tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17827699739940670612024-02-20T10:43:50.303-08:00Adewale Maja-PearceAdewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-44702204999783494692015-09-03T17:00:00.002-07:002015-09-04T15:55:47.971-07:00Still on Burma Boy<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">ANOTHER
MAN’S WAR: THE STORY OF A BURMA BOY IN BRITAIN’S FORGOTTEN ARMY<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">by
Barnaby Phillips</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Oneworld,
336pp. 9781780747118</span></div>
<br />
<a data-ved="0CAcQjRxqFQoTCMD6y_2Q3McCFQqdGgodlmINQQ" href="http://www.google.com.ng/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCMD6y_2Q3McCFQqdGgodlmINQQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fm.ebocoo.com%2FAdd_ne.php%3FID%3D513&psig=AFQjCNHR7vafP2c1Cb3bsNPVSOX3obaB-w&ust=1441413231267571" id="irc_mil" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk;irc.il;" style="border-image: none; border: 0px currentColor; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img src="http://www.ebocoo.com/uploads/513%20Barnaby%20Phillips%20-%20Another%20Man's%20War-%20The%20Story%20of%20a%20Burma%20Boy%20in%20Britain's%20Forgotten%20Army%20(retail)%20(epub).pdf.jpg" height="200" id="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="154" /></a><br />
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<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Isaac
Fadoyebo was sixteen in 1943 when he signed up with the British Army to fight
in Burma. Not that he knew where he was going at the time, or that such a
country even existed. He was just a village boy in colonial Nigeria enticed by
the promise of money and adventure when his father refused to send him to
secondary school. A shilling a day – and all found - was twice what he could earn
as a ‘pupil teacher’, which was the highest his elementary education could
aspire to in his rural backwater where subsistence farming was the only
alternative. There was also the promise of preferential treatment for services
rendered the King of England should he survive, which turned out to be true in his
case, although the story of his survival was itself improbable.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There
were many Fadoyebos in Britain’s African possessions, and the imperial power was
in dire needed of their services. Although things were looking up on the other
fronts - Germany bogged down in the Soviet Union, the invasion of Italy
underway and Monty triumphant in North Africa – the Japanese were wreaking
havoc in South-East Asia. They had overrun Singapore, the Malaysian Peninsula
and now Burma, leaving an already fractious India – the jewel in the crown – vulnerable.
Moreover, Burma was a vital supply route for the Chinese, Japan’s longstanding
enemy, who were receiving American weapons from India. Expendable manpower was required
for the work of the world and Africa proved fertile recruiting ground, Nigeria
alone providing about 120,000 of them.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They
sailed first to the jewel itself, where Fadoyebo and his fellows were holed up
for three frustrating months before they crossed over in December. Among the
reasons for choosing them was their supposed familiarity with the topography
they now faced - ‘The jungle is so thick that, when you are in the middle of
it, you need a torch to see, although the sun may be high in the sky,’ to quote
Fadoyebo himself – but in fact they had experienced nothing like it. Worse was
to come with the onset of the monsoon in May when, for the next five months,
three times as much rain would fall as ‘the steamy coast of Nigeria receives in
an entire year’. But Fadoyebo was perhaps fortunate in this respect. Most of
his contingent weren’t even from the steamy south but from the open savannah of
the north bordering the Sahel.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
was tough going. With only picks, shovels, machetes and explosives, they were
ordered to build a jeep track 75 miles long ‘through the wild jungle hills and
ravines... In some sections, the track had to be cut into a cliff with a sheer
drop of hundreds of feet.’ They completed the task in three months and named it
‘West African Way’ but it cost many lives, including 44 Gambians who died from
cholera after drinking water from an apparently clear stream. In all of this,
they received fulsome praise from their officers, who considered them alone of
all the nationalities who fought in this campaign ‘capable of operating for
months on end in the worst country in the world, without vehicles and without
mules, and was alone able to carry all his warlike stores with him’. Another
admired ‘men who tolerated so much so patiently, and...with such good humour
and so little grumbling’.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Fadoyebo’s
own conventional war was to be relatively short-lived. Barely two months into
the crossing his unit was surprised by a Japanese patrol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All except Fadoyebo and a man called David
Kargbo from Sierra Leone were killed. Both had been shot in the initial
exchange but for some reason their assailants spared them:</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They
spoke so quickly he couldn’t understand. But they repeated a phrase again and
again. ‘English people. English people,’ they seemed to be saying. Were they
asking him whether there were any other officers? Did they want to know where
the survivors were hiding? Now they were gesturing for him to stand up. One of
them pointed a rifle at his head. They were saying something else, it must have
been. ‘Get up, get up,’ but Isaac could not even sit. He wondered at the idiocy
of it all. Did they think that, if he could get up, he would still be lying here?</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knew what was coming. The Japanese, take
prisoner? A white<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>man...perhaps, but a
black man? No chance. That was not how they did things. He closed his eyes and
waited to be shot.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The
shot never came. Of the two, Fadoyebo had sustained the more serious injuries
and was later to lose his right kneecap, leaving him with a limp for the rest
of what would prove to be a long, fruitful life.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And
so began his and Kargbo’s personal war. Wounded, surrounded by the enemy and in
the midst of a native population whose language they couldn’t understand and whose
allegiance they couldn’t fathom, they only survived by what Fadoyebo himself
termed ‘a stroke of unbelievable luck’, the title of the 60-page memoir he was
to write many years later. Their luck was that they were near a Moslem village
whose inhabitants were sympathetic to the British cause, which alone protected
them from oppression by the Buddhist majority. For erratic days over the next
few weeks, villagers visited their hideout with rice and water. They were
fearful of taking them into the village proper at the risk of being discovered
by a Japanese patrol, which wouldn’t have hesitated to do what they had
recently done to a chief in a neighbouring village:</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They
stripped him. They laid him down in the sun and then pinioned him to the ground
with bayonets through his hands and feet, and then carefully, and with skill,
they stripped the skin from his back and rubbed rock salt into the tortured
flesh. His village was forced to watch his execution, and stay watching until
he was dead, which, though he was over sixty, did not come to him until six
hours later.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">However,
after a harrowing few weeks in the open, and later under a makeshift shelter at
the onset of the monsoon, an apparition by the name of Shuyiman appeared before
them; in Fadoyebo’s recounting:</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">After
twelve days hunger lying down hidden in the jungle, we saw an Indian Mohammedan
coming towards us. On his arrival in this jungle the man said to us, ‘Oh
African brothers, have you had a chop?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We said, ‘Oh, our father, for twelve days
we have had no chop.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tears ran down his eyes, and he said to us,
‘I will sacrifice my life to be feeding you from today till the troops come, no
matter what will be the cost to Japanese wickedness.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">For
the next seven months, he hid them in the only bedroom of his bamboo house
which he shared with his wife and daughter (and, before long, a son). As it
turned out, there was only one scare when a Japanese patrol undertook a
house-to-house search and Shuyiman helped them into the bush behind. For the
rest, Fadoyebo never detected any anxiety on the part of his saviour or his
wife.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Phillips
first came cross this remarkable story of the ‘unlikely’ and ‘beautiful’ bond
between ‘two Africans and a Burmese in the Arakan jungle’ in 2009 when he
stumbled upon Fadoyebo’s manuscript in London’s Imperial War Museum while
researching a documentary for Al Jazeera. He tracked down the academic who had
worked on the manuscript some years earlier and obtained an address. Wondering
whether Fadoyebo was still alive, he asked a friend in Lagos, where he had once
worked as a BBC reporter to see if he could track him down. Some weeks passed
without any response and then he had his own stroke of unbelievable luck when the
friend confirmed that Fadoyebo was indeed alive and well and anxious to speak
with him. So began another unlikely – and beautiful - friendship.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Meeting
with Fadoyebo and listening to his story, Phillips is perturbed by his own country’s
refusal to acknowledge the services of men like Fadoyebo during the Empire’s
darkest hour. He is especially incensed that they were excluded from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Burma Victory</i>, the official documentary
commissioned by Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in
South East Asia, even though British army cameramen had gone out of their way
to capture them on film. All Fadoyebo himself received was a certificate
thanking him for his ‘Loyal Service’ and, under the column for medals, ‘Not Yet
Decided’. It was still undecided when he died, despite Phillips’s own attempt
to elicit a reason from the relevant authorities.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps
Phillips’s book will go some way to rectify this anomaly and it would be
fitting if it did so, albeit posthumously, but at least he has publicised their
case. But what have we here in Nigeria done? Where are our own accounts of how
our gallant men saved the empire from itself? Come to that, why did Phillips
have to discover Fadoyebo’s manuscript in London and not Lagos, the author
having tried and failed to get it published locally but for our broken-down
system? At one point, Phillips himself wonders at what he calls ‘Nigeria’s
sometimes baffling indifference to its own history’ but that hardly goes far
enough. History as a subject, as an ongoing interrogation of who we are and
where we are headed, has never been encouraged by the cabal which took over
from the British in 1960, so much so that it was recently expunged from the
school curriculum on the grounds that students shun it, and that History
graduates have difficulty securing jobs. And if Burma – another man’s war,
after all - seems too remote, especially in such a demographically young country,
what are we to say about the civil war in the late 1960s when the breakaway
state of Biafra attempted to secede and was crushed by the federal might on the
grounds that, ‘To keep Nigeria one/Is a task that must be done’? There is still
no official history of the central defining event of our post-colonial
experiment in ruling ourselves, which in any case only merited a single page in
the secondary school textbook I once came across in the days when History did
feature in the syllabus.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In
fact, there is no mystery about this ‘baffling indifference’, which is summed
up in the meaningless slogan that justified slaughtering over one million
people who merely wanted out of this polyglot colonial creation they never
agreed to in the first place. Tellingly, even the document which finally
amalgamated all the disparate parts in 1914 remains hidden, as if it might
finally reveal the country to be a fiction after all, what one early
nationalist called ‘a mere geographical expression’, which might also explain
why it has been left to the writers to chart its trajectory. Burma itself was
the subject of Biyi Bandele’s well received 2007 novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Burma Boy</i>, based on the tales his father, also a veteran, had told
him, as well as Rotimi Babatunde’s short story, ‘Bombay’s Republic’, which won
the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing. Unsurprisingly, many more novels have
tackled the civil war, the latest of which, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Half of a Yellow Sun</i> (2006), was
recently made into a film (directed, appropriately enough, by the same Biyi
Bandele.)</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">*</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Fadoyebo
himself didn’t seem to have been particularly bitter about his hitherto
invisibility but then he had made a success of his life, partly because his military
service got him a good government position, partly because he belonged to a
generation which enjoyed ‘the fruits of independence’, and partly because he finally
got the ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels his father had denied him. But those were the long-ago
days when the salary of a civil servant could buy a car, a house and raise six
children, all of them now graduates with their own cars, houses and children.
But he was bitter about what his country had become. As he recounts to
Phillips, what had once been the serene, middle-class neighbourhood he had moved
into with his young family had become a treeless, congested slum of high walls,
colonised public spaces and the endless roar of generators fouling up the air
because a country drowning in oil and flaring gas cannot provide constant
electricity. On one of Phillips’s many visits to a man who he warmed to for his
‘modesty, integrity and gentle humour’, and who reminded him of his
grandparents’ generation – ‘their emotional restraint, and how they would talk
about the war when I was a small boy. Or, in fact, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> talk about it very much, unless prompted’ – he waxed eloquent
on the need for a revolution. Phillips, having himself endured life in the
country, found it difficult to disagree with him, but is nevertheless seduced by
the people’s fabled energy and optimism.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Medals
aside, Fadoyebo’s greatest regret was that he never got to properly thank
Shuyiman and his wife for saving his life. The occasion of their rescue was a
matter of great fanfare in the village and then he and Kargbo were whisked away,
although many years later, in London in 1969, he had a strange encounter which
filled in a gap. He was attending a training course for Commonwealth civil
servants, itself evidence of his ‘arrival,’ and was sitting alone in a
restaurant near Victoria Station when he noticed an older white man openly staring
at him. The man eventually came over, greeted him in Hausa and remarked that he
had noticed him limping when he entered. As Fadoyebo started to explain, the
man’s face ‘lit up in recognition’. It turned out that he was a retired Major
who knew all about his and Kargbo’s ‘improbable survival’; and added: ‘By the
way, that chap who hid you and looked after you. We gave him piles of rupees,
and some cows as well. He became a rich man.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
was only after the Major had left that it occurred to him that he might have
asked for more information; and now, equally improbably, another Englishman had
mysteriously turned up with the promise of closure. Both knew at once that
Fadoyebo was too ill to undertake what would prove to be a gruelling journey,
and Shuyiman, who was already in his forties when he rescued his African
brothers in the bush, would have long since died, but Phillips was determined
to go to Burma and deliver a letter to his surviving relatives:</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On my last morning in Lagos, I went to Isaac’s
house in Surulere to say goodbye. He had not heard me enter the compound. I
found him in the yard, hunched over a table, half-dressed in shorts and an old
vest, but writing intently. For the first time, I saw Isaac’s misshapen right
leg. He had no right knee as such, just a long dark scar underneath where his
kneecap had once been. He was absorbed in composing the letter that he wanted
me to deliver to Shuyiman’s family.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Phillips
arrived in Burma during the monsoon. He had to pretend to be a tourist because
journalists weren’t welcome. He did indeed manage to trace the village – an
improbable event all by itself - and delivered the letter, as you can see from
the documentary on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">YouTube</i>. But what
the documentary doesn’t convey is the wretched state they and their people were
living in as unwanted minorities under a paranoid military regime: ‘Rangoon was
a city of strange, stilted conversations. People seemed to talk to me in
riddles, hinting at fears and frustrations rather than explicitly spelling it
out, only to abruptly shut up whenever a stranger approached. The regime’s
spies, I was warned, were everywhere, and wearing plain clothes.'</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Nigeria
also laboured under military rule but they never embedded themselves in this
way. Phillips wonders whether this was because they just didn’t have the
stomach for it or were simply not organised enough, but then Nigeria, unlike
Burma, doesn’t have a dominant ethnic group under one religion with an idea of a
past greatness. Moreover, Phillips himself is struck by the different responses
to British subjugation when he contrasts the respective fates of the old
colonial clubs. Those in Rangoon are all but closed down; those in Lagos are bubbling:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The
difference with Nigeria is striking. The clubs of colonial Lagos were just as
important to the British, but most of them are still thriving today. Once the
likes of Aduke Alakija [currently ‘the richest black woman in the world’] had
forced their way into the Ikoyi Club they never looked back... In Nigeria,
British snobbishness met its match in the local elite’s own sense of
entitlement. Nigerians cheerfully adapted colonial traditions they admired and
discarded the rest.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps
it wasn’t so much that the Burmese didn’t feel entitled as that Nigerians have
no lingering resentment about the colonial period, or even any quarrel over the
name they were given and the language they were bequeathed. On the contrary, as
the country’s first Prime Minister put on the eve of independence (and which
Phillips quotes), Nigerians knew the British ‘first as masters, and then as
leaders, and finally as partners, but always as friends’. It was a gracious
thing to say, no doubt, but it was also true. However, it was also true that
Nigeria didn’t have to endure foreign troops rampaging through it. The chapter
on Burma makes for dismal reading. Even the sainted Aung San Suu Kyi comes off
badly with her refusal to speak out on the plight of Shuyiman’s people.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And
then there was David Kargbo, the man who had shared his fate in that faraway
bush, and who Fadoyebo credits with electing to remain with him when he could
have taken his chances in that same bush. They parted at Freetown on the ship
that delivered Fadoyebo back home and never met or even corresponded again.
Phillips, who is nothing if not as intrepid as his empire-building forebears,
managed to track down his widow. She was in her late eighties, ‘a striking
woman, with a fierce and proud stare’. She told him that her husband had died
many years before in his early forties ‘because of the mysterious things that
had happened to him in the war’. She had nothing to remember him by: the civil
war in her own country had destroyed his photos and war records when their
house was burnt down by marauding ‘rebels’ who specialised in disembowelling
pregnant women and hacking off limbs.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It’s
tempting to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Another Man’s War</i> as
the kind of gift every writer craves, a ready-made story of the hapless
individual pitted against world historical forces and living to tell the tale -
or having it told for him - by a stroke of ‘unbelievable luck’, but then it
would never have been told but for the passion of the author. Phillips is a
proud Englishman, hence his outrage over the matter of Fadoyebo’s medal; would
that we were proud Nigerians, outraged by our neglect of those who have done us
proud.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><em>Adewale Maja-Pearce's latest book is </em>The House My Father Built <em>(Kachifo, 2014)<o:p></o:p></em></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-25962592379512542512015-03-26T16:33:00.000-07:002015-03-26T16:33:41.673-07:00The no-choice electionI won’t be voting in this year’s election in Nigeria, the fifth since the return of civilian rule in 1999 following many years of the military. It’s partly my fault; partly the fault of the misnamed Independent National Electoral Commission (misnamed because the chair is appointed directly by the president, as he has repeatedly reminded us), which couldn’t find evidence of my 2011 registration despite the obscene amount spent on laptops.<br />
<br />
But no matter; I wouldn’t vote if I could. Neither candidate – still less the parties they represent – will lead this country of embarrassing abundance to the Promised Land. Take the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south. To say that his performance has been abysmal is acknowledged even by his unsavoury handlers who ceaselessly attempt to counter the widespread notion that their boss is clueless – the adjective most used to describe him – thereby confirming the fact.<br />
<br />
It is four years since Boko Haram launched its deadly campaign and yet it is only now that he has seen fit to address it, but only with the assistance of soldiers from neighbouring Chad and Cameroon (along with South African mercenaries), a humiliation for a country whose armed forces were once lauded by the UN for bringing peace to Liberia and Sierra Leone.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, his opponent, Muhammadu Buhari of the opposition Alliance for Progressive Change, is a northern Moslem and former military dictator who thought nothing of executing three men with a retroactive decree, allowing for indefinite detention without charge or trial and having people whipped for not queuing at the bus stop. He is also believed by many in the south to be a Boko Haram sympathiser, having previously refused to condemn their murderous activities on the grounds that they were freedom fighters akin to the Niger Delta militants. Claiming now to be a born-again democrat, he has nevertheless insisted that he has no regrets for his past misdemeanours.<br />
<br />
There is a perverse irony in the fact that a nation of 170 million people – the so-called ‘Giant of Africa’ – should be pulverized between two candidates who hardly represent the best on offer. Indeed, reading local and foreign reports one would hardly suspect that 10 other candidates are also vying for the top slot come polling day on 28 March. This is deliberate. The Constitution which berthed our recent experiment in democracy, the fourth such since independence from British colonial rule in 1960, ensures that only those with access to the oil money that is the raison d’être of Nigeria can hope to achieve high office. Buhari is no more or less ‘establishment’ than Jonathan. Both are merely tendencies within it, to use old-fashioned Marxist rhetoric.<br />
<br />
The irony lies in the fact that these tendencies are now in open conflict for the spoils at a time when the value of this same oil is plummeting in the international marketplace. The point, at any rate, is that the outcome of this titanic battle can make little or no difference to ‘the masses’ – to use Nigerian parlance – who will continue to subsist on a dollar or day in a nation otherwise dubbed too rich to be poor. The fact that it doesn’t stop them from hoping, accounts in large part for the astonishing fact that a member of the reviled Hausa-Fulani aristocracy with unsavoury antecedents should be championed by Jonathan’s otherwise natural supporters, and tacitly acknowledged by Jonathan’s voluble wife, who is currently criss-crossing the country pleading that her husband be allowed a second term on the grounds that he has learned from his past mistakes.<br />
<br />
The salient fact about the current elections is the complete absence of any coherent ideas from the two leading contenders about how they propose to ‘move the nation forward’ (as we also like to say). Instead, we are reduced to slanging matches over forged certificates – Did Buhari finish primary school? Did Jonathan get a doctorate in zoology? Salacious gossip – Was Buhari’s wife 10 years old when he married her? Is Jonathan’s wife old enough to be his mother? And plain drivel, with Mrs. Jonathan calling Buhari “as old as Jonathan’s father”, and Mrs. Buhari suggesting that all southern women who fetch up in Italy are prostitutes.<br />
<br />
As I write, the smart money is on Buhari, an outcome which ‘the West’ would seem to favour – the Economist of London called him the ‘least awful’ option despite his questionable credentials (not just scholastic) at a time of paranoia against Islamic fundamentalism. But nobody wants to contemplate the disintegration that will surely be the result of another four years of Jonathan’s cluelessness.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©
Adewale Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
(This piece first appeared in African Arguments, an online publication of the Royal African Society in the UK)<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and
Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, was<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published
last year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-24669851729762282962015-01-29T01:54:00.000-08:002015-02-01T11:11:53.359-08:00Between Jonathan and Buhari, how did we find ourselves in this mess?<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">One doesn’t have to be a member of the opposition All Progressive’s
Congress in order to consider President Goodluck Jonathan a colossal failure.
Whether he is the most corrupt of Nigeria’s long list of venal leaders is
debatable and possibly pointless, but what really rankles in all but the most
partisan is the impunity he has allowed to be celebrated.</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">As I write, there are reports that $700mn in cash was discovered in the
home of Diezani Allison-Madueke, the long-serving petroleum minister (where all
the money comes from, or what is left of it), who was earlier accused of
blowing N10bn on chartered aircraft over a two-year period while she admonished
the masses to stop ‘pointing to corruption, if we are not prepared to bear some
of the hardship.’ </span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">And hardship is what Nigerians suffer daily. Five years after assuming
office following the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua, most still live without
reliable electricity or running water, and the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency
continues to make a mockery of the county’s armed forces, abducting schoolgirls
at will and decimating entire towns. They are currently threatening Maiduguri,
the Borno State capital.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ordinarily, Jonathan’s defeat in next month’s elections should be a
foregone conclusion, the more so given his inability to come across as halfway
coherent, as is painfully obvious in the (significantly few) interviews he has
granted the international media. Clueless is the word most bandied about him in
the pages of the newspapers. Unfortunately, his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, a
retired General and former military dictator, comes with questionable credentials.
</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Literally so: the raging controversy – and raging it is – concerns his
primary school leaving certificate, which he does or does not have but which he
needs in order to qualify for the job. He swore to it in an affidavit he filed
with the Independent National Electoral Commission but then went quiet when the
ruling People’s Democratic Party called him on it, only to produce a document
containing subjects that weren’t offered back then in grades that didn’t exist.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The problem with the suspect certificate is that Buhari is running as Mr
Clean, having overseen the ‘War Against Indiscipline’ in his previous
incarnation in khaki, when he also caused three men to be executed with a
retroactive decree and had soldiers whip people in the street for not standing
in line. But then he was young and impulsive – ‘youthful exuberance,’ as we
like to say – and is perhaps more tolerant now that he is older and wearing an
Agbada. </span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Then there is the added problem of his apparent Boko Haram sympathies.
Just two years ago he compared them to the Niger delta militants while arguing
in favour of an amnesty for them on the grounds that both were fighting an
‘injustice’. His reasoning was difficult to follow but he has since distanced
himself from ‘these barbaric purveyors of power’ and promised to mop them up
within the first three months of his administration, although that would be a
miracle given the impunity with which Boko Haram has so far annexed 20 per cent
of the Nigerian state against a military mired in corruption. Unfortunately, a
miracle is what Nigerians are looking for with Jonathan only promising more of
the same.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">At the root of all the angst over who we should or shouldn’t vote for is
the idea that this is the moment when the country will break up. That Nigeria
is already failing is not in doubt, which is why John Kerry, the US Secretary
of State, is currently in town cautioning both candidates to play by the rules.
But it was this same America which ten years ago predicted our collapse this
year, at least according to popular mythology, which is invariably the
prevailing mood in interesting times. In fact, America wasn’t the culprit but
the Washington-based National Intelligence Council that envisioned ‘the
outright collapse of Nigeria’ in 2015, but America (if not President George W.
Bush himself) might as well have said so. Not that it matters. Most Nigerians
believe it, if only because the Nigerian media has reiterated the same ad
nauseam because checking the accuracy of their claims is not what they are primarily
paid for.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The result, as I write, is a Buhari victory by a small margin, at least
as gauged from the social media, from which most Nigerians – rural, largely
illiterate – are excluded (this makes accurate polling very difficult). Nobody
but Jonathan’s hangers-on and their dependants (the contractors, the civil
servants, the fly-by-nights both foreign and local) seem to want him back. </span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 12pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But what might a Buhari presidency portend? And why should the
‘Giant of Arica’, recently christened the continent’s largest economy, be
polarised between these two representatives of 160 million people? That we
should even ask the question is ‘the problem with Nigeria’ in all its ethnic,
linguistic and religious ramifications, and not merely in the dismal quality of
its leadership, as the late Chinua Achebe would have it. Achebe himself, the
title of whose 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, was prophetic enough, titled his
last book, a memoir of the civil war of the late 1960s we seem intent on
fighting all over again, There Was a Country.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">But all of this is to
assume that the elections will be held in the first place. A few days ago,
Sambo Dasuki, the national security advisor (and himself a retired General),
recommended postponing the elections – which in any case can’t possibly be held
properly in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states, where the emergency currently
persists. Jonathan himself has little interest in Borno and Yobe (Adamawa is
leaning towards the PDP), which Buhari swept in 2011 using the same affidavit
concerning his academic qualifications (or lack thereof). The question really
is: How did we find ourselves in this predicament so many years after we won the
right to direct our own affairs?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
Adewale Maja-Pearce<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 36pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">This
piece first appeared in African Arguments, an online publication of the Royal
African Society in the UK<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, was </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published last year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-78620233577716289412014-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:002014-12-15T12:58:26.681-08:00The House My Father Built 6<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img alt="The House My Father Built_front" class="wp-image-4546 size-medium aligncenter" height="200" src="https://farafinabooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-house-my-father-built_front.jpg?w=196&h=300" width="130" /><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And so it was, at last, that I had entered into my
possession, as the late Prince himself would have put it. The journey had begun
twenty years earlier when my father died, although I had to wait another ten
years for the terms of his will to be satisfied before I could lay claim to it.
Naively, I had assumed that the tenants would leave of their own accord when I
called on each of them in turn, and that the courts would quickly deal with any
stragglers. Even at this distance I still clearly recall the Alhaji smirking at
my English accent as he heard me out in his parlour. He knew the score. He also
knew that I was unlikely to stay the course and he was almost proved right. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But I was also lucky. I was lucky that two of the
tenants did indeed comply with the one year rent-free I offered them, lucky in
a job that enabled me to travel back and forth at will, lucky in the nation’s
on-going tragedy – Abiola, Abacha, Saro-Wiwa: the three faces of our collective
dilemma – which kept the country centre-stage. I was lucky, finally, in having
to fight for it, which was the measure of what it meant to me – and with it the
country I desired to make my own.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Childhood was an unreliable guide, made more so by
my privileged upbringing where the gutters didn’t overflow and there was more
than one bathroom with running water. Now I had to see the country for what it
was: the Alhaji laughing on his way out of the magistrates’ office while I
waited three hours for the next date; Baba Ibadan ordering me to ‘sign, my
friend’ at a police station which specialised in torture; Prince hiring
suspected killers to dispose of me. As Prince himself used to say, ‘Move by
faith and not by sight,’ which I thought a good philosophy, even if he didn’t
seem inclined to follow it himself, as I would invariably remark whenever he
uttered it, whereupon he would burst into laughter, revealing his missing front
tooth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But all that was a long time ago now, longer than
the time it took me to dislodge the Alhaji and Ngozi and Pepsi, and longer
again since my father died, the man who had willed me the house he built that
made it all possible. I have written about him elsewhere. I had my problems
with him; he had his problems with me. One of them was that I wanted to be a
writer, not a physician, an incomprehensible decision which kept us estranged
for years. The irony was that Nigeria was all that engaged me as a writer,
which was why his gift was so apt, even if he hadn’t imagined it that way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©
Adewale Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and
Dream Chasers.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-47695582164440415582014-12-08T17:06:00.000-08:002014-12-08T17:06:50.585-08:00The House My Father Built 5
<br />
<img alt="The House My Father Built_front" class="wp-image-4546 size-medium aligncenter" height="200" src="https://farafinabooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-house-my-father-built_front.jpg?w=196&h=300" width="130" /><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">We were all
gathered in the charge room, Prince and his friend on one side, me on the
other. The officer sat in front of us with a woman detective beside him. He
read my petition then turned to me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘So what do you
say happened?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘This man has
refused to pay me any rent for almost four years now and when I finally told
him to go, he threatened me.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">He nodded and
turned to Prince. ‘And what is your own?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘OC, it is not
that I don’t want to pay, only that I don’t have any money now. I am a
politician. When my aspirants…’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Can’t you even
pay something?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Like I said, I
am a politician and I have my aspirants…’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As he spoke, the
charge officer turned to the woman detective and said something to her, then
looked back at Prince.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Eh heh, what
were you saying?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘My aspirants
have promised me a post once they win the election.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘I think you
should try and pay something,’ he said. ‘As you see me here, I also have to pay
rent. Even this year, I had to beg my landlord to give me some more time to
balance him, but I had to first give him something so that he could hear me.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Like I said,
OC, once my aspirants…’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As he spoke, the
officer leaned over to the woman and said something and she replied.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘He’s not
listening to me,’ Prince said, giving up.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘I think it is a
matter of self-respect,’ the officer said. ‘Everybody must pay their rent.’ He
shook his head in bafflement and wrote on a sheet of paper and handed it to
Baba Ibadan, who beckoned us all to follow him, including the woman detective.
On our way out, we collected a wretched-looking young man in handcuffs. At
first, I thought we were going by police van, but we left the station and
crossed the main road and stood waiting for a taxi. It was about 11 o’clock and
people were going about their normal business, hustling in Lagos, as The Poet
would say. Suddenly, the man in handcuffs legged it. Baba Ibadan and the woman
detective tore after him. Prince laughed and said something to his friend. It
was surreal. Here we were, standing on busy Western Avenue not far from where
Pepsi was killed by a runaway bus, and there was nothing in the world to
prevent Prince himself from taking off. He wasn’t even handcuffed.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Baba Ibadan and
his colleague caught their quarry and we hailed a taxi. Prince and his friend
squeezed in the front; the rest of us squeezed in the back. The price hadn’t
been discussed but, as usual, I would be paying. There was some initial
confusion about which of the four courtrooms we would still find a magistrate
sitting. It turned out to be the other one in the same block where I had been
coming and going with the Alhaji and Pepsi, with the same spreading almond tree
in the middle, the same old man sitting under it and the same charge-and-bail
lawyers looking for custom, one of whom quickly latched onto Prince.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It seems that
the court had to be reconvened because the magistrate was getting ready to
leave for the day. While we waited, the man in handcuffs, who was sitting on
the concrete floor, made a drinking gesture. A shop nearby advertised ‘pure
water’, so I bought two sachets and gave them to him. The woman detective
smiled in approval; Baba Ibadan said that the man had raped an eight-year-old
girl left in his care by his master. I don’t know what became of him because
our case was called first. Prince stood in the dock, just like the tout who had
run away with my phone money and looking just as bewildered. The charge was
read out: hiring suspected assassins. Even I went a little weak at that. Prince
was asked whether he wanted to plead guilty or not guilty. He looked to his
newly acquired lawyer, who was himself getting to his feet. The lawyer gave his
little speech but the magistrate, who seemed to be in a hurry, set a date for
hearing one month hence and remanded him in custody on <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>100, 000 surety to be guaranteed by two people with landed
property in Lagos State.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Oga, bring
money,’ Baba Ibadan said to me.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘What for?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Abi you no see
as we dey take <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>15 biro put person for
prison,’ he said. ‘I wan’ take am go Ikoyi.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce
is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon? A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka? From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"> page: </span><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a></span>Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-14410843443401183812014-12-02T12:19:00.000-08:002014-12-02T12:19:46.854-08:00The House My Father Built 4
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><img alt="The House My Father Built_front" class="wp-image-4546 size-medium aligncenter" height="200" src="https://farafinabooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-house-my-father-built_front.jpg?w=196&h=300" width="130" /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Back home, I
felt shabby. How had I acted any differently from the tenants? Later that day,
I went down to see Prince. He was standing on his balcony, rubbing his belly
and eyeing the local talent as he nursed a huge reefer. I told him that I was
thinking of leaving Pepsi and his family where they were. I didn’t tell him
that the BQ wasn’t even mine. My father had given it to the younger of my two
brothers in addition to his share in the main building and I was still smarting
from the favouritism he had shown him. Prince considered me for a moment and
then indicated that we should go inside. When we were seated, he said that I
was making a mistake; that first I had to let Pepsi know who was boss by
throwing him out. I could let him back in afterwards on new terms if I still
felt the same way although he, personally, wouldn’t recommend it because a man
who can call the police for you will do worse the next time. He was right, of
course, and so, the next day, properly mobilized, off he went to bribe the High
Court judge.</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">He was pleased
as Punch when he returned.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘I first went to
greet Sunday and then I thought to check whether the judge was around. When I
got to the office the clerk asked me if I wanted to see him. Just like that.
The judge looked at the file and said, “Oh, you have a good lawyer. Yes, a good
lawyer.” He read through the papers and said, “Oh, this is a simple case, yes,
a simple case. Just tell your lawyer that it has no merit and should be struck
out. No merit. That’s all.” I thanked him and asked if I could buy bread for
his children. He laughed and told me to discuss it with his clerk, who demanded
for <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>5, 000.’ He paused and watched me,
waiting for the words to sink in. ‘Can you believe that?’ he continued. ‘Just <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>5, 000 for a whole High Court judge!’ He
paused again and shook his head. ‘Naija done spoil,’ he concluded and laughed,
not altogether disapprovingly.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And that was how
it happened. But my lawyer from the fire-on-the-mountain chambers almost goofed
even though Pepsi himself was absent at the hearing. Just before we entered the
courtroom Prince told him that everything was sorted and he should just say
blah blah blah, no problem. As he spoke, I noticed that my lawyer wasn’t paying
attention, as though to say, don’t teach me my work. When our case was finally
called he went into a long spiel citing this and that from all the books he had
lugged along. The clerk, realizing that he was in danger of derailing, leaned
over and whispered to the judge even as my lawyer prattled on. Finally, the
judge raised his hand and asked him whether, in essence, he wanted the case to be
struck out, whereupon my lawyer agreed and it was struck out. We immediately
notified Sunday. He was happy to see us. Another payday.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So it was all
over. Pepsi didn’t put up any resistance this time. Prince and I sat upstairs
drinking beer as we watched the proceedings. It was a melancholy, overcast sort
of day, always threatening to rain but never doing so and, for once, Prince
wore a singlet over his protruding belly. As with the Alhaji, Pepsi had taken
the precaution of stripping the place of every fixture and fitting, including
the wire that ran from his meter at the front of the main building all the way
to the BQ at the back. He must have done it when we were out, perhaps in
revenge for me cutting his light. Replacing it alone cost me <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>6, 000.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As before, when
Ngozi found herself similarly embarrassed, some of the neighbours offered space
for Pepsi and his wife to store their belongings. The widow even said she could
take in their daughter, but Pepsi’s wife declined. She was the one directing
Pepsi where to put what. He once ventured an opinion but she shouted him down,
‘I said pack the plates, pack the plates,’ as if she was talking to a small
boy, which scandalized Prince no end. One year later, I heard that Pepsi was
dead. It happened that he was waiting for a customer at Ojuelegba, the busy
intersection made famous by Fela from the time he lived there, when a runaway
bus ploughed into him. I also heard that his widow and children were living at
Akoka, just around the corner from the university. I thought of going to visit
them but didn’t and then it was too late. Besides, what would I have said?</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-63461491254340629732014-11-25T14:30:00.000-08:002014-11-25T14:30:20.047-08:00The House My Father Built 3<img alt="The House My Father Built_front" class="wp-image-4546 size-medium aligncenter" height="320" src="https://farafinabooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-house-my-father-built_front.jpg?w=196&h=300" width="208" />
<br />
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">By and by, my
lawyer came back to say that all was now on course and that the eviction would
be carried out the following week. Unfortunately, he failed to do the proper
checks, otherwise he would have seen that Pepsi had gone down the same route as
Ngozi and the Alhaji and filed a motion against the ‘purported consent
judgement’ he had agreed to the previous year. As with the Alhaji, the matter
had been heard in my absence and a date set for a hearing three months hence.
Worse yet, we only discovered this when the bailiff and his boys came to evict
him, but not before Pepsi himself received a beating.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The bailiff
turned up with his boys just before dawn. I gave him money to go to the station
to register the action and collect two policemen, as he should already have
done, while the rest of us settled down in Prince’s parlour with the obligatory
bottle of Chelsea and some reefers. Dawn was breaking when a jeep pulled up in
front with Pepsi and four armed policemen. I was surprised because I hadn’t
seen Pepsi leave. He must have been watching us from his kitchen window and had
perhaps been doing so for a number of days. I went out to meet them and
introduced myself as the landlord and asked them what the problem was. Their
Oga said that Pepsi had come to complain about some ‘miscreants’ in the
compound. I said that the only strangers around were from the High Court come
to evict the very man who was making the complaint. I added that the bailiff
was even now registering the matter at their station. As I spoke, they drifted
back to their jeep, where they waited with bored expressions. Eventually, one
of them said, ‘Oga, make we dey go, I never chop,’ and off they went.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Pepsi loitered
about for a while, apparently confused as to what to do next, and then his wife
came out and told him to go and wait at the junction. As soon as he was gone,
Prince told the bailiff’s boys to follow him and keep an eye on him.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Can you
imagine,’ Prince said. ‘Pepsi brought police to arrest us.’ He was
incandescent, as well he might have been. ‘He is in trouble today. I was about
telling the boys to go easy on him but because of this I will tell them to
teach him a lesson. And it is his wife who is putting him up to it. Pepsi can’t
go to police by himself.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">He entered his
bedroom and emerged in a singlet and a flat cap. Prince favoured caps, which he
pulled down low over his eyes.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Let me go and
see what’s happening,’ he said and marched off with his springy step, his heels
barely touching the ground, his back straight, his head held up: a man ready
for action. I went upstairs to make my morning tea, but while I was waiting for
the water to boil I saw a small crowd heading towards the compound. I got
downstairs in time to see Pepsi being dragged along by a policeman. His feet were
bare, his T-shirt was torn and blood was running down the side of his face. The
policeman held him fast by the collar and the top of his shorts, which were
filthy, as if he had fallen into a gutter. The bailiff’s boys followed behind,
breathing heavily.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Why are you
doing this to yourself?’ I said.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Do I know for
him?’ the policeman quipped as he marched him to the back, where he stood him
up against the wall.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Where is the
key?’ the policeman demanded, pointing to Pepsi’s security gate, which was
padlocked.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘I don’t have
it,’ Pepsi said as he crouched against the wall.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One of the boys
kicked at the gate, which held fast. He turned to me. ‘Oga, bring money, let me
go and get welder.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I gave him and
he set off.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Prince appeared.
‘His wife has the key,’ he said. ‘She’s refusing to come.’ He was breathing
heavily, his big belly going up and down. He turned to me. ‘Come, let’s go
inside.’ We entered his parlour, where he poured himself a generous shot of
Chelsea and then told me what had happened. Apparently, they were all standing
at the junction when the bailiff arrived with the two policemen. Prince pointed
to Pepsi, who suddenly bolted, almost colliding with a car. The boys took off
after him, closely followed by the policemen. They caught up with him at the
next junction one hundred meters away ‘and beat hell out of him.'</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘It was
terrible,’ Prince continued. ‘You should have seen him, curled up in a ball.
The boys beat him for trying to get them arrested and then the police added
their own for making them run this early morning. Afterwards, they carried him
in the air and started coming until some people begged them to let him walk by
himself for the sake of his dignity.’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘What of his
wife?’</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘That one? She
just stood there and did nothing. Does she care?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Aluta
continua</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-13624615030248275642014-11-18T15:48:00.000-08:002014-11-19T04:11:02.901-08:00The House My Father Built 2<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img alt="The House My Father Built_front" class="wp-image-4546 size-medium aligncenter" height="300" src="https://farafinabooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-house-my-father-built_front.jpg?w=196&h=300" width="196" /><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I first met
Prince when he introduced himself to me as I was walking past a bungalow in the
close. I had allowed him to catch my eye because I had just then embarked on
the election handbook and had noticed a party flag and some posters on the
front wall but the place was always deserted. It turned out that Prince was the
campaign manager for one of the state gubernatorial candidates, although it
didn’t appear that his man was overly serious about his political ambitions,
perhaps because the eventual winner was already known (internal democracy being
considered a foreign endearment, as I was discovering in my researches) and was
simply positioning himself for his own slice of the national cake baked in the
swampy heat of the oil-producing Niger Delta that had caused Saro-Wiwa to be
hanged. There was a chair, a table and an outdated newspaper in one of the
three bedrooms that passed for Prince’s office. The rest of the flat was bare. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Moreover, since
it soon transpired that his aspirant never actually paid him for his services,
and there wasn’t in any case much for him to do, he was forever on the lookout
for other means of getting by. As it also happened, I needed someone to visit
all the registered party offices to collect whatever literature they had that I
could use. Moving around Lagos was difficult enough – too many vehicles, too
few roads, no alternatives despite the city’s extensive waterways. There were
twenty-six registered parties altogether, eventually whittled down to three to
satisfy so-called national spread, meaning that they had to have a presence in
two-thirds of the thirty-six states, plus the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja,
where they were also to have their head office. In a country with too many
languages, too many ethnicities and too many religions this meant, in effect,
that the minorities and special interest groups who between them comprise half
the total population were excluded from representation by the so-called Big Three,
much to Prince’s approval. “The minorities will have their say but the majorities
will have their way,” was how he put it and laughed when I muttered something
about fascism. Prince was nothing if not reactionary, in politics as in
everything else.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Prince is dead
now. It seems he had a heart attack in the middle of the night and it took too
long to get him to the hospital. I wasn’t surprised when I heard. He would have
been about sixty then, the same age I am now, and I hadn’t seen him since he
had become a nuisance in his own turn, but it was perhaps a wonder that he
lived as long as he did. He was just above middle height, with the physique of
an athlete – he told me he had been an amateur boxer in his youth – but for his
stomach, which was the biggest I have ever seen on anybody. Not that he was
disturbed by what some might have considered a self-inflicted deformity. On the
contrary, he lolled about bare-chested whenever he was indoors and I never had
the impression that he thought it a sexual turn-off, if only because he
regarded the women he openly salivated over (which is to say, almost any woman
who crossed his path) as sex objects and nothing more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">'</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Look at that,
the devil walking on hind legs,' he once said with sudden fierceness when a
comely woman strolled by as we sat drinking beer on the front balcony where
Ngozi had once kept her generator. His vehemence took even him by surprise
because he suddenly giggled and said something to the effect that he hadn’t had
a screw in ages, although he needn’t have worried on my score.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Prince was also
reliable, if expensive. He liked nothing better than a clear brief, although a
good number of the party offices he visited when he embarked on the first of
the many assignments I gave him over the years that we were together turned out
to be either bogus – a rented room where nobody ever turned up after the
registration exercise, and the landlord looking for the balance of his rent –
or were reluctant to part with their manifestos (assuming they had one) because
Oga was not ‘on seat’. At the end of each day, he would fetch the beers from
the woman down the road. ‘You can send an old man a message but don’t tell him
to run,’ he would invariably quip before settling down to read all six
newspapers I bought every day as I worked away on the balcony overlooking the
school in the adjoining compound. By and by, I felt confident enough to entrust
him with extending my Nigerian passport.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">'</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They thought
you were a Lebanese,' he said when he returned some hours later and told me how
he had found someone in the office who spoke his language and all was sorted.
It also happened to coincide with the day Ngozi was supposed to have been
evicted and he could see that I was agitated, so I brought him up to speed. He
was shocked when I told him that the Alhaji was a tenant. 'The Alhaji!' he
exclaimed. 'But I thought he was the owner of the building. That is what he has
been telling people.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">'</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Which
people?'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">'</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Everybody,'
he said. 'He is a big man, you know. He used to be a socialite. Whenever he
went to a party he would spray more than anyone else, although they didn’t know
he was using condemned money from his office that should have been destroyed,
but which he packed into his house in beer cartons. Chief Ebenezer Obey even
wrote a song about him.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><em>Aluta
continua</em>...</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, </span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
</div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-16851822877921630962014-11-12T08:46:00.000-08:002014-11-12T17:13:39.651-08:00The House My Father Built 1<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img alt="Image preview" class="u-block" height="200" src="https://o.twimg.com/2/proxy.jpg?t=HBgtaHR0cDovL3N0YXRpYy5vdy5seS9waG90b3Mvb3JpZ2luYWwvN3RkZDEuanBnFMAHFLoLABYAEgA&s=1IMyeucgMeuq2mNKkPoLSZW7HSGYRJINjoPNV9ifR20" width="130" /></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Over the next few weeks I will be running extracts from my new book, The House My Father Built, which has just been published by Farafina under their Kamsi imprint. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The book itself, a memoir about how I returned to Nigeria to possess my possession, is a follow-up to my earlier travelogue, In My Father's Country, published in 1987. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The third part of the projected trilogy, A Farewell to My Father's Country, will be published anon (but hopefully not with so long a gap).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'I hadn’t expected anything from my father’s will and was surprised when I discovered that he had left my siblings and me a block of four flats – one each for my mother’s children – in a decent area of Lagos. The property itself was initially tied up in a trust fund whose terms were only satisfied when I was in a position to return to the country in a meaningful way. I was forty then, ten years exactly after my first journey back following my father’s death, and lucky enough to be working as Africa editor of Index on Censorship, a Cold War journal whose mission was to bring the light of democracy to the dark places of the earth, first behind the Iron Curtain and then elsewhere. I was lucky, also, that Nigeria was caught up in a crisis, by which I mean a crisis within the larger one that has been the nation’s lot since independence in 1960. Elections had been organised after many years of military rule, but were annulled before the counting was over in order that the military might continue. At the same time, apartheid was coming to an end in South Africa, leaving what we are pleased to call the ‘giant of Africa’ fully exposed in all its wanton corruption. It was easy enough to convince a foreign foundation to underwrite my extended trips to Lagos. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'Two of the flats, along with the annex at the back, were still occupied by tenants who had refused my earlier offer of a year rent-free to help them move so I put a friend in one to keep an eye on things during my prolonged absences and settled into the other as I prepared to do battle. I had no idea at the time how fierce and long-drawn out it would turn out to be, how rancorous and tiring, how absurd and humiliating. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'The most combative – outwardly at least – was the Yoruba Alhaji in the front flat downstairs, a squat, thick-set man in his early fifties with red lips, bandy legs and a white skull cap. He thought me amusing when I politely knocked on his door and told him that he had to go in a year’s time, but that it wasn’t personal. In the event, it took me six years to be rid of him, only ending, neatly enough, with the hasty transition to democracy, which the by now hapless military was forced to organise in order to save what remained of its – and the country’s – dismal reputation. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'Because the Alhaji had rented directly from my father when the place was newly built twenty years earlier, it was obvious at once that he regarded me as something of an interloper. He was also my senior in age so that, in his eyes, I was doubly done, Nigeria being a gerontocracy in the interests of ‘African tradition’ – a useful concept to invoke whenever anyone tried to suggest the desirability of ‘Western’ notions of freedom of expression, equality before the law and other such inconveniences. He fought dirty and encouraged the other two to stand their ground alongside him, but it was partly my own doing that the case dragged for so long. The arrangement I had with the magazine meant that I could only manage two months in Lagos at one time. This meant, in turn, taking long adjournments, but then I was the only one who wanted a quick resolution in what I had assumed would be an open- and-shut case.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'The more drawn-out the case the more money I would have to part with, which suited not only whichever lawyer I happened to be using at the time (and I went through a number of them) but also the court clerk, the fellow who helped with the photocopying (always so many papers) and even the old man under the spreading almond tree in the front as though for all the world it was his office, which in a way it was. At each sitting, I would arrive at the court at nine sharp, only to see the Alhaji emerge from the magistrate’s chambers and drive off with his trademark smirk that betrayed what I thought a pointless triumphalism. Two or three hours later, my case would finally be called. The magistrate would bark at my lawyer over some infraction or other and then bring down his gavel to the spontaneous refrain, ‘As the court pleases’. I found this increasingly irritating as we fixed yet another date some months later, while the assembled lawyers on the front benches looked at me with a mixture of pity and defensiveness that I not think badly of this Third World charade that was an accurate reflection of the shenanigans being played out in the larger political arena.' </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To be continued.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times;"><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span><br />
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-9341725968000023242014-09-29T12:29:00.002-07:002014-10-27T18:35:10.089-07:00Between Fayose and Joshua<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In the wake of
the Ekiti gubernatorial election last July, I was among those who chastised
Fayemi for putting physical over stomach infrastructure, as in the case of the
expired Thai rice. He was too aloof, an intellectual who didn’t sit down by the
roadside and drink pami with the people. I even accused him of lacking ‘common
sense’, which I now regret. You can’t be both a democrat and a thug. You can’t,
for instance, concede power gracefully, which was what Fayemi did because ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">I am a democrat and the will of the people is the basis of democracy’,</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">and
at the same time burn down the opposition party’s headquarters even before
assuming power, which was what Fayose did, but only after slapping a high court
Judge, such is mindset of the man of the people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I remember a photograph of Fayose in his
post-election press conference with Fayemi. He wore a pair of dark jeans and a red
T-shirt with short white sleeves and the legend TOKYO in bold white lettering
across his chest. But it was the round, white-rimmed sunglasses which sealed the
thuggish impression, more so given that the event was being held indoors.
Fayemi, by contrast, who sat across from him on the sofa, was dressed more demurely
in the same dark jeans but with a plain white short-sleeve shirt and what
seemed like a smile of mild bemusement while his would-be successor addressed
the assembled journalists, a microphone in his right hand showing off a white
wristband, which completed the ensemble.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Fayose, of
course, was already widely known for his thuggish behaviour during his first
incarnation between 2003 and 2006. ‘Where is Bode Olowoporoku, I want to kill
him, I have immunity,’ he once thundered as he led his merry men to attack the
then senator of the federal republic, who had been tipped off by well-wishers
and miraculously escaped. Not so fortunate were four students at the College of
Education, Ikere-Ekiti who took part in a peaceful demonstration to protest the
imposition of a provost and paid with their lives; another was so severely
beaten that his leg had to be amputated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The fact that
Fayose was selected to contest at all says much about the equally thuggish
nature of PDP itself, which has since declined to comment on his latest
outrages, even objecting to Fayemi’s call for the man to be prosecuted outside
the state in order to ensure transparency given the complicity of the security
forces who stood by during the invasion of the hallowed chamber. One recalls
the occasion in 2004 when, piqued by the ‘loss’ of Anambra State, suspected PDP
thugs burnt down government offices and two studios of the state-run radio
station while the police also stood idly by, causing Chinua Achebe, the
celebrated novelist, to reject a national honour on the grounds that the then
president, Obasanjo, had turned his state into a ‘lawless fiefdom’. Ironically,
it was Obasanjo who was later to call Fayose a ‘bastard’ but his political son
had learnt well enough. They have since been reconciled, bastards, like
thieves, being without honour.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So the consensus
is that Ekiti is also about to be turned into a lawless fiefdom with the full
connivance of the presidency. With Ondo now under PDP and Osun recently – and miraculously
- spared the same, all eyes are now on Lagos, Ogun and Oyo. It is an open
secret that PDP would love to ‘capture’ the troublesome south-west, as they once
briefly did under Obasanjo, with Lagos as the jewel in the crown. Whether this
ultimately matters is a moot point. As I have argued in previous blogs, one is
hard-pressed to see any difference between the ruling party and the so-called
‘opposition’. Impunity is the name of the game, whatever the supposed political
colouration of the party concerned, as witness both Jonathan and Fashola
rushing to congratulate Pastor Joshua for breaching the building regulations
which Fashola had himself earlier vowed to curb: ‘It is our job to ensure that
no life is lost where the circumstances are avoidable, therefore, when people
do not die of old age, illnesses that sciences can’t treat, rather they died
because people cut corners...'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Indeed, the
collapse of the building in the extensive compound that is the Synagogue Church
of All Nations might usefully be taken as a metaphor for the collapsed state of
Nigeria itself. Moreover, as with the victory of Fayose, who was, after all,
voted in by the people who already knew of his antecedents but were willing, it
seems, to exchange their birthright for bags of expired rice, so it appears
that Prophet Joshua’s followers still continue to flock to his house of
miracles despite the evidence of his culpability in what can only be described
as murder, as I saw for myself when I drove past the place last Sunday. It may
very well be that the self-declared man of God can make the blind see and the
lame walk, as many insist, but this is as nothing compared to the greater
miracle that is their continued belief in one who so casually dismissed the
tragedy caused by his own negligence - even as he proved himself unable to
raise the dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Between Fayose
and Joshua, what hope for Nigeria? Both seem to have grasped the gullible, miracle-seeking
nature of the Nigerian people who simply refuse to believe in the evidence of
their own eyes and thereby collude in their bondage. Democracy is doubtless a
good thing, and may even be the solution to our myriad problems, but it is not
an imminent possibility so many years after the soldiers returned to the
barracks. It might be galling to admit it, but the politicians and pastors who
prey upon us have understood us well enough.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-74259262463501176622014-08-30T13:36:00.000-07:002014-09-29T17:04:50.530-07:00Caliphates and other fictions<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘We
have nothing to do with Nigeria. We don’t believe in this name... There is
nothing like Nigeria.’ With these words, Boko Haram recently declared the new
Islamic Caliphate in the north-east. There seems little reason to argue with
the sentiment, if not the intention, in this the year of our purported centenary.
The country was always a fiction, the creation of foreign adventurers and their
native collaborators with no higher purpose than plunder. We have known this
all along. Once, early on in our so-called independence, which was when the
native collaborators really came into their own, the attempt to rewrite the
terms of our forced union that could be the only affirmation of that
independence was ruthlessly crushed on the
grounds that, ‘to keep Nigeria one, is a task that must be done,’ an accurate
enough expression of the mindlessness now consumed in tragedy, a case of the
chickens coming home to roost, as the deputy-governor of Enugu State in the
once and future Biafra recently discovered.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This
was not to be avoided. The Niger Delta militants had already demonstrated the
impotence of a state mired in levels of corruption that now witnesses soldiers
fleeing better armed insurgents who loot and rape at will, much like the
government they have vowed to overthrow. Nigeria is fracturing although the
government, which is unable to guarantee the country’s territorial integrity, still
appears oblivious of the immensity of the crisis unfolding before us. It was
only six months ago that it belatedly acknowledged we were at war, and it was just
yesterday that the president received yet another report from yet another
national conference supposedly convened to move the country forward but in
reality to impede its progress by distracting our attention. Alas, the time for
talk is over. It was over a long time ago, in 1970 to be precise, which was
when Biafra was ‘defeated’ in order that we might Go On With One Nigeria, with
what results we now see.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So
here we are and - that famous question - what is to be done? The same question
was recently asked by a well-known political commentator who usually has
something sensible to say but not so this time. Alleging that ‘[w]e love our
democracy, rule of law and human rights with all their imperfections,’ he
recommends that Mr President ‘call on young Nigerians to come out and join the
armed forces to save the country.’ He further suggests that we re-equip the
military ‘with the urgency it deserves,’ and court-martial those responsible
for its present parlous state. Finally, he calls for ‘a serious political and
ideological campaign’ to rope artists into creating ‘the new slogans we need to
mobilise for the successful prosecution of the war.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I take this to be profound misunderstanding of what is happening in
Nigeria. If indeed we had democracy, the rule of law and human rights - however
imperfect -</span></strong><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%;"> </span></strong><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">we wouldn’t be
in this mess to begin with. Moreover, to imagine that the country is teeming
with youths dying (as it were) to offer themselves up as sacrifice for a
country which delivers only grief in order to support the status quo that is
their biggest problem is as deluded as the idea that anybody will ever be
court-martialled for anything. Who is going to court-martial them? The man who told
us ‘[t]here is no corruption but mere stealing in Nigeria,’ his wife having
been labelled the ‘greediest woman in Bayelsa State’ by the US authorities in
the days before she and her husband moved into Aso Rock?</span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></strong></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></strong></span><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The problem isn’t with this particular commentator’s staggering naiveté
concerning the nature of the country he imagines he is living in but that his
views are echoed in one form or another by many of his fellow commentators,
even at this late hour. We see this in their affected surprise in the pages of
the same newspapers that the latest expensive talking shop ‘merely’ agreed to
disagree on the division of the spoils, which is all that has ever interested
them. It’s hardly any wonder that the president’s constituency should threaten
that ‘the blood of the dogs and the baboons will be soaked in the streets’ if
their man is not returned come February next year, only surprising that they failed
to follow Boko Haram’s logical example and secede altogether, thereby keeping
all the proceeds of their good fortune to themselves, which was always theirs
anyway. </span></span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></span></strong> </div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To cap it all, we are now daily assailed by considered opinions as to who
might or might not run in next year’s elections. INEC will certainly have its work
cut out, perhaps, as in 2011, using youth corpers, i.e. ‘young Nigerians,’ as
shock troops should they decline to sign up for direct military service. In
other words, it isn’t only the ‘authorities’ who are deluding themselves concerning
the nature of the challenges we are facing but those privileged to know better.
There may be good reasons for this refusal to look the facts in the face given
that nobody wants to contemplate the possible ‘Somalia-isation’ of Nigeria – as
one current presidential hopeful once put it – but pretending that we live in
normal times is equally likely to hasten the fragmentation we are now
witnessing all around us.<o:p></o:p></span></span></strong></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">So we come back to the question: What is to be done? In one way, the
answer is simple, which is perhaps the problem with it: Let everybody go their
own way. Since this is not going to happen by government fiat, government
itself being largely a fiction, we will have to do it all by ourselves, just
like the Biafrans attempted, just like the militants threatened, and just like
Boko Haram has done. What will come out of it is anybody’s guess but anything
has to be better than the slow drift to anarchy that bodes ill for all. <o:p></o:p></span></span></strong></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale
Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a>Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-61549943521179660492014-08-12T13:05:00.000-07:002014-09-29T17:05:13.161-07:00Africa goes to Washington<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> Tom:
I can’t tell you how many times your father and I have discussed your future.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> Michael:
You and my father discussed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i>
future?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Tom:
Yes, many times.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> Michael:
But I’ve got my own plans for my future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Godfather<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Africa
went to Washington last week and The Washington Post had a field day with the
assembled delegates, or at least their consorts. Leading the pack was Mrs Biya
– ‘The first lady of Cameroon and her hair have touched down in D.C.’ – which
extolled the achievements of Madam’s ‘bouffant’, which was ‘a beauty school
master’s thesis in contradictions,’ somehow managing to be ‘short <em>and</em>
long, rebellious yet elegant, unruly but controlled.’ Mauritania’s ‘chic’
Lady Tekber Mint Melainine Ould Ahmed managed to make ‘wearing aviators at
night look cool.’ Not to be outdone was the Rwandan president’s daughter, who
towered above everyone else and so could afford a more demure look. Sadly, our
own Patience wasn’t in attendance, although this might have been just as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
seems that some serious discussions did occur in the course of the three days,
things like encouraging ‘</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">progress in key areas
that Africans define as critical for the future of the continent,’ things like ‘expanding
trade and investment ties,’ things like ‘engaging young African leaders,
promoting inclusive sustainable development, expanding cooperation on peace and
security, and gaining a better future for Africa’s next generation,’ in the
words of the White House press release.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">These are all doubtless laudable ambitions but not
a few raised sceptical voices. One of them, Mukoma Wa Thiong’o, likened the
event to ‘a father calling his children to discuss their futures,’ which some
thought a cheap jibe. Another, Mo Ibrahim, the British-Sudanese businessman who
offers an annual $5mn reward for African leaders who pass the sobriety test,
i.e. leave office without falling or being pushed (but which, significantly,
has not been awarded in the last two years). As he bluntly put it:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Everywhere
in Africa there are Chinese businesspeople, there are Brazilian businesspeople.
None of us went to Brazil or to Asia or to China to tell them, look, come and
invest in Africa. They found out themselves and they come and invest. That’s
how basic business people behave. Why do we need to come and inform these
misinformed American businesses? You know, you guys invented Google. Use it
please.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">China,
as everyone pointed out, was the great bugbear behind this sudden rush to do
something about Africa, as indeed Obama confirmed in an interview with The
Economist of London the previous week: ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">My advice to African leaders is to make sure that if,
in fact, China is putting in roads and bridges, number one, that they're hiring
African workers; number two, that the roads don't just lead from the mine to
the port to Shanghai.’ The US, by contrast, doesn’t </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">‘simply
want to extract minerals from the ground for our growth’ but to ‘build genuine
partnerships that create jobs and opportunity for all our peoples and that
unleash the next era of African growth.’ Not everyone was convinced. A sulking
Zimbabwe, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">one of the three countries barred from dinner on
account of its human rights record, understood the gathering to be ‘America
pursuing its interests, afraid that China has made headway,’ according to a
statement by that country’s information minister.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But
there was also something about Obama needing to leave behind an African legacy,
which seems to have become de rigueur for American presidents. Both his predecessors
had staked their own claims, Clinton by negotiating the African Growth and
Opportunity Act, George W. Bush by throwing money at HIV/AIDS (along with his
country’s pharmaceutical industry), yet neither had their successor’s
continental roots, and which Obama himself was now –belatedly - claiming: ‘I
also stand before you as a man from Africa. The blood of Africa runs through
our family.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Unfortunately,
the blood line didn’t extend beyond the distinguished guests. At the closing
press conference, to which he turned up over an hour late, the White House
press corps was given front-row seats while the African journalists ‘scrabbled
for space behind the cameras’ and never got a chance to ask any questions
before Oga was ‘whisked out of the building,’ leaving one of the African
journalists to wonder, ‘What did we come all this way for?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In
fact, much the same question might have been asked by the assorted heads of
state (and their consorts) had they been able to see beyond the fancy dinner.
When all the noise had died down, Obama announced a $14bn investment pledge by
US companies. To put this into context, the US has
blown $104bn in Afghanistan alone, but the real question is: Was it necessary
for all those African heads of state – and never mind the journalists - to
travel to Washington en masse in order to secure such a risible sum, less even
than the former Central Bank governor accused our very own NNPC of purloining
under the leadership of a minister known for her financial recklessness?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One
wonders for how long we here in Africa will continue to look to the foreigner
to save us from ourselves. Five centuries and more of slavery, colonialism and
exploitation – whether from Europe, the US or China – have still not convinced
us that the solutions to Africa’s many problems lie with us, not them. To that
end, we have been given all the resources we need, the very resources Europe,
the US and China are here for in the first place. That our heads of state – and
their consorts – even honoured the invitation to have dinner in the White House
is a measure of how far we still have to go. Well, so be it. One day we will
wake up to the realisation that we need our own plans for our future. Until
that day, we will continue to go a-begging in the vain hope that foreigners
really do have our best interests at heart.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale
Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span>Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-46122524577448710932014-07-26T14:16:00.002-07:002014-10-17T19:54:39.148-07:00The dangers of irresponsible ownership<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To use Nigerian
parlance: One small girl came to Nigeria and the president jumped to it. Three months had passed since the abduction of
the Chibok schoolgirls but it was only now that he consented to meet with their
relatives. Others had been pressing the case, including a former minister and
assorted ‘troublemakers’ who decided to occupy a small corner of a public park
in protest against the government’s inaction, but it seems he considered them
agents of foreign propaganda, and promptly sent hooligans to harass them. He is
evidently ill-served by his advisers but then he presumably hired them to tell
him what he wants to hear. Quite what this is nobody seems to know apart from
remaining president come the elections next year, and his cringe-inducing
performances on CNN and other international outlets have been well remarked. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of these appearances apparently involved
forking out $59,200 via an American PR firm, Fleshman-Hillard Inc., for the
privilege. Now we hear that he has hired yet another such firm, Levick, at a
rumoured $1.2mn to brush up his image.</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Levick has so
far only issued a one-paragraph statement in which it spoke about the
‘brutality of Boko Haram’ and its ‘cowardly tactics’ in its ‘terrorist
campaign’, and insisted on the firm’s ‘mission’ to assist their paymaster ‘to
rescue the girls’. They didn’t give details of their rescue plan but then one
can understand their problem given that Oga is himself clueless - the word most
associated with him in the media - as was evident in the op-ed Levick also arranged
for him in The Washington Post, for which he (or, rather, we) purportedly paid
$60,000. He needn’t have bothered. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
assuring the grieving relatives how much his ‘heart aches’ for the missing
girls, being ‘a parent myself’ who knows ‘how awfully this must hurt’, he could
only implore foreigners to come and save us from ourselves: ‘Terrorism knows no
borders’, ‘I will urge the UN General Assembly’, ‘new international cooperation’,
and other such platitudes.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Our genuflection
before the foreigner even as we vociferously insist on our authenticity - legally
raping schoolgirls, for instance, while denouncing same-sex marriage between
consenting adults – is the measure of our hypocrisy, which is what makes us
such easy pickings. Some commentators questioned the logic of paying foreigners
exorbitantly for what we could do ourselves, what with all the Senior Special
Assistants (duly capitalised) running around Aso Rock at Nigeria’s expense, but
this is merely affected naiveté, as if they don’t understand the raison d’être
of Nigeria, as in, ‘Are you not a Nigerian?’ Others were surprised that Levick
was simply trying to do what it was hired to do, i.e., help change the ‘international
and local media narrative’. As narratives go, Jonathan’s ascent is as magical
realist as the country itself.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And a narrative was
what the Levick appointment quickly became. Even a statement attributed to Dr Doyin
Okupe, the president’s No. 1 Rottweiler, was wrongly ascribed to the foreign
interloper, as if Dr Okupe, who was said to have brokered the Levick deal
anyway, was incapable of thinking for himself, which he then proceeded to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Calling the #BringBackOurGirls ‘psychological
terrorists’, he surpassed even his own asinine interventions in the public
space on behalf of his master - ‘I check through the history of Nigeria, among
our past and present leaders, the only one we call our Mandela is President
Jonathan’ – by blaming the protestors for ‘contributing to poverty
and violence in Nigeria’. Levick has its work cut out but they might want to
consider the beast they are dealing with.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">According to the
American Kennel Club (to stay foreign), the Rottweiler is ‘a powerful breed
with well-developed genetic herding and guarding instincts’. It is an excellent
guard dog, fierce, loyal and with a good overall temperament. Unfortunately, ‘irresponsible
ownership, abuse, neglect, or lack of socialisation and training’ can lead to ‘potentially
dangerous behaviour’, which is understating it somewhat since they account for
over half of all canine-induced human deaths in the US. Even at that, they may sometimes ‘behave
in a clownish manner toward family and friends’ while being ‘protective of
their territory’, reluctant to ‘welcome strangers until properly introduced’.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Dr Okupe, who
once incurred the wrath of Baba for his questionable behaviour – ‘I was there
when President Olusegun Obasanjo physically beat and assaulted him because of
his attitude and lack of honesty’– suggests that the ‘irresponsible ownership,
abuse, neglect’ and so on and so forth done pass be careful by the time he was allocated
his own kennel in Aso Rock.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Meanwhile, three
months have now passed since #BringBackOurGirls were abducted to become slaves
before Mr President, chastised by the small Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai,
finally got to meet with the relatives and the fifty or so girls who had
managed to escape, self-help being the only recourse left to Nigerians
now that government has actually ceased to govern in all but name. As might
have been expected, the event – or the narrative, if you like – reflected the gap
between perception and reality that would otherwise be bridged by American PR
firms.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">According to newspaper
reports, the venue was the ‘cavernous’ Banquet Hall in Aso Rock with a banner proclaiming,
‘Special Meeting of the President with Parents of the Abducted Chibok Girls’. The
chairs were decorated in green and white silk arranged to resemble the national
flag. Some tables in a corner were laden with food. While the guests awaited
Oga’s arrival, they were serenaded by the Brigade of Guards band. As one
journalist put it, ‘a wedding reception could not have been more colourful’. So
far, so tacky but no sooner had all protocol been observed than the assembled
journalists were shooed outside, to be admitted three hours later in order to
watch the band play the national anthem. Security was also on hand to ensure
that none of the journalists got to talk to any of the invitees as they were
ushered into their buses and driven back to their war zone.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I was going to
say that Levick might advise its client that Nigerians just want to know what
the hell is going on. Silly me! Nothing’s going on, not even lunch for the
journalists.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">© Adewale
Maja-Pearce<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-26326755297854359312014-07-16T18:42:00.000-07:002014-07-18T12:48:34.945-07:00Everything changes but remains the same<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There
is a famous photo of President Goodluck Jonathan taking the salute on
Independence Day decked out in military attire. He himself was to later say
that he was no soldier: - ‘Some others will want the President to operate like
an Army general, like my Chief of Army Staff commanding his troops.
Incidentally, I am not a lion; I am also not a general’ - and by common consent
he looked ridiculous, what with his double-jointed, salute-cum-wave at the best
of times.</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The
photo was subsequently forgotten as an unfortunate aberration until recently,
when it surfaced again in the aftermath of last month’s gubernatorial election
in Ekiti State. Not only was the state itself flooded with soldiers but they
were also deployed on the expressways to turn back serving governors of the
opposition come to support their ‘brother’. Prior to that, they were busy impounding
vehicles carrying newspapers which had published stories alleging the courts
martial of treasonable officers for aiding and abetting Boko Haram - which the
same military is spectacularly failing to contain.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So
we are seeing the growing militarisation of Nigeria as a civilian president
struggles to contain the many war fronts he is busy ignoring but for the
inconvenience of the unregulated social media, as in the case of the abducted
Chibok schoolgirls. Ironically, the reason for the military’s inability to
contain Boko Haram also points to the reverse: the civilianisation of the military.
We no longer have soldiers but supplementary police in battle dress, fit only
for corralling civilians.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This
was not to be avoided. Past military leaders always acknowledged their civilian
sponsors and never tired of reminding us that they couldn’t have actually ruled
alone, as their ministerial appointments demonstrated, not excepting the prominent
newspaper publisher who served the worst of them and paid the price
accordingly. By common consent, it was these civilians who showed our boys in
uniform how to go about looting the treasury, the pen always being mightier
than the sword in this as other areas.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">All
this has now resulted in a military-civilian cabal that rotates power within
itself, power being its only objective. These are those who are currently in
and those who are currently out. Many of the latter are busy scurrying between
the two parties you couldn’t insert an ATM card between. The difference between Fayemi
and Fayose in the recent gubernatorial election in Ekiti State was not between
contending ideologies but contrasting personalities, the one enlightened, the
other not. It is our misfortune that the latter predominate (and deliberately
so), as perhaps we will see in Osun State next month with the triumph of
another alleged murderer. President Jonathan’s apparent flirtation with a
military he ostensibly commands but which is unable to secure the territorial
integrity of the nation he presides over seems foolhardy, especially with all
the talk in some quarters of the senate president heading a caretaker government
to do...what, exactly? Restore sanity? Move the nation forward? End the
nightmare of corruption that he and his like have made our way of life?</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">All
of which raises the question of whether the Chibok schoolgirls are merely
hostages to naked power come elections just six months away now. The military’s
own endlessly repeated reluctance to invade the Sambisa forest in Borno State for
fear of inadvertently causing the deaths of our daughters might or might not be
operationally true, although one needn’t go further than the widely reported military
operation in Baga in the same Borno State three months ago.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Baga residents told
Human Rights Watch that soldiers ransacked the town after the Boko Haram
militant Islamist group attacked a military patrol, killing a soldier.
Community leaders said that immediately after the attack they counted 2,000
burned homes and 183 bodies. Satellite images of the town analyzed by Human
Rights Watch corroborate these accounts and identify 2,275 destroyed buildings,
the vast majority likely residences, with another 125 severely damaged.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But one needn’t rely on satellite images. Just last week in
Lagos, where there is no war (or at least not yet), they showed us what they
were made of when one of their number was accidentally killed by a BRT bus.
Perhaps he was in the BRT lane at the time, like that other military fellow
Governor Fashola was forced to publicly chastise; and we still remember the
occasion when soldiers from Abalti Barracks burnt down Area ‘C’ police station
at Ojuelegba because a bus conductor had been rude to a rookie out of uniform.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The phrase ‘bloody civilian’ was much bandied about in the
military days. Perhaps that is how all militaries view the politicians they are
compelled to take orders from. One sees their point. What does Jonathan know
about hand-to-hand combat? He even chickened out of an announced visit to
Chibok to commiserate with the aggrieved families until the recent arrival of Malala
Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head for going to school,
whereupon he changed his mind, only to be distressed by their refusal to grant
him an audience.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But
Nigeria was always a military state, only held together by force of arms, a
fact which the president is belatedly acknowledging as he approaches his
nemesis less than six months hence. This predates independence in 1960 to
encompass the country’s genesis in 1914, the terms of which the bloody
civilians – for which read colonial subjects - are prevented from
interrogating, and never mind the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act,
which is just another fantasy in this cauldron called Nigeria.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©Adewale
Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This
piece first appeared in a slightly different version in Hallmark newspaper, 15
July 2014<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-71752647837883214112014-07-11T15:33:00.000-07:002014-07-12T20:12:46.995-07:00The 'problem' with Tinubu<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Following
Fayemi’s defeat in Ekiti, there has been much discussion in the media about the
role of Tinubu in the nation’s politics. The general view seems to be that his
growing unpopularity in Yorubaland didn’t help. One leading commentator even
claimed that he actually cost him the election, but that seems doubtful. If
nothing else, the people themselves were clear enough on why they voted for
Fayose. The more urgent question would seem to be why they elected a man who stands
accused of murder, and who also happens to be answering corruption charges – of
their own money.</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I am no lover of APC. Indeed, I find it disturbing
that anyone should consider them an alternative to PDP, not least because of
Tinubu himself, whose well-documented greed and nepotism are the very definition
of Nigerian politics. Moreover, his own assessment, post-Ekiti, that Fayose
triumphed because his election was rigged by a ‘subterranean process’ in which
‘elections have become a perverse form of modern coronation’ sits uneasily with
a man who positioned his wife in the senate, his son-in-law in the house and
his daughter in the market, along with assorted local government chairmen in
his self-declared fiefdom, having once boasted that when the ‘lion of
Bourdillon sleeps’ so does the rest of the city-state he once disastrously
governed.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
was telling that Tinubu was careful to avoid any mention of Fayose’s expired
Thai rice, leaving it instead to his protégé, the Lagos State governor, to explain
its purport in the pages of the newspapers. This was unusual in itself given
that Fashola is not noted for discoursing at length on weighty political
matters in the public arena. But it was also an unedifying performance from a
man whose own second term was a foregone conclusion on account of his ‘solid achievements’,
a la Okonkwo. It was also difficult to remember that he was a lawyer – and a
SAN to boot - when reading it.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Ekiti
State: My Take-Away’ begins by referring to ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">some of our most seasonal [sic], informed and respected columnists’ who,
just the week before the election, unanimously noted ‘that the incumbent had
served his people well’ and therefore deserved at least a close run. That being so, it
was inconceivable that Fayemi should have lost by such a wide margin, which
these same columnists, writing after the event, then erroneously sought to blame
on ‘money and inducements…that swayed the electorate’, and the fact that ‘the
incumbent was elitist and disconnected [because] he spoke too much English’. To
Fashola, this was clearly absurd. In the first place, Fayemi had been running a
social welfare scheme for the elderly and the disadvantaged for three years;
and, in any case, Ekiti was a land of the professors - all of whom,
presumably, speak impeccable English.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Having thus marshaled his ‘arguments’, Fashola found it ‘illogical’ that
so many should have ‘so overwhelmingly’ abandoned ‘an incumbent that was a
respected family man, a devout Catholic, gentleman and urbane representative,
even in his own ward,’ which was difficult to follow, especially in Nigeria
where the private lives of politicians – however depraved - are never a factor
in their electability. Curiously, he stopped well short of actually accusing
PDP of rigging, which was where his argument was otherwise headed. But one can
see his problem. Despite the heavy presence of PDP stalwarts from Abuja,
complete with truckloads of soldiers; and despite the barefaced harassment of
APC supporters (including three governors), all 28 local and foreign observers
were unanimous in agreeing that the exercise was free and fair, at least
according to our ‘Third World’ standards. It would sit ill with a ‘progressive’
to deny the will of the people, which, as he himself concedes, ‘is their
prerogative, I cannot question it’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">So where does that leave him? In a quandary, it seems:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It may
well be that the party of the governor elect may be right in their assessment
of what the people of Ekiti and by extension Nigerians want, this would make any
inquiry appropriate because it may compel a change of strategy for many
political parties. It should make governance a lot easier if they were right. Do
nothing, put money together, share it a few weeks to election, strut to
Government House, and why should you bother about agriculture, electricity,
housing, security, healthcare and more?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">When someone resorts to so many qualifiers – ‘It may well be’, ‘the
governor elect may be right’, ‘it may compel a change’ – then we may assume
‘woolly thinking’ is afoot. To put it plainly, what he is really asking is
whether the great mass of Nigerians – rural, poor, semi-literate – are not to
be trusted to vote for the ‘right’ candidate, which is to say the candidate who
bothers about ‘agriculture, housing, security’ against those who dole out
expired rice at the opportune moment.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It is true that Fashola is one governor who has indeed built
infrastructures but then Lagos is not rural, poor and/or semi-literate.
Unfortunately, it is also true that what Fashola sneeringly calls
‘infrastructure of the stomach’ is very much Tinubu’s style, which is one
reason why he needs to amass as much money as he is reputed to have done. What
I have called the ‘problem’ with our lion is in fact the problem with Nigeria,
which the politicians know well enough, and why they continue to keep the masses
in poverty.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">No doubt all this will be debated – is being debated – as we gird our
loins (or our stomachs) for the showdown next year. Meanwhile, we are now being
assailed with photographs of another suspected murderer stopping to eat corn at
a roadside somewhere in Osun State, where PDP hopes to repeat Ekiti next month.
That he happens to be wearing a wristwatch worth <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>3 million (according to one newspaper report) was obviously lost
on him, being no more a man of the people than Fayose himself – or Fayemi for
that matter – just a cynical politician who understands his people well enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">A slightly different version of this first appeared in Hallmark
newspaper, 8 July 2014</span><br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream
Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later
this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">
page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-44533752233222923282014-07-03T15:04:00.000-07:002014-07-30T19:42:37.355-07:00Whose numbers?<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Early last year, a Canada-based academic, Morten
Jerven, published a book with the title, ‘Poor Numbers: How we are misled by
African development statistics and what to do about it’. As the title
indicates, his basic premise was that most figures given for the continent are
plain wrong. His book caused a furore. Calling the author a ‘hired gun’ who had
not dome his research, Pali Lehohla, the South African Statistician General,
said that ‘unless he is stopped in his tracks’ he will ‘hijack the African
statistical programme,’ and proceeded to try and prevent him from attending a
conference organised by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Mr Jerven
responded by saying that Mr </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Lehohla
and his counterparts ‘are doing well in the current system,’ and that ‘[a]ny
change to the status quo in the political economy of statistics in Africa is
considered a threat.’ It seems that the two have since made up, which doesn’t
mean that the problem has gone away.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Mr Jerven, an economic historian, was concerned with
GDP figures. Here in Nigeria, we recently rebased our economy and discovered
that we were underselling ourselves. According to the new figures, we are now
Africa’s biggest economy. This may well be so. I am no economist although I’ve often
wished I was the better to understand the world I live in, what with its
getting and spending and laying waste our powers, as William Wordsworth,
himself no economist, poetically put it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But I do believe I understand something about
politics, more particularly Nigerian politics, which in any case is the duty of
every citizen. Among the things I understand because everybody else does, too,
is that we can’t count ourselves, and that this is not a problem of economics
but of politics. Every census since 1952 up to and including the last one in
2006 has been disputed. We don’t have to go far to find out why. In a recent
interview, Festus Odimegwu, the immediate past chair of the National Population
Commission, bemoaned the parlous state of the commission itself, the place
where all the activity was supposed to be taking place – ‘</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Nothing
was working there. The commission was deliberately killed, so it will not
fulfil its constitutional obligations’ – and was finally forced to resign when
he queried the figures for Kano State:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In the
process, when all these fraudulent people were shouting, Governor Kwankwaso
started running his mouth from Kano that I, Festus Odimegwu, His Royal Majesty,
that I am drunk. He made a joke of a serious matter, as the biggest beneficiary
of the fraud that is the demographic data in Nigeria</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Mr Jerven himself got ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">a peek into…the domestic political pressures some
serious technocrats have to deal with’ </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">when he was finally permitted
to attend the conference and was subjected to ‘a loud rant’ from Busani
Ngcaweni, Deputy Director-General in the South African Presidency. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a character in Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations who, presented with an apparently intractable problem, ‘took
the case altogether out of the region of metaphysics...and by that means
vanquished it.’ Mr Ngcawemi did the opposite by accusing Mr Jerven of
‘sustain[ing] the meta-narrative of the Heart of Darkness' while also managing
to slip in something or other about Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses alongside
the Conrad novella, which was where he finally lost me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Regarding our population here in Nigeria, we
know perfectly well that the figures are skewed in favour of the north for
reasons of patronage, and that it’s doubtful whether Kano State is more populous
than Lagos State. According to the 2006 census, the former has just under
9.5mn; the latter 9.1mn. So outraged was the then Lagos State governor that he
denounced the figures and went ahead to do his own illegal enumeration given
that counting Nigerians is a strictly federal matter, whereupon he came out
with almost twice that, as even the UN agencies agree.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">With that in mind, I recently undertook some
research on behalf of Africa Check – </span><a href="http://www.africacheck.org/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">www.africacheck.org</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
- on the question of Nigeria’s population. During my background reading, I came
across a study by Africapolis, a French based team currently part of a global study
of urban populations. Using ‘a combination of satellite imagery, geographic
information systems, and the largest collection of documentation on the region
ever collated,’ it concluded that the 2006 census for Lagos was reasonable. It
also found the population of Kano city – about one-fifth of the state’s land
mass - ‘inflated’. Perhaps there are many people in the hard-to-access rural
areas but we know all about the cultural problems of counting the
womenfolk in those parts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Part – or even most – of Mr Ngcaweni’s ‘rant’
(although I wouldn’t have used that word myself, having watched his slick,
measured performance on YouTube) is this business of foreigners doing our work
for us, or at least the work they want done but which we won’t or can’t do
ourselves. Another participant at the UN conference, and himself a former
director of the commission hosting the event, criticised Mr Jerven on a number
of issues, as contained in the commission’s own report, to wit: ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">sensationalism and Afro statistical pessimism’, ‘failure
to consult statistical elders’, and ‘the insinuation of political interference
in the management of statistics’. Having cleared away the troublesome weeds, he
had two questions: ‘which equation is he trying to solve and on whose behalf is
he working?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Unfortunately, the problem is with the weeds, not
the questions, the answers to which are self-evident, only a pity that he
should be asking them, having introduced the very sensationalism he deplores by
his appeal to bogus authority that is the continent’s greatest bugbear. And in embodying
the very politics he attributes to others, he enables all sorts of things for
which we – not they – are responsible, things like women dying in childbirth,
things like babies dying before they reach the age of five, things like
children not going to school. Sensational, perhaps, but until we know who this
abstraction is we cannot possibly plan for its future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">A version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark
newspaper, 1 July 2014</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many
miles to Babylon?, A</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From
Khaki to Agbada,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A
Peculiar Tragedy, and</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Counting the
Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The
Heinemann Book of African</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher
Okigbo:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian
Short Stories,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 11.35pt 0pt 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-16243008341604535492014-06-26T15:24:00.001-07:002014-07-30T19:41:55.969-07:00Counting pointless votes<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I was going to get all worked up about Saturday’s
gubernatorial election in Ekiti State. As I write – 9 p.m. on the day – it
seems that Fayose might have succeeded in unseating Fayemi, who had to wait
three years for his earlier victory to be validated by the courts after the
mayhem visited on the state by a PDP desperate to retain its ascendancy in the
famous ‘do or die’ 2007 elections. Like everyone else, I read about how the V-P
declared Ekiti a ‘war zone’ in the ruling party’s determination to regain its
‘stolen mandate’. Perhaps he was impugning the majesty of the law he had sworn
to uphold, or perhaps, more likely, he just wasn’t thinking, which would be par
for the course. That said, preliminary reports from the 28 local and international
observers consider the exercise fair enough, at least by our ‘Third World’ standards.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And so it was, indeed, that Fayose won - and convincingly
so. The troubling aspect about the exercise, and the one which has been much
remarked upon, was the role of the military. Ekiti was swamped by soldiers who
might have been better employed in Borno, where #BringBackOurGirls are still
languishing more than two months after they were abducted from their school by
our wayward Islamic brothers. Perhaps their salvation will come next February,
when the general elections are scheduled to hold. On the other hand, there are
already fears that no elections will take place, either there or in the other
states still labouring under emergency rule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The question is: Does any of it matter? Does it
matter whether APC lost out to PDP, or even whether elections do or do not take
place in certain designated states come next year? The fact of the matter is
that the country has fallen apart – apologies to Achebe – and it seems
pointless agonising over the nomenclature of its architects, even when they consider
themselves ‘progressives’, the heirs to Awolowo’s legacy (but which, bizzarely,
a now ‘older and wiser’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fayose is
claiming: ‘I want to be the Awolowo here...’). We needn’t labour the point. Consider
one of their ‘stalwarts’, Chief Tom Ikini, the former foreign minister in the
bad old days of Abacha who chased our only Nobel laureate into an ignominious
exile, and who was himself outraged by Saturday’s election. ‘</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">What
happened in Ekiti was a violation of the constitution and those who are
responsible should be exposed and, where necessary, punished’, our wordsmith
opined, as who should know? Plus ca change, as Aristotle said.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It was Ikimi’s emergence as a significant force in the new
mega-opposition that should have alerted us to the true nature of the party
that parades itself as the radical alternative to the present incumbents. In a
normal country he would be wandering about in sack cloth and ashes imploring
the forgiveness of those he sinned against, but then a normal country would
hardly have produced the likes of the master he served so diligently. Hear him:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">My first achievement in that
Government was to initiate the creation of the highly successful Petroleum
Trust Fund [which] General Muhamadu Buhari headed...successfully... Those who
are still deaf and have not heard the true situation regarding my tenure as
Foreign Minister as it does not in any way relate to the unfortunate
occurrences regarding Ken Saro-Wiwa are advised to watch my 70th birthday
documentary still being run on the AIT television. I am prepared to donate free
copies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The idea that anyone would want to watch, much less acquire (even for
free), the self-glorification of a man who dragged this country’s name through
the mud and then turned around to distance himself from that ghastly episode
could only occur to the architect himself. Well, we are used to such obscene
levels of hubris among those who lord it over us. We see the same with Ikimi’s
brother-in-arms, the man he once helped into the defunct PTF and who now revels
in the adulation of the great unwashed he did not help out of poverty when he
was passing his with-immediate-effect decrees. But these are easy targets and
Tinubu’s newspaper has lately gone to town over Ikimi’s sins now that he and
the ‘lion of Bourdillon’ have fallen out, as was perhaps inevitable. But this
doesn’t mean that Ikimi’s assessment of the immediate past Lagos State governor
is wrong: ‘I am informed that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is not comfortable with my
independent-mindedness and he holds the view that I cannot be controlled. He
prefers someone that he believes will do his bidding...’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In other words, there is no difference between the two contending
parties. As regards Ekiti specifically, it is true that Fayose is not the kind
of man anyone would want to represent them (he still has case pending over <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>1.2bn gone walk-about in his first
incarnation as governor), and by all accounts Fayemi is a gentleman (as he
demonstrated in the aftermath of his defeat), but that is not what concerns us
here. In any case, the people voted and we are bound to respect their wishes.
The point is not this or that party or person but the system itself which tends
to nepotism and corruption by the nature of the case. It cannot be helped. And
this is so because the end is not service but plunder, however otherwise
well-meaning the candidate, who would never have gotten there in the first
place anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">So what would make it better? Alas, one has to keep coming back to this:
true federalism. The fact is that too few Nigerians believe in Nigeria, which
is why they can steal public funds with impunity and their fellow citizens
cheer them on, praying only for their own chance to do the same. It is no
accident that those currently arguing at the national conference for more of
the same also happen to come from those parts which have the most need to
steal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">A slightly different version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark
newspaper, June 24.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-87681488061144043582014-06-19T15:09:00.000-07:002014-06-20T12:34:56.899-07:00Militarising Nigeria<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The former MD of Nigerian Breweries recently called
for the return of the military. Festus Odimegwu doesn’t seem to be a man much
given to hyperbole so we must take him at his word, as indeed those various
others voicing the same opinion. It should be said at the outset that his
reasons are cogent enough. ‘Our leaders don’t understand what leadership is all
about,’ he opines and few would disagree. As I write, the president and the newly
appointed Kano State emir are forgiving one another their kleptomania;
meanwhile, the vice-president, whose reputation for avarice is second to few,
has descended on Ekiti State to beef up the ‘war front’ in the ruling party’s
determination to ‘bring back our stolen mandate’.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This is what happened in Ekiti State during the
infamous 2007 elections that made the courts finally overturn the results in
favour of Dr Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent now hoping for a second term:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">This writer was in Ekiti</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span> XE "<span style='font-size:
12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:
"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'>Ekiti</span>" <![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>State during the re-run elections and I saw
how dangerous and desperate they were. The entire state resources were deployed
in order to keep the loot. The Nigerian press had a bitter lesson to tell and
the documentation of raw deal newsmen suffered in Ekiti State. I saw Oni</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span> XE "<span style='font-size:
12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:
"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'>Oni:</span>Segun" <![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">’s men and women going
berserk and mad just to remain in power. Senators Ayo Arise and Omisore took
the fight personal because they know that if Oni</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span> XE "<span style='font-size:
12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:
"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'>Oni:</span>Segun" <![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>loses their position will be on [the] line.
Senator Ayo Arise and Omisore...physically mobilized thugs to main and kill
innocent people with impunity. The delegation from Abuja led by the Dimeji
Bankole, the Speaker of the House of Representatives provided a shield for the
Oni</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:
115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span>
XE "<span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'>Oni:</span>Segun"
<![endif]--><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:
115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">’s army
to unleash violence on the people of Ekiti without caring a hoot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">With the new gubernatorial election just two days away, Fayemi has
already expressed fears for his life following the death of a supporter from a
police bullet during an otherwise peaceful rally. He also alleged police
complicity following an altercation between OC Mobile and his own police detail
that is the preserve of state governors but not schoolgirls. Meanwhile, we are
now hearing that several turncoat governors have been denied entry to the state
by soldiers at checkpoints. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Mr</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
Odimegwu should claim that Nigeria is ‘not ripe for democracy’, but calling on
the military to stage a coup is both infantile and mischievous.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Mr Odimegwu has evidently forgotten the trauma we
all went through during the long years of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha but he
misses the central point, which is that military rule never really ended with
the so-called enthronement of democracy in 1999. The military-civilian
oligarchy which has governed this nation since 1960 simply swopped khaki for
agbada and continued business as usual. The only difference between then and
now is the veneer of freedom without the ‘with immediate effect’ decrees which,
for instance, banned newspapers, yet a president who now feels threatened by the
same press which fought the longest and the hardest to bring about our
so-called democracy sends soldiers to impound newspapers and arrest vendors.
That this is being done under the guise of that catch-all, national security,
only underlines the sinking feeling of déjà vu.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">At bottom, Mr Odimegwu fails to understand that the
problem with Nigeria is structural. It isn’t a matter of the head of state’s
dress code, hence the clamour at the on-going national conference for the true
federalism we attempted to practice for the first six years of our independence
until it was truncated by the very military he would now invite back. Mr
Odimegwu himself knows that Nigeria is a failed state - ‘Nigeria as a
state has failed already. We cannot be saying it may fail,’ he opines – but fails to understand that this is so because
it is designed to fail given the politics we play.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Or, more accurately, the politics we are allowed to
play by the military-inspired Constitution we have been labouring under since
1979, as amended. According to this Constitution, ordinary citizens like you
and me, i.e. the common man and woman, are forbidden from contesting for any elective
post from local councillor to president unless we belong to a ‘national’ party
duly registered by the misnamed Independent National Electoral Commission. The
reasoning, if it can be so called, is to foster unity in a diverse nation but
we all know that the real reason is to enable those already in possession of
the money – the money-bags – to continue to perpetuate themselves in power in
order to acquire yet more money.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">No one doubts Nigeria’s diversity. Indeed, a case
could probably be made for calling it the most patchwork country in the world
which would never have become a nation in the first place but for the European
imperial adventure. The many religions, languages and ethnicities had lived
cheek by jowl for centuries without seeing any need to come together in any
formal way. Well, we got our independence and those who were privileged to
decide these things thought it best we remain as one. Since then, they have
been reiterating our indivisibility like a mantra, even declaring it a ‘no-go
area’ whenever they get up yet another conference to map our future.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In fact, the only way Nigeria can cohere is by
celebrating the very differences that we have turned into our biggest problem.
And this will only happen when each of its component parts – however large or
small – is able to control its own affairs (including its own resources) within
the larger context of a federation they have freely agreed to be part of. Under
this arrangement, any citizen anywhere in the country would be able to stand up
and decide to vie for any position without recourse to one or other of the
permitted behemoths currently parading themselves as political parties.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Until that day, looking for Mr Odimegwu’s strong man
will only guarantee that the country remains the ‘war front’ that is currently
being enacted in Ekiti ahead of the greater conflagration awaiting us next
year.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This piece first appeared in a slightly different
version in Hallmark, 17 June 2014</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-18924104370551879272014-06-12T16:12:00.000-07:002014-08-01T17:13:09.489-07:00The arrogant North<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I was reading with amusement a communiqué from the
Northern Elders Forum. Nothing new, alas. It begins by saying that the
‘majority of the northerners...are far more politically conscious of the two
broad regions that make up Nigeria’, and laments the ‘dangerous trend’ by the
Jonathan administration ‘aimed at weakening the determination of the North to
reclaim its traditional position of providing leadership for the Nigerian
polity’. After taking a swipe at the traitors among them who have fallen for Jonathan’s divide and rule tactics, it reiterates its long-held belief
that the North has a divine right to rule – ‘it is the almighty that has
destined it so’ – which alone has kept the country ‘stable and secure’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All said and done, ‘The North is only asking
for what it does best in Nigeria: leadership.’</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The contempt for the lesser breed is hardly to be
credited. Dismissing the current ‘aberration’ with an ‘interloper’ going by
‘the name of a Jonathan Southern presidency’, they recall the only previous
occasion when they were caught ‘unawares’, which was when ‘Aguiyi Ironsi and
his Eastern cohorts’ jumped the gun. Other than that, they once ‘even denied
themselves’ by allowing Obasanjo two terms, although he ‘nearly abused this
privilege’ by latterly trying for a third ‘after he begged and pleaded with the
North that brought him to power in the first place’. Although he ‘made amends’
of sorts by installing ‘his friend’s younger brother,’ he nevertheless oversaw ‘the
most rigged election of 2007’ which cheated Gen. Muhammadu Buhari</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> of his
deserved prize.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The
communiqué is clear that Buhari is ‘currently the undisputed of the North’,
given that ‘there is no other person whom the masses in the North are willing
to vote or even die for’. It then praises Tinubu, who ‘has seen the light’ by
joining forces with him, unlike the inflexible Awolowo, who didn’t understand ‘the
strategic wisdom in working with the North for a just and sustainable Nigeria’.
According to their calculations, the North and the South-West between them have
the numbers, unlike the current zone, ‘which arrogantly believes that it is
entitled to [power] by virtue of [its] natural resources’, not minding the fact
that ‘all mineral resources belong to the federal government’, as has been the
case ‘since the colonial period’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once
in office come 2015, they will ensure that derivation is reduced from 13 per
cent to 5 per cent for on-shore oil only, and adds: ‘If the North stands
together with its allies in the South-West we can ensure that local governments
get 35% of federal allocations, while states get 39 percent. Let those who want
50% derivation get it only from those resources that were not located
naturally.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 10.2pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 10.2pt 0pt 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Whether Tinubu himself is prepared to be the willing stooge of a contemptuous
North; or whether, more importantly, the people of the South-West see
themselves as collaborators in the theft of other people’s resources, will
undoubtedly be one of the lessons of the coming elections (assuming that they
actually take place), but this is in many ways the story of Nigeria, and in
that sense will merely be a continuation of the same. The entire communiqué
reeks of power for its own sake for the purpose of plunder <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as a God-given right</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in
insisting that only the North has delivered a ‘stable and secure’ country when
all the evidence tells us otherwise, they also threaten – if only by
implication – the mayhem they are currently witnessing in their own domain, a
clear enough case of the chickens coming home to roost: If you govern by divine
right, you just might suffer divine retribution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The communiqué was signed by Dr Yusuf Jubril (President) and Sani
Mohammed (Secretary). Nothing much seems to be known about either of them and
perhaps they are misrepresenting another group by the same name, which has been
more measured in its tone, if not in its demands. In an address delivered to
Jonathan two years ago, they professed themselves distressed by the activities
of Boko Haram while blaming the government for its ‘misjudgement’, which led to
‘the poor handling of the sect’s activities’. But they were also distressed
over the disparity in revenue allocation, ‘which appears to ignore the
constitutional injunction of promoting even development’; and the dearth of federal
appointments, currently standing at about 18 per cent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In a way, it’s unfair to blame the ‘arrogant’ North when one is talking
about a severe minority of the self-interested, as contemptuous of their own people
as they are of others. This includes the Middle Belt, Jonathan’s only apparent
ally outside his own zone, whose inmates are distinguished by their ‘treachery
right from the days of Joseph Tarka and his likes’, but which nevertheless
couldn’t prevent ‘the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) from winning in the past’.
Their ‘political naivety and narrow mindedness’ will deliver them into the
hands of the North this time around, ‘if only the APC selects a Northern
presidential candidate’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘If only the APC selects a Northern presidential
candidate.’ So there you have it. Once you get past the grandstanding, the veiled
threats, the extended sulk, they must openly beg those who nearly abused the
privilege after they begged and pleaded to be allowed power in the first place.
But the game is up and they know it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>More importantly, so does everyone else. They themselves call Jonathan
and his people ‘arrogant’ without any sense of irony but they are right
nonetheless. And why not? Why shouldn’t Jonathan and his merry men do the same
with the same resources, and which they happen to own whether you like it or
not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Meanwhile, Nigeria, the country of however many
million square kilometres with abundant land and rain and people – and, yes,
oil - seems all but forgotten. We don’t deserve it and for that reason we are
going to lose it. This may or may not be a bad thing, but it is what we are
doing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">An earlier version of this piece first appeared in
Hallmark, 10 June 2014.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-12347249085644855462014-06-04T18:12:00.001-07:002014-06-06T20:21:57.357-07:00Defending the nation<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It seems that the military was upset by an
International New York Times article of 23 May alleging that it was hampering
the hunt for the abducted schoolgirls. According to one Colonel Onyema
Nwachuckwu, signing on behalf of the Director of Defence Information, the
paper’s bureau chief for West and Central Africa, Adam Nossiter, wrote a
‘reckless and unprofessional’ article which claimed that the military was ‘poorly
trained and armed’ and was also ‘riddled with corruption’. According to the
Colonel, this was typical of the bias ‘adopted by a section of foreign media
organizations which have continued to feed on insinuations aimed at casting
aspersion (sic) on the Nigerian Military’. He further noted that Mr Nossiter
was already ‘well known’ as someone ‘committed to reporting Nigeria in bad (sic)
light’, as witness ‘his previous articles on the country in the same medium’.
He ended by challenging his employers ‘to note the racist disposition of this
writer and always take his writings on Nigeria and Africa with a pinch of
salt’.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I should admit at once that I am not only a
contributing writer to this same newspaper but that I also count the journalist
in question a friend. That said, it would be unseemly to ‘defend’ him
against the unfortunate charge of racism, which is only a measure of our good
colonel’s desperation, but which in any case he declines to substantiate in the
course of his response. Indeed, ‘response’ is too elevated a word for what are
simply assertions. The stories we have all heard this past month concerning the
abducted schoolgirls – and by no means exclusive to the INYT - would seem to
bear out the claim that the Nigerian military is both ‘poorly trained and
armed’, as well as ‘riddled with corruption’, but which hardly goes far enough
if we are to believe what we have been reading in the Nigerian press about
Generals selling weaponry to Boko Haram, which was why soldiers at the
Maimalari Barracks in Maiduguri shot at their commanding officer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Defending the indefensible is always a tricky
matter, which was why our good Colonel failed to mention that the views of the article
in question were not those of Mr Nossiter. The full sentence of
the original article reads as follows: ‘<span style="color: black;">There is a
view among diplomats here and with their governments at home that the military
is so poorly trained and armed, and so riddled with corruption, that not only
is it incapable of finding the girls, it is also losing the broader fight
against Boko Haram.’ Clear enough, and borne out by other stories reaching us
that those same ‘governments at home’ which have ridden to our rescue are
unwilling to exchange information with the Nigerian military because they do
not trust them. This is the real indictment, and never mind what our brave boys
did or didn’t do in the past, which the colonel uses to clinch his ‘argument’,
to wit:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span> </div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: justify;">
Describing as a weak reed, a military that fought and sacrificed so much
to extricate Liberia, a vital and longstanding ally of United States of America
from the brinks of total collapse on two occasions, reveals the viciousness of
the bias being displayed by Nossiter. This same Nigerian military which
Nossiter tried fruitlessly to ridicule fought valiantly and successfully to
bring to an end, the civil war in Sierra Leone, a former British colony and
ally. What about the successes in Darfur and Somalia? Has he also forgotten or
is he so unaware of the gallantry of Nigerian Soldiers when American troops
were being mauled by rebels in Somalia in 1994? Has he quickly forgotten the contribution
of the Nigerian military to the current peace being savoured in Mali? </div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It may be that our military distinguished itself in
Liberia and Sierra Leone, and that they were prepared to go into areas where
the Americans and the British cried off. That was in those days. In these days,
yet other reports – not written by Nossiter and not published in the INYT – have
suggested that all was not well with the contingent we sent to Mali:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Malian top military
officer said he had no confidence in Nigerian soldiers and called them
undisciplined and incompetent, he further stressed out in a press interview
that Nigeria would only do minimal military jobs as manning checkpoints and
loading trucks as they were not capable of fighting the Islamist extremist and jihadist
in the battle front. The military officer said though their military was not
much better it was well trained by the EU and could harness the menace.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But this will not be the first time that an
individual representing the ‘western’ press has been singled out for the sins
of the others, although this was usually the provenance of military rule in the
bad old days, when it wasn’t even necessary to write two-page letters to that
end. Alas, democracy (if that us what we are practising) is trickier, what with
all this ‘western’ talk of transparency and accountability.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The pity of it is that no one is really surprised by
the continuing revelations concerning the unfitness of our military to protect
the citizens. No institution can be exempt from the corruption we see all
around us, so much so that we are beginning to read more and more stories in
the media – both local and international – of our failing state as we approach
elections which look less and less like happening. And what would be the point?
Like the militants before them, Boko Haram is merely demonstrating that there
is no government in Nigeria, just a bunch of hooligans who are even worse than
the colonial masters they succeeded.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span>©Adewale Maja-Pearce</div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
An earlier version on this piece first appeared in Hallmark,
3 June 2014</div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="ecxmsonormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #0072c6;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #0072c6;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-9030521488866499692014-05-29T07:59:00.000-07:002014-05-29T14:25:56.236-07:00The view from abroad<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘I think the Black sense of male and
female is <span class="ilad">much more</span> 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.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>James Baldwin</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">An earlier version of this piece first appeared in
Hallmark, 27 May 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-53184025522609064482014-05-22T16:25:00.000-07:002014-05-22T16:25:04.196-07:00I, Nigerian citizen
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Citizens who allow politicians to set the agenda
while they just react have themselves to blame for lack of tangible results
from governance.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Oby Ezekwesili<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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!'</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">‘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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">A slightly different
version of this piece originally appeared in Hallmark, 20 May 2014.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books,
including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a
memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-68830539499154591722014-05-15T19:34:00.002-07:002014-05-26T15:11:21.230-07:00Government by rhetoric<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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’.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">©Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A slightly different version of this
piece first appeared in Hallmark, 13 May 2014</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and
Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published
later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-38193599306864743832014-05-07T18:43:00.000-07:002014-05-26T13:58:06.322-07:00Cautionary tales<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">'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.'</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The
film did actually manage to premiere in Lagos but was subsequently barred from general
release because, according to the Board, it contained</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> ‘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</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> well-catalogued
massacre of Igbos at a northern airport as they fled the pogrom following the
1966 counter-coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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 </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">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.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 11.35pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©
Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">A
different version of this piece originally appeared in Hallmark, 6 May 2014</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and
Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published
later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1782769973994067061.post-30969799151571076622014-05-01T13:19:00.000-07:002014-05-01T13:19:17.260-07:00God will not do it!
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>4,000 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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 – <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>1.055 trillion
in the current budget – are simply looted at source, hence the rumours of soldiers
fleeing before the heavier firepower of the insurgents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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 <s style="text-line-through: double;">N</s>4 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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ll
have to do it all by ourselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">©
Adewale Maja-Pearce</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">An
earlier version of this piece first appeared in Hallmark, 29 April 2014<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties <br />
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A <br />
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada, <br />
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and <br />
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human <br />
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African <br />
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo: <br />
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">and
Dream Chasers. The House My Father Built, a memoir, will be</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">published
later this year.<br />
<br />
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's </span><a href="http://amazon.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">amazon.com</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> page: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Adewale Maja-Pearcehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792948699513486446noreply@blogger.com2