The view from abroad

‘I think the Black sense of male and female is much more sophisticated than the western idea. I think that Black men and women are much less easily thrown by the question of gender or sexual preference – all that jazz.’

                                                                                                                     James Baldwin

I was recently in Cape Town as one of four speakers for a debate on ‘Sexuality and the Law’. The event itself, which held at the university, was part of the annual Africa Month programme to ‘celebrate our Afropolitan vision, the beacon that guides our engagements on the African continent. That vision is about our connectedness to the continent and our desire to play a role as an intellectual meeting point between Africa and the rest of the world.’

 

This year’s topic was dictated by the recent anti-gay legislations in Uganda and Nigeria, itself part of the widespread homophobia that appears to have surged through the continent. It also happens to be a subject South Africans feel strongly about, having themselves legislated in favour of same-sex marriage. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was among those counted in the struggle against apartheid, voiced what I take to be the common view in his country:

We must be entirely clear about this: the history of people is littered with attempts to legislate against love or marriage across class, caste, and race. But there is no scientific basis or genetic rationale for love. There is only the grace of God. There is no scientific justification for prejudice and discrimination, ever. And nor is there any moral justification. Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, among others, attest to these facts.

In my own contribution, I suggested that Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, while generally popular, was politically motivated by a president anxious to appease a constituency determined on his ouster next year. I also suggested that, again though popular, the legislation may have been posited on a misunderstanding of what constitutes what we are pleased to call ‘African culture’ that was supposedly hostile to alternative narratives, for instance love between members of the same sex. This may or may not be the case but we don’t know because we have banned the study of history, which might otherwise be our guide to such arcane matters. Ironically, not even the ‘apartheid gods’ went that far, choosing instead to rewrite the narrative to suit their own purposes, which is what any serious ruling class does.

 

Whatever the case, the underlying assumption of the event in Cape Town was that no government anywhere had the right to legislate against what people were ‘allowed’ to do as long as they didn’t disturb the next person. Passing laws to corral them into a preconceived set of moral imperatives simply because you possess the power to do so was in itself a fascistic act, and this whether based on a concept of ‘race’ (itself a misnomer) or sexual orientation.

 

And, yet, the matter can hardly be as simple as that, and for the reason raised by a member of the audience who expressed uneasiness that the agenda concerning gay rights was a foreign invention foisted on Africans by those who colonised us yesterday but lecture us today on the universality of human rights. In either case, we remain the helpless butts of an agenda set by others, which is then easily exploited by African leaders seeking cheap popularity. This is well taken and true enough as far as it goes, but the essential hollowness of this argument – if it can be so called - is perfectly illustrated here in Nigeria by the ongoing drama of the abducted schoolgirls. On the one hand, President Jonathan (like his Ugandan counterpart) outlaws gay marriage as an expression of our independence; on the other, he rushes to Paris in order to beg those same foreign powers to come and rescue the schoolgirls from the clutches of fellow Africans who have threatened to sell them into slavery, women as chattel presumably also being part of our supposedly time-honoured cultural values. All this must be pleasing to the likes of Senator Ahmed Yerima, the former Zamfara state governor who was the first to introduce Shariah in order that he might marry a 13-year-old girl as his fourth wife, and this despite the provisions of the Child Rights Act that he and his fellow northern governors have consistently refused to sign into law.

 

The point, in any case, is not so much that we have forfeited the right to the moral high ground, to judge what is right and what is wrong, but that our responses can hardly be dictated by outsiders, which is what the whole debate amounts to. We are like the child who does the opposite of what their parents tell them merely because their parents tell them and for no other reason. In other words, our responses are purely reactive. In the process, we don’t stop to ask ourselves what we think about the larger issues of our age. The irony here is that those indigenous cultures we fall back on to justify our non-actions (which is what it amounts to) would not have survived as long as they did had they not themselves adapted to the changing world around them, including the foreign onslaught which sought to subjugate them and would now save us from ourselves.

 

In other words, cultures are not static entities handed down at the beginning of time and fixed forever in stone like the Ten Commandments. But until we begin to interrogate what is best for us irrespective of what others say, so long shall we remain slaves to their whims. Passing anti-gay legislation is not an assertion of our independence but the abrogation of it. That it is popular is a commentary on our collective inability to see beyond those amongst us who use it to subjugate us even as they turn our country into a laughing stock in the eyes of the world.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

An earlier version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 27 May 2014.

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, 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

I, Nigerian citizen

‘Citizens who allow politicians to set the agenda while they just react have themselves to blame for lack of tangible results from governance.’

                                                                                                                     Oby Ezekwesili

The abduction of 276 girls now at the centre of an international outcry has proved to be a game-changer. Two events would seem to prove this. The first was the refusal of Oby Ezekwesili to be intimidated during the peaceful #BringBackOurGirls demonstrations in Abuja, and just yesterday organised a march on Aso Rock. The former education minister and World Bank vice-president for Africa simply sat unconcerned on the grass while 50 or so armed police, behaving in the only way they know how, ordered the demonstrators to disperse. The others, behaving in the only way they know how, began to drift away. Not so Ezekwesili, who told our uniformed officers point blank: ‘I, Oby Ezekwesili, am not going anywhere. This is my democratic right. I will not go anywhere. I...will not be intimidated by the police. My rights will not be violated. I don’t care who has given you this instruction. I...will not be intimidated in my own country. I am not going anywhere!'

 

The second was the apparent ‘jungle justice’ meted out to suspected Boko Haram insurgents in the town of Kalabalge (or Kala Belge) in troubled Borno State. According to unverified reports, the residents received information that about 400 militants in two armoured vehicles, eight pick-up trucks and seven sports utility vehicles were on their way to visit on them the mayhem that has become their signature. But instead of fleeing in fear of their lives, as other communities have done, ‘we gathered many of our young men and positioned ourselves in surrounding bushes and forests. We were armed with bows and arrows, Dane guns and pump action rifles.’ According to an Al Jazeera report, 41 of the surprised insurgents were killed and an undisclosed number captured. The rump fled.

 

Ezekwesili could get away with what she did because of her prominent position in the society, which was why her ‘stubbornness’ (in Nigerian parlance) received such wide coverage. Any ‘lesser’ individual would have been simply hauled away, more likely than not to be tortured by those same police officers she defied. It is for this reason that such people have a greater responsibility to take a moral stand against the outrages perpetrated daily against Nigerian citizens, as was evidenced by the outpouring of support for her actions. And this is true whether such outrages are perpetrated by the state or by private militias, who may in fact be one and the same.

 

Ezekwesil’s action received such widespread support because it is so rare. Those who have been elevated to prominence, whether by their own efforts or by happy chance, do the exact opposite, which is to say revel in their status by actively promoting the mores which have resulted in the impunity which holds one law for the minority rich and another for the majority poor. I have likened this to South Africa in the days of apartheid, and which, as in South Africa as was, is ultimately unsustainable, as indeed we are currently observing the length and breadth of the land.

 

Conversely, the only possible action open to the masses is the supposed example shown recently by the people of Kalabalge (or however spelt), which has nevertheless gone viral, if only because people wish it to be true. But whether true or not (and there are other such stories of vigilantes confronting the Islamic terrorists), it is hardly the way to run a country. And, after all, what choice do they have, even with their bows and arrows against armoured vehicles? Inevitably, the innocent will be slaughtered along with the guilty, even assuming we can separate one from the other, which we can’t, given the absence of the instruments of law that have been bastardised over five decades. But it is where we have ended up.

 

There are those who blame President Jonathan for our descent into anarchy and yearn instead for a ‘strong’ leader, or – even worse – the return of the military. Nobody would deny that Jonathan has been a complete disaster: weak, indecisive and clueless. But it is perhaps as well that he is all those things in order that we might understand the depths we have sunk to. A ‘strong’ leader would have simply allowed us to keep patching things over – witness Obasanjo’s wasteful eight-year tenure and his war crime against Odi in Jonathan’s own Bayelsa State - without tackling the underlying problem which has given rise to our current predicament.

 

This predicament – how we are to rule ourselves in a way which is inclusive of all Nigerian citizens – is currently being evaded by the latest talking shop, which pretends to an inclusiveness that was abrogated even before it began sitting. It is absurd to discuss the country’s future which is posited on continuing the current arrangement that has brought us to the present disaster in which 276 girls can be abducted and the entire resources of the Nigerian state are unable to rescue them, even as the president himself goes on television more than a fortnight afterwards to admit his own impotence.

 

This being so, the answer now lies in the example of Ezekwesili on the one hand, and the vigilantes on the other. That is to say, the state has become irrelevant to all but the tiny minority who leach from it, fit only for grandstanding, in the process making us a laughing stock in the eyes of the international community. In a nutshell, only we can rescue ourselves from the cesspit we now find ourselves in by the pitifully small cabal who lord it over us. That we do not do so is the reason why the US Senator John McCain said that he ‘wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan’ to invade the joint, Goodluck himself having invited the cowboys to rescue him from himself.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

A slightly different version of this piece originally appeared in Hallmark, 20 May 2014.

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, 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

Government by rhetoric

Fresh from her triumph at the World Economic Forum in Abuja, where she extolled the virtues of investing in a failed state to ‘close to 1000 regional and global leaders’, Dr Okonjo-Iweala found time to sympathise with the abducted girls of Chibok. As ‘a mother myself’, she declared, she found it difficult to imagine ‘the agony the parents of these children must be experiencing,’ even as she understood ‘the anger and sadness [of] Nigerians at home and abroad’. Assuring us that Mr President ‘has promised that the Nigerian security services will work tirelessly to bring back the girls,’ she thanked the US, the UK and China for their ‘assistance’ even as the government itself would ‘not relent until our children have [been] returned to their families’.

 

Our Harvard-trained, former World Bank vice-president then went on to reassure our would-be investors that ‘we will not let any terrorist group undo the progress we are trying to make in ensuring new rights and opportunities for girls across our country,’ which was why ‘the abduction of our daughters and the attempt to truncate their education is so unacceptable’. In conclusion, she reiterated the government’s determination to ‘do everything in our power to bring back our girls, and we will never be complacent when it comes to girls' rights. We will not relax our efforts until every one of the 10.5 million girls and boys who are today denied education in Nigeria are given a chance to go to school in safety’.

 

It is entirely possible that Dr Okonjo-Iweala, who began life as the finance minister but was quickly elevated to coordinating minister by a president anxious to unburden as much of his office as possible while desiring to remain on seat, actually believes her own rhetoric. This is the same minister who happily reels out statistics to prove that the Nigerian economy is growing by leaps and bounds while the vast majority in whose name she speaks wonder whether she is referring to the Nigeria which is visibly falling apart – apologies to the late Chinua Achebe - or some never-never land of her imagination. Certainly, it must seem like a cruel joke to the abducted girls and their desperate families, for whom the promised ‘assistance’ from the US, the UK and China is now their last hope. The only wonder is that she and her boss – along with assorted ministers and legislators – still occupy the seats they do, but then our standards have fallen so low that we excuse levels of incompetence which would have long spelt the doom of their foreign counterparts.

 

That the government itself has actually acknowledged its incompetence is borne out by the gratitude with which its spokespersons now welcome the foreign ‘assistance’ which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. And it is as well to recall that in 1962, heady still with our independence, Nigerian students successfully demonstrated against a proposed military pact with the recently departed colonial power whose ‘assistance’ is now being sought half-a-century later. In other words, we are in a more wretched condition than we were then, yet Dr Okonjo-Iweala, whose own children were educated in the US that is also to be our salvation, tells us that ‘we must not overlook [government’s] efforts to tackle these challenges, nor discourage those attempting to do this difficult work’.

 

But what Dr Okonjo-Iweala and her ilk appear not to have grasped is that the Chibok fiasco, while far from being an isolated outrage, nevertheless appears to have finally woken up Nigerians – along with the rest of the world - to the truth of their condition, which is that they are on their own. There is no government, a fact which the government itself has known all along but managed to conceal by oppressing us with its outward trappings. How else to explain the president’s silence about the abducted girls until Nigerians stood their ground for the first time in their post-colonial history, leaving the way for Michelle, Hillary and Angelina to jump into the fray, only for him to announce that he didn’t actually know the whereabouts of the girls before pleading for foreign ‘assistance’? So much for our pepper-soup generals and demoralised police force, who only know how to brutalise helpless citizens. Show them a gun and they run for cover, as the Niger delta militants the government now pay to lay down their arms amply demonstrated.

 

As to whether this foreign ‘assistance’ will arrest – much less reverse – our steady slide towards disintegration is not something the president’s men and women appear to have contemplated in their euphoria that somebody else is coming to do their work for them. On the contrary, the presence of the hated Satan can only be expected to make things worse but then they probably have no other option if they are to have any hope of clinging on to whatever power they imagine they still have, even as Dr Okonjo-Iweala claims to be ‘launching the Safe Schools Initiative’ in order ‘to provide security so that parents and pupils are reassured about our determination to protect them’.

 

Foreign ‘assistance’ or no, I think we can safely conclude that vast swathes of the north-east have now become ‘no-go areas’, similar to the ‘tribal areas’ in Pakistan which are only visited by American drones every Tuesday to pick off suspected militants. The fault is not Jonathan’s alone but the long years of irresponsible leadership he inherited that have brought us to this pretty pass. Perhaps nobody could have rescued Nigeria by the time he took his own turn in the saddle but I think it is true to say, nonetheless, that he has proved the most clueless of the lot. But there is this at least to be said: that in being so clueless, so incompetent, so ham-fisted he has inadvertently opened up for all to see the awful emptiness of the rhetoric that cannot find 276 girls abducted from a government college nearly a month ago.

 

©Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

A slightly different version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 13 May 2014

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, 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

 

Cautionary tales

'Mr. Nabokov is particularly lucky because his book was not censored in the United States, but in France of all places. What more could he hope for? The French ban was eventually removed and now this book written in English in the United States by a White Russian emigré can be bought legally in Paris where it was first published.'

 

So the National Film & Video Censors Board has banned Half of a Yellow Sun. I’m trying to work out the permutations. This is the novel by our hugely celebrated Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which won the UK Orange Prize, and whose recent offering, Americanah, won the US National Book Critics Circle award. It stars, amongst other luminaries, Chiwetel Ejiofor, fresh from his recent triumph in 12 Years a Slave, for which he won a best actor award, also in the UK. The film, which has premiered the world over, was directed by Biyi Bandele, a novelist himself who has long made his name on the London stage

 

The film did actually manage to premiere in Lagos but was subsequently barred from general release because, according to the Board, it contained ‘objectionable materials’ which were ‘capable of inciting civil strife’ that needed to be ‘reduced or eliminated completely’, so as to avoid ‘racial, religious or ethnic discrimination or conflict’. The problem appears to be the already well-catalogued massacre of Igbos at a northern airport as they fled the pogrom following the 1966 counter-coup.  The rest is history except that it isn’t because we don’t teach history in school anymore (although we have lately introduced Mandarin), and even when we did the story of Biafra was reduced to a one-page summary of the main actors, who have been ruling this country ever since, having fought to keep it one under a meaningless slogan.

 

Chimamanda, who, like the majority of Nigerians, was born after the civil war, says that she was haunted in her childhood by its ‘shadow’ – her parents would never speak about it except by allusions – but nevertheless calls it a ‘seminal event’. She is right, of course, but what kind of event? I have argued elsewhere that Nigeria is really a fiction, which is why it has fallen on the novelists to write about it, the historians having rightly been ruled irrelevant for the wrong reasons. You can see this with our government officials – say Patricia Bala, the DG of NFVCB – who actually attended the Toronto premiere and gushed to a number of those in attendance ‘how much she loved it and why (such) movies should be encouraged … She was very encouraging, very positive and did not at any time express any reservations about the film.’

 

And then she returned to Nigeria, to her big desk in her big, important government office where everyone bows and scrapes – I’ve seen it first-hand for myself – and everything changes. She has left the real world where people have to raise $10mn to make a film and then go shoot it in Calabar, as Bandele did:

 

Myself and several members of my crew and cast got typhoid. Some even had malaria. Thandie Newton got typhoid too, but she was incredible. She was really suffering but didn't take a single day off work. It was like she was possessed by God knows what. The experience of shooting was tough, but every single day I woke up and wanted to be on set, because you just didn't know what was going to happen.

The work ethic would be a novel experience (as it were) to our ‘pompous asses’ (as Nabokov of Lolita fame dubbed the members of whatever censorship board, as who should know), and perhaps they are not overly concerned with the view from Toronto. But there seems to be a tremendous irony here, which is that Nigeria is only taken seriously because its artists – we haven’t mentioned some of the other stars of Half of a Yellow Sun, including Genevieve Nnaji, Reginald Ofodile and Onyeka Onwenu – have not been found wanting, a case of political ineptitude in inverse proportion to creative talent. We need go no further than the 276 missing schoolgirls for whose salvation the president, three weeks after their abduction, appears to have entrusted to his wife, who broke down in tears while the military of which he is supposedly commander-in-chief. tries to explain why it can do nothing. This being so, why must we not then endure the opinions of petty functionaries telling us what we can and can’t watch, read, think – what you will?

 

Or so they would flatter themselves. Leaving aside the endlessly documented fact that censorship invariably achieves the opposite of what it intends (if only because of the publicity it generates), the corruption the censorship board itself serves is the main worry of the filmmakers, who have refused point-blank to remove any ‘offending passages’. And what would be the point? It’s only a wonder that the Biafran-Nigerian traders at Alaba International Market haven’t yet pirated their sister (to say nothing of their brother), being themselves the necessary parasites of an unproductive system. The unexpurgated version would only up their profits.

 

All of this is acknowledgment that the Biafran-Nigerian war never went away, evidence for which are the guns and bombs that have not ceased exploding since, as the unfortunates at Nyanya twice discovered recently in the space of a fortnight. In amongst all this, the fundamental question remains: Do we want to remain together and, if so, how are we to do so even as conferences and dialogues are got up to that end, and where the un-representatives argue over oil revenues, the country’s raison d’être. It might be better if they said so more openly but of course they can’t, so they seek to ban films instead, in the process alerting us to the problem they would otherwise attempt to bury, much like the 276 schoolgirls they have forsaken, but which even the faraway St. Louis Post-Dispatch is fretting over.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

A different version of this piece originally appeared in Hallmark, 6 May 2014

 

 

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, 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

God will not do it!

I was going to write about General Buhari’s latest volte face in which he condemned the Nyanya bombing and the abduction of 234 schoolgirls, now said to be sold off at N4,000 a piece. Others have noted that he never before criticised the murderous activities of Boko Haram. On the contrary, he had seemed miffed on previous atrocities that a group which despises ‘Western’ education, seeks to Islamise Nigeria and repudiates democracy should fail to attract the same sympathy accorded the Niger Delta militants, whose own legitimate grievances were borne for far too long, but who never blew up motor parks or abducted schoolgirls.

 

But why bother? His widely circulated (and poorly headlined) article – ‘Putting Back the Fight against Terrorism on the Rails’ – in which he professes himself shocked at the ‘evil’ perpetrated by these Islamic fundamentalists, is too obviously self-serving. ‘While we are engaged in tight political competition against the ruling party we shall not play politics on this issue so vital to our national survival and well-being,’ he sanctimoniously wrote, having done just that, much to the delight of the presidency, whose erudite apologist was quick to acknowledge the former military dictator’s ‘very statesman-like views on terrorism and insecurity’.

 

Buhari’s obsessive – I almost said sinister - presidential ambition dates back to 2003, when he famously promised to make Nigeria ungovernable if the results weren’t reversed in his favour. Well, Nigeria has now become ungovernable and all he can tell us is to ‘take close heed at this moment and recognize the severity of what is upon us’. But we knew that already. We knew that even when he served the late, unlamented Abacha as his alternative petroleum minister, having paved the way when he did his own stint as maximum dictator. And all this before we began the voodoo democracy he would now profit from.

 

In fact, Buhari’s sudden realisation that bombing citizens and abducting schoolgirls are ‘evil’ is less a Damascus conversion than a cynical reading of the prevailing mood in the nation. It isn’t so much that Nigerians are beginning to realise the ineptitude of government at all levels - they knew that already - but the loss of a desperate hope that things might improve if only we could get the right set of people at the helm of affairs. As I attempted to argue in my last blog, sacking this or that minister is merely a distraction from what is already an undeniably failed state, which is also why any talk of 2015 is not merely beside the point but obscene to boot. Nothing will be improved by swapping Jonathan for Buhari (or whoever else), which would merely guarantee more of the same.

 

But what is especially noticeable in the public discourse across the social media is the absence of any recourse to the Almighty. Previously, one would have been assaulted by the maddening refrain, ‘God will do it,’ as if we are not ourselves actors in the unfolding tragedy of Nigeria. Now we know that God won’t un-bomb Nyanya, nor is God about to rescue the schoolgirls. Moreover, there is no earthly (or even heavenly) reason why God should do so, having already equipped us with the wherewithal – and that in comic abundance.

 

Concerning the schoolgirls especially, we are now to believe that the entire resources of the Nigerian army, to say nothing of the police and the various other security agencies, are unable to confront an armed gang hiding out in a forest. What a laughing stock we have become in the eyes of the international community, and there we were getting worked up when President Mugabe rubbished us. He hardly went far enough. Besides, he only said what everyone else was thinking, even those presidents who are forever in and out of Abuja looking for handouts, which seems to be the sum total of our foreign policy. Everyone knows that the huge sums voted to security – N1.055 trillion in the current budget – are simply looted at source, hence the rumours of soldiers fleeing before the heavier firepower of the insurgents.

 

Some time ago, someone coined the term Pepper-soup Generals, and there you have it exactly: the top brass entertaining their girlfriends in Abuja while the rank and file are expected to lay down their lives. What for? Better to go into the forest yourself, which was what some despairing parents did before they realised the folly of their undertaking. And if the idea of Jonathan himself leading the way into that same forest is too preposterous to contemplate, we can at least wonder why he ever thought it necessary to flaunt his own daughter’s wedding.

 

Meanwhile, as all this is going on, a select group of the usual suspects is busy debating the future of the country in a hotel in Abuja at N4 million a month. I say the usual suspects. In fact, in amongst their number is a coterie of so-called civil society activists who don’t appear to understand why they were nominated to this pointless talking shop in the first place. One of them vowed to donate his share of the national cake to charity, another that he wouldn’t even touch the money, and a third went into a long spiel about how you can only affect change from the inside. One hardly knows which to despise most. Better those who know the score and are content to play Scrabble when they aren’t sleeping.

 

So there we are: the endgame in Nigeria and 2015 just around the corner, with Jonathan and Buhari squaring up to each other in the interests of exercising power without responsibility. But at least we now know that God will not do it for us; was never going it for us.  We’ll have to do it all by ourselves.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

An earlier version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 29 April 2014

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. The House My Father Built, a memoir, 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