Thanks for being there!

In February last year I determined to write 52 weekly blogs of about one thousand words each. The idea was to track the evolving political landscape as we began the approach to the 2015 elections. Even then, it wasn’t too early. Public office is the raison d’être of Nigeria, with crude oil earnings the prize. Everything that happens in the country, from the sacking of the central bank governor to the fatal stampedes in Abuja, Bauchi, Lagos and Port Harcourt for a few paltry slots in immigration and customs, can only be understood in those terms. My main worry, in fact, was how to keep it fresh week in, week out. To be sure, revelations of venality overtake one another faster than we can assimilate the sordid details but they are simply variations on a single theme.

 

Take the recent one by the central bank governor that $20bn of oil money had gone walk-about. This upset our Harvard-educated, ex-World Bank coordinating finance minister who ridiculed his claim on the grounds that he had first alleged almost $50bn before settling for the lower figure and promptly announced that the real figure was $10.8bn. She then attempted to shift the blame to her sister in the petroleum ministry, where all the money she is coordinating comes from anyway.

 

To say that Nigeria is geared for graft is to say nothing new, only a wonder that anyone ever believed that our coordinating minister, who had to be begged to forego her job at the World Bank to come and serve her country (‘It would be very easy for me to sit at the World Bank and earn a nice salary’), was ever going to serve our interests. But then we have always been in thrall to the foreign institutions which know more about the price of onions and peppers at Mile 12 than do our home-grown economists and must therefore take our punishment however they see fit, complete with Trojan horse.

 

These foreign institutions also encompass US public relations firms with ‘extensive must-win campaign experience’ on account of knowing ‘what it takes to win in difficult situations’, in this case Mercury LLC, to which the minister fled for advice on how to shore up her tattered image she otherwise insisted was still intact: ‘I don’t think my reputation is under threat and to imply otherwise is distinctly wrong. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m here.’ I did try and contact the self-styled ‘high-stakes public strategy firm’ through its website but never received a reply, as invisible to them as the market women at Mile 12.

 

This invisibility of the people is currently being acted out at the recently convened national dialogue on the country’s future. Like its predecessor under Obasanjo, the delegates were told what they can and can’t deliberate on.  Then again, no government will pay delegates $4mn a month each for three months to deliberate them out of office. The only wonder is not that you can’t find 492 people out of 170mn to accept the insult to their intelligence (the majority of whom have been doing little else for years anyway), but that others not so fortunate should continue to imagine that anything good can come of it.

 

The triumph of hope over experience would seem to be the besetting vice of Nigerians, which was partly why thousands of young men and women were prepared to pay for the privilege of being interviewed for a limited number of federal appointments, most of which, it turned out (man-know-man), had already been farmed out to those better placed, none of whom, I daresay, needed to risk their lives in the stampede which followed. It can only be a matter of time before these same youths, who we continue to churn out from our universities with nothing to look forward to, will rise up and tear down the whole rotten edifice. The question is: When? It is telling that those responsible for their wretchedness – as who should know? - have taken the precaution of buying private jets to spirit them to the safety of their foreign havens. This includes, above all, the self-styled pastors who urge the gullible to close their eyes while they rob them blind as they exhort them to pray for the miracle that will never come.

 

But I have written all this before in any number of earlier blogs. Nor am I alone. Every commentator has said as much week in, week out in the pages of our newspapers. The ‘message’ has become dulled with the repetition. And to what end? The fact that they are published at all, and that nobody in authority pays the least attention to them, was acknowledged by the previous Borno State governor who was believed to have incubated the Boko Haram which thinks nothing of murdering children in their beds. What do they want? Good question. Possibly they don’t themselves know, any more than the rest of us know what to do with this awkward colonial creation. Why, we aren’t even allowed to see the piece of paper which amalgamated us. Perhaps the delegates can begin by demanding it so that they at least know what it is, precisely, they are supposed to be deliberating. Then again, perhaps this is another ‘no-go area’.

 

So this is my last blog in the present series, to which I gave the generic title, ‘All about Naija’. The danger of continuing is not only a reflexive staleness but also diminishing returns. Keep saying the same thing over and over and pretty soon nobody is paying you much attention. At the same time, the plethora of opinions might in fact be part of the problem.  A cursory look at Nigerian newspapers shows that the one thing we don’t respect is the facts, which is why one searches in vain for a full list of the delegates to the current national conference. In partial fulfilment of that lack, and with the looming 2015 elections in mind, I propose to embark on a new series profiling the political actors positioning themselves for 2015 in the hope that business will continue as usual. In the meantime, I will be taking a one-month break.

 

Thanks for being there!

 

© 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. His memoir, The House My Father Built, will be

published later this year.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU

What is to be done?

On 18 April 2012, a story appeared in The Punch newspaper concerning one Blessing Effiong, who had already served four years in Kirikiri Maximum for the alleged theft of a mobile handset. She was nineteen at the time. According to the report, she had bought the phone for N10,000 in order to start a business centre but later got a call from a man who said the phone was his and had been stolen. He wanted it back but would be happy to refund the money she had paid. She gave him her address but when he turned up he claimed that other items were also stolen (including a laptop), accused her of being a thief and called the police. Although she was then only sixteen the police, for reasons best known to them, insisted that she was twenty-one and could therefore be charged as an adult. So began her nightmare, which only ended on 5 July 2012.

 

According to a subsequent report in The Punch, Ms Effiong wasn’t charged to court in all those long years (one-fifth of her short life to that date) because the Director of Public Prosecutions couldn’t initially decide what to charge her with. Her case did eventually get to court, where she was charged with receiving stolen property. Her lawyer plea-bargained for her to be charged with the lesser offence of possessing suspected stolen property, whereupon she pled guilty and was freed, having already served eight times longer than the stipulated punishment.

 

I start from the assumption that Ms Effiong was innocent of her alleged ‘crime’ despite the fact that she now has a record that may yet return to haunt her. It doesn’t take much imagination – or any at all, come to that - to understand why she would have been eager to walk free, whatever the subsequent stain on her character. Moreover, given that she was a child (legally speaking) at the time of her alleged crime, the law itself erred in charging her as an adult. But there is also the matter of double standards in the way the law is applied in Nigeria, which is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa: one for the minority rich (whites), one for the majority poor (blacks). So, for instance, while the criminal justice system exerts time and resources over a N10,000 mobile phone, it indulges a senior civil servant, John Yakubu Yusuf, accused of embezzling N2bn but who was fined a derisory N250,000 and released after only two years behind bars.

 

Mr Yusuf’s case is especially pertinent here because he was convicted of embezzling the police’s own pension fund and, therefore, more deserving – humanly if not morally (or even legally) - of the nightmare the police themselves criminally visited on Ms Effiong. But Ms Effiong is a nobody with only N10,000 to invest in a business; and although The Punch report doesn’t explicitly say so, we can infer that the police were paid by her (perhaps vindictive) accuser to lie against her. What the report also doesn’t say, but which again we can infer, is that it was only their report that got her a lawyer in the first place, helped along by Linda Ikeji, perhaps the country’s most famous blogger, who was present at the hearing, along with assorted sympathisers she had galvanised online, and all of whom erupted in jubilation at what they evidently considered closure.

 

Unfortunately, closure it was not. For one thing, there is the question of all the other Blessing Effiongs awaiting trial in Kirikiri – 154 out of 191 at the time, according to The Punch report – among them two sisters, Funmilayo and Endurance Felix, one about to give birth, the other having already done so. For another, there is the question of what the police themselves were alleged to have done.  For a third, there is the tardiness of the DPP in all of this. These would seem to be weighty issues but are not even addressed. According to Ms Ikeji, who visited Ms Effiong in Kirikiri, where they ‘hugged’ and ‘wept’, Nigeria’s ‘most widely read newspaper’ erred in her age (nineteen, not twenty) and the price she paid for the mobile phone in question (N800, not the N10,000 it would have cost new).

 

In fact, The Punch report reveals much that is wrong with Nigerian journalism. Given Ms Effiong’s central role in the story – its peg, as it were – we have to rely on Ms Ikeji’s blog to give her some humanity:  ‘Blessing is an orphan. Her father died when she was very young and her mother died just last year. She told me her incarceration led to her mum's death. She was her only daughter. Blessing has two brothers but they are in the East and as helpless as she is.’ Nor are we told how she secured the services of a lawyer, who might himself have been quoted, although, again, we must infer that it was their own initial report which did the trick, itself inferred from the drama in the courtroom when ‘Justice Christopher Balogun berated both the prosecution and defence counsel’ for not intimating the court in good time about the change of plea but ‘nonetheless allowed the case to continue’, presumably because by now the case done pass be careful.

 

The point, at any rate, is that all the hullaballoo surrounding Ms Effiong’s case, while indubitably good for Ms Effiong personally (and one hopes that she did indeed receive all the help promised by Ms Ikeji), stops there. Nothing has changed. The same police who framed her – one can hardly describe it otherwise – themselves went scot-free to continue their criminal activities, and we are yet to hear whether the Felix sisters still continue to languish in the limbo called awaiting trial persons without the wherewithal to hire a lawyer or the good fortune to be mentioned in newspaper reports and private blogs, which can hardly be the basis of conducting a system of justice.

 

As I write, President Goodluck Jonathan has just finished naming the delegates to the national conference that is to debate - again! - the future of this country. In the nature of things, they do not include among their number the Ms Effiongs of this world. This would perhaps be too much to expect, but any resultant document which does not begin to address the fundamental injustices of the unequal society we have managed to construct out of our so-called independence will be an exercise in futility. But we have been here before and it would be a foolish person who expected any different now.

 

© 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. His latest book, The House My Father Built, will be

published later this year.

Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU