim to be nurturing. For Jonathan, who can’t but be alive to suspicions of barefoot illegitimacy, playing the religious card also has the cynical advantage of garnering at least a modicum of political capital amongst those who profess themselves so keen on their purity that their state governments sponsor parallel (and unconstitutional) police forces to raid brothels and beer parlours. And yet it is the ‘people’ who betray the supposed sinners in their midst, a case of Neighbourhood Watch run riot. It is also these same ‘people’ who loudly demand for the death sentence for the innocent-until-proven-guilty outside the Area Courts staffed by corrupt old men with little or no knowledge of the laws they casually enforce (chapter and verse supplied on request).

 

Flogging females, preferably young ones, seems to be something of a cultural value in our bigoted country. We recall the 2000 case of 13-year-old Bariya Ibrahim Magazu who was charged in Zamfara State for engaging in premarital sex and bringing false accusations against three men she claimed had slept with her. She was found guilty and sentenced to 180 lashes. The punishment was administered before her appeal was heard. The men themselves were nowhere to be found because, according to the law, four independent male witnesses were required to testify that they had actually seen the penises of the accused inside her vagina.

 

From flogging to stoning to death – the prescribed punishment for buggery as well as adultery - is not a big step given our much-touted religiosity, especially with the advantage of the foreign holy books we now swear by. It wasn’t so long ago that two women – Amina Lawal and Safiya Husseini – were sentenced to this medieval notion of justice. As with the Magazu case, the men went scot-free because, according to the judge, a man is not a woman whereby she will have a 'protruding stomach' to show for it. On that occasion the authorities backed down from carrying out the sentence. This time, it seems, the baying crowd might do it for them, which might or might not satisfy our irresponsible legislators seeking to divert attention from their own moral turpitude.

 

‘Prominent’ Nigerians have deafened us with their silence over this fascistic law, along with our professional associations - ANA, ASUU, NBA, NMA, TUC – who would otherwise have the country’s best interests at heart, but perhaps they are themselves poisoned by the bureaucratic torpor of our indolent civil servants cowed by a system they have given carte blanche to in exchange for their sitting allowances. That being so, they might care to remember the famous quote during the Nazi era about keeping quiet when they came for your neighbours, only to find there was nobody to speak on your behalf when they finally came for you.

 

So, Bin, my friend and brother, come, we are here. As for Jonathan's new law, you were already a criminal when you came here before, so: Fuck it!

 

© 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

Revisiting Uwais

With the countdown to 2015, all the talk is about the coming showdown between PDP and APC. In Nigerian parlance: Who will win who? The assumption here is that APC is some sort of ‘opposition’ party which will liberate us from the sleaze-ridden behemoth in power since we became a democracy again, as if it was somehow different from the one it is seeking to replace. That it is not is self-evident, although why so many should choose to believe otherwise is a question all by itself. Perhaps it has something to do with our profound unbelief and its concomitant: our seeming helplessness to bring about the kinds of real changes that will indeed transform us into the economic powerhouse recently envisaged by a foreign economist on an eight-day freebie to the country, courtesy of a foreign network.

Following the ‘do or die’ 2007 elections, which even the normally complaisant international community baulked at (with one or two honourable exceptions), the recipient of the stolen mandate prevailed upon a retired chief justice of the federation to recommend how we might do better next time as a palliative to the insulted and injured. The Uwais Electoral Reform Panel made many suggestions. The two most important - independent candidates, and who gets to appoint the ‘independent’ Oga of INEC – were eventually jettisoned, but then it was all a scam from time (to stay with Nigerian parlance), much like the present National Dialogue. There’s nothing like appointing a committee to keep everyone distracted while also leveraging political patronage, this being the sum total of Nigerian politics with the oil money otherwise meant to transform us into the fabled economic powerhouse.

To all intents and purposes, we might as well still be under military rule given that the ‘ordinary’ Nigerian - the 80 per cent or so who apparently live on a dollar a day, according to the same foreign economist - are denied a voice in their own country given the amount of money needed to bankroll offices in 24 of the 36 states just to contest for local councillor. In other words, I must go all the way to Abuja, where I am to have my HQ, in order to contest Surulere Local Government. This is justified under the rubric of national spread, thereby engendering federal character. And it’s not as if Nigeria began life as a cohesive entity. On the contrary, there can hardly be a more patchwork arrangement under the sun, the majority of them too small and insignificant in the scheme of things to ever hope for any kind of representation in an arrangement so heavily skewed in favour of those with the sheer numbers. As with the unexpected bonanza of crude oil (to say nothing of the ‘good inner demographics’ identified by said foreign economist), our diversity is neither a curse nor a blessing but what we choose to make of it. That we have consistently embraced the former is a truism hardly worth repeating but then a cabal which writes the rules – which is permitted to write the rules – can hardly be expected to reform itself.

Among those rules is that only Oga at the top can appoint the person who will count the votes of the election he is contesting in. To know what will happen in 2015 we need only look at what recently happened in Anambra, where it was apparently difficult to ensure that the ballot papers arrived on time. We excused the 2011 lapses on the grounds that the new-look INEC headed by an incorruptible political scientist who once fought the detested military had little time to prepare even as it demanded – and speedily got - N87.72bn for laptops, and is now demanding N92.9bn for even more of the laptops which had problems – the heat! the dust! - keeping an up-to-date voters’ register, as also happened in Anambra. Perhaps our problem is too much money, as a former head of state once quipped, doubtless to his eternal regret now that the 20 per cent (if that) have cornered the bulk of it and are using it to ensure that everything stays the same, however they otherwise dub themselves.

Gone are the days when they could send in the Gestapo to ensure that the ‘people’ voted for the chosen candidate, even those who couldn’t attend the polling booth in person, which didn’t matter anyway when it came to the actual counting. Our foreign well-wishers who insist on monitoring our shenanigans profess not to like such heavy-handed tactics. It’s bad for business and anyway looks indecent, democracy, along with trade, being a game of numbers, as our politicians never tire of reminding us, hence all those laptops, which are hardly the neutral objects they would have us imagine (ask Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, for starters), especially when it comes to number-crunching. But we are running ahead of ourselves. Nigeria’s ‘good inner demographics’, i.e. our excessively young population, can only be good if they can actually read and write, which most of them can’t, and never mind turning on the laptops they were once promised for free in the absence of electricity because they all had to go to INEC.

Whether APC will in fact hold together long enough to get to 2015 is in any case doubtful, although much the same might be said of PDP given its current woes under a clueless leadership. What we might be witnessing, in fact, is a case of thieves falling out among themselves in the scramble to acquire ever more wealth to add to the one they can’t finish in several lifetimes, although their children will probably do it for them in one lifetime. As the late Bola Ige put it, We go just siddon look, only a pity that he didn’t follow his own advice when he dined with the devil. Entertaining it will certainly be if you have the stomach for that kind of movie.

© 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

 

Of oracles (and gurus)

In 2001, Jim O’Neill, the British economist and former Goldman Sachs bigwig, coined the acronym BRIC to identify the coming economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (with the later addition of South Africa to become BRICS). By all accounts, he got it about right, although some of his fellow economists wondered at the gap between China and the rest. A decade later, he has coined MINT for the next big four: Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, and is now all over the BBC telling us about them. It seems that Nigeria was not on the original list until someone pointed out that South Korea, a smaller economy than Nigeria’s at the time of our independence in 1960, was in fact already developed, but then MINT is a more pleasing acronym given the object of the exercise.

 

The late inclusion of Nigeria is understandable. While the other three rank in the world’s top 20 economies, Nigeria languishes at 39.  Infrastructure (or the lack thereof) is primarily to blame, notably electricity, as Mr O’Neill readily acknowledges, with Indonesia, for instance, generating 24 times more than we do. Perhaps the Jonathan administration really will solve our power problem (his no less than the country’s), in which case we are assured that we will grow by up to 12% annually, in effect doubling the size of the economy every six years, but even without we are apparently growing at 7%.

 

The percentages may be as Mr O’Neill calls them, having spent 32 years ‘looking at a Reuters screen from when I got up at 6am in the morning until 9pm at night. Before I would go to bed I would predict what the dollar rate would be...’ Understandably, perhaps, he is enamoured of the man who predicts the naira rate, the ‘extraordinarily talented’ central bank governor, as well as the ‘charismatic’ finance minister, but then he had only eight days to measure the weight of this global economic powerhouse in the making (however many days he otherwise spent staring at the computer screen).

 

According to Mr O’Neill, the advantages all four countries possess are lots of people, good geography, abundant commodities (Turkey excepted) and ‘good inner demographics’. Nigeria is indeed a populous nation with abundant commodities and ECOWAS is ours for the taking but for the federal government’s tardiness in empowering our entrepreneurs who have, for instance, usurped France as ‘the leading supplier of imports’ to Ivory Coast, but what if most of your surplus young (no more so than in Nigeria) are illiterate? Whatever Awo’s faults, he ran the only government in this country which set about educating its children, with the then Eastern Region quickly following until this forward-looking enterprise was truncated by those who shun progress. Had they done the same we might by now be the South Korea which Mr O’Neill calls the only example in his lifetime of a country which went from third world to first (apologies to Singapore) on account of having ‘one of the highest levels of education’ in the world.

 

Mr O’Neill has been described as an ‘oracle’ (and sometimes a ‘guru’) on account of an acronym or two and perhaps he is, having successfully managed $800bn of other people’s money. He himself warns that his predictions are long-term – 30 years - so be careful where you put your money. He is also mindful of the scourge of corruption for which Nigeria is infamous, although he agrees with the overly-endowed central bank governor that this needn’t be the bugbear so often portrayed in the Western media since ‘[s]uch views are important to listen to, as an alternative to our often simplistic Western way of thinking’, to wit: ‘For many credible people in the Mint countries, corruption is a consequence of their weak past, not a cause of a weak future, and certainly not the number one challenge. It falls way down a list compared with the costs of energy and the breadth of its availability and, of course, infrastructure,’ although some might think that our energy and infrastructure problems were, in fact, the consequence of the corruption he so casually brushes aside. During his eight-day stay, Mr O’Neill was much inconvenienced by a delayed flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos, and was mightily relieved to be offered a private jet from Abuja to same, only a pity that he didn’t have time to sample the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, where he would have seen for himself the corruption attendant upon the busiest road in Africa.

 

A large part of Mr O’Neill’s assessment – surprisingly for an economist – is what he called the ‘wow’ factor, as in, ‘In Turkey, visits to white goods manufacturer Beko and Turkish Airlines, the world's fastest growing airline, definitely made me go "Wow", and in Nigeria, I was saying it all the time.’ He was less-enamoured of Indonesia because, ‘The country's challenges are as big as I thought and I didn't hear too many things that made me go "Wow" in terms of trying to deal with them. The country needs more of a sense of commercial purpose beyond commodities, and has to improve its infrastructure.’ It’s fortunate that we can ourselves peer at our computer screens all the hours God sends and gauge the gap with a country which we were also at par with half a century ago.

 

By all accounts, Mr O’Neill is a fanatical Man U supporter – his walls at Goldman Sachs apparently bore testimony to this, and he was once on its board – so it was perhaps fortuitous that he met his match (as it were) in the Lagos State governor, who allowed him to win a penalty shoot-out. And who knows? Nigeria may yet score in the economic league table although it won’t be because of oracles (or gurus) pinpointing a central bank governor who studied Islamic Law at the University of Khartoum, or a Harvard University graduate seconded from the World Bank. The pity of it is that dem no go let person drink water put cup down because of the oracle (or guru) who anointed them, but worse again is our own gullibility in the sordid enterprise. Nigeria will become great when it decides to become great, and will in the process re-write the rules Mr O'Neill is so enamoured of.

 

© 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