In the name of religion

There was a story recently about a 20 year-old man who allegedly raped a nine-year-old girl to death.  According to him, he was walking her home when he was suddenly overcome with lustful thoughts. ‘I discussed with her and she accepted so I took her to one of the abandoned buildings that has [sic] been overtaken by weeds, where I told her to remove her underwear and she complied.’ Because the place was filthy – ‘The uncompleted building is now used as a toilet’ – he turned her around and told her to bend over so they could do it standing up. When she started to cry out in pain he thought she was ‘pretending’. The next thing he knew she had slumped.

 

This case was unusual only because the victim died. According to reports, the rape of underage girls has been on the increase over the last few years although, as with all statistics in Nigeria, nobody really knows.  What is certain, in any case, is that there must be many, many more than we read about in the pages of the newspapers for obvious enough reasons. The sole consolation, such as it is, is that the culprits can be charged to court under the country’s criminal laws, although given the state of the criminal justice system – corruption everywhere you look, as we recently saw in the case of the last chief justice of the FCT – this isn’t necessarily saying much. But now even this recourse of ‘the common man’, as the saying has it, is about to change by making such rapes legal.

 

To Nigeria’s great shame, the Senate recently amended the 1999 Constitution – an illegal document to begin with but we must work with what we have – to allow for underage marriage. According to Ahmed Yerima, who caused nationwide uproar in 2009 by marrying a 13-year-old Egyptian in contravention of the Child Rights Act, such a provision was un-Islamic because ‘any woman that is married is of age and if you say 18 years you are going against Islamic law’, and, further, that a woman or girl who is married shall be considered ‘of age’ by virtue of her marital status. In other words, even an infant can be considered ‘of age’ once she has been taken in wedlock. The vote was passed by 65 votes to 30, which gives an idea of the moral bankruptcy – to say nothing of the darker desires - of those charged with making laws for the good governance of the country.

 

By all accounts, the session was rowdy. David Mark, the Senate president and one of the dissenters, tried to deflect the discussion by pointing out that the relevant clauses had already been put to the vote in the ongoing constitution amendment exercise and that standing policy was not to revisit them. Yerima promptly accused him of ‘double standards’ by citing two previous exceptions, whereupon Mark conceded that ‘it could be revisited another time after Islamic scholars can argue it’ before finally capitulating ‘[b]ecause of the sensitivity of issues on religion’. It is a measure of how distorted our politics has become that the ‘issue’ of religion should come up at all given the secular provisions of this same Constitution which is forced to recognise – albeit with certain provisos – the multiplicity of faiths attempting to rub along in what is already a delicate balancing act foisted on an unwilling populace.

 

That Yerima himself should invoke Islam in order to justify a degenerate lifestyle is hardly surprising. During the controversy over his Egyptian bride he had claimed his allegiance to the Koran ahead of the Constitution he had otherwise sworn to uphold, but perhaps he was merely obfuscating in order to deflect attention from the constitutional provisions he was intent on not upholding - but which he nevertheless now wants to amend. Islam may indeed permit the paedophilia he assiduously practices - in 2006 he married a 15-year-old he plucked from school before going for an even younger model – but if so surely not in such specious terms: a girl is of age once she is married and so doesn’t have to be 18 in order to be of age. Why not just say that you want to violate little girls?

 

In fact the ‘issue’ is less about Islam than the excuse to indulge the irresponsible antics of a power-drunk ruling class for whom religion –and not only Islam – is a convenient cover. But to accuse those who make up this class of simple hypocrisy would be to miss the point. It is telling how often we are exhorted to respect ‘duly constituted authority’ in order that the likes of Yerima might continue as they do, being themselves bound by a higher authority which itself cannot be questioned, a sort of divinely appointed chain of command with God – or Allah – in His Heaven and all’s right with the world. It was for this reason that the Senate president was quick to trample on the Constitution he had also sworn to uphold by seeking the opinion of Islamic scholars on one of its provisions, as if what they thought mattered any more than would those of your local pastor. Both have a role to play, no doubt, but not when it involves the fundamental human rights of Nigerian citizens, which alone are sacrosanct.

 

For Yerima, of course, the girls he would violate – does violate – are no more real than pets he might want to acquire as playthings, to be discarded when no longer needed. The only question is: how much? For the Egyptian girl it was $100,000, but then she was a more exotic creature than the 15-year-old he promptly divorced in order not to violate – so many violations – the Islamic injunction on the number of such pets you may keep under your roof at any one time. Before long Boko Haram will be telling us that murder is also sanctioned from above.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

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

Mummy said

The presidency is an opportunity that fell unto us on a platter of gold.
                                                                                    Dame (Dr) Patience Jonathan

Everything seems to come back to Mummy, as in, ‘Mummy told me to support Wike and I have told Mr Speaker, otherwise I would have supported Oruwar.’ Thus the Honourable Evans Bipi, a member of the Rivers State House of Assembly, explaining the extraordinary scenes we recently witnessed when he physically assaulted a fellow Honourable with a fake mace, the original having been removed for safe-keeping by the embattled Governor, the ultimate object of this unseemly spectacle if we are to believe what we hear.

 

For a certain kind of Nigerian, educated, citified, probably been abroad, Dame Patience Jonathan is too bush – ‘an illiterate Okrika woman,’ as one commentator unkindly dubbed her – on account of her many grammatical gaffes: ‘My heart feels sorry for these children who have become widows by losing their parents for one reason or another’, ‘We should have love for our fellow Nigerians irrespective of their nationality’, ‘The people sitting before you here were once a children’, but there is no intrinsic reason why she should be able to speak the ‘Queen’s English’, this not being her first language. Nor, for that matter, is it the language of most Nigerians, for whom the snobbery of being able to speak through one’s nose, as the saying has it, can only endear her to them the more. She is of the people - she speaks their language – and is all the more dangerous for that, and not necessarily for any fault of hers, or at least not consciously so.

 

Dame Patience’s excesses are, of course, the stuff of legend. As everyone else has pointed out, she has taken the unconstitutional post of First Lady to new levels of ostentation and vulgarity. Where her predecessors concerned themselves with improving the lot of their rural sisters, she behaves as though she is the other half of the presidency. The most bizarre occasion was an official trip to New York to attend a UN meeting soon after ‘we’ took office when she charged out of the aircraft and was photographed shaking hands with the assembled dignitaries on the tarmac while the hapless husband was still negotiating the steps. She also consistently outdoes him on the domestic front. In the last month alone, she shut down Lagos for eight hours - on a working day – in order to attend a naming ceremony. Later, in her native Rivers State, she cordoned off the GRA for eleven days in order to campaign for her husband’s 2015 ambition, during the course of which she also found time to attend the wedding ceremony of her pugilistic ‘son’, Bipi, who was moved to call her ‘Jesus Christ on earth’. As Wole Soyinka put it in his own inimitable English: ‘This is getting to a state where an unelected person, a mere domestic appendage, can seize control of a place...and as a result of her presence, the governor of that state was told by policemen that you cannot pass here because the queen was there. What sort of jungle are we living in?’

 

‘A mere domestic appendage’ was perhaps not the wisest choice of words given the scandalous under-representation of women in the public sphere, to say nothing of the brutal facts of life endured by the non-English-speaking rural women to be gleaned from any number of UN reports. Besides, Dame Patience herself is assuredly no ‘mere domestic appendage’, the problem being that she is a particularly odious specimen of her tribe even as her husband is a particularly weak specimen of his – woman wrappa, as we tellingly like to taunt the backsliders whose wives have pocketed them – but then so, presumably, is the Honourable who was man enough to fight a fellow Honourable on the orders of ‘Mummy’. The level of infantilism is at odds with the swagger that reached its apotheosis – also, tellingly enough, under the military - when the First Lady syndrome made its initial appearance. Dame Jonathan – Mummy - has merely taken it a step further and in the process revealed the swagger for what it is, in itself another reason why she is so reviled by the educated scribblers in the pages of the newspapers.

 

Regarding Rivers State particularly, there is little doubt that Dr Patience – she also seems to have acquired a doctorate from somewhere or other - is the one calling the shots, but the real test of her power will be whether she can actually unseat a sitting governor she publicly upbraided two years ago. ‘Listen to me, you listen to me,’ she shouted him down before explaining why he mustn’t use the word ‘must’ in her presence. It had to do with some houses he was proposing to demolish in her hometown in order to make way for a school. The issue was clearly close to her heart although the governor might himself be faulted for inviting her to the flagging-off ceremony in the first place. It was also during this period, still flush with her husband’s recent victory, that she ‘stormed’ another state on a thanksgiving tour and was duly received by the entire State House of Assembly – of an opposition party at that - who shut down business for the day in order to stand under the sun and listen to a ‘mere domestic appendage’ who nobody ever voted for.

 

This time around in Rivers State she even went as far as to assure a delegation of chiefs – all 135 of them – that she had not come ‘to fight the Governor...because he is my brother,’ before discussing the issue of his replacement, given that Amaechi is serving out his second and final term, but perhaps the prospect of even his remaining two years is too much for Mummy. Whatever the case, the Governor ought to be a worried man and doubtless he is. What is certain, in any case, is that it will all end in tears, for us no less than for them.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

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

 

Between a rock and a hard place

The Jonathan administration has been notably lacklustre in its foreign policy, especially where Africa is concerned, a far cry from the time when Nigeria was considered a front-line state in the war against apartheid, or when, later, we sent troops to Liberia and Sierra Leone. By contrast, we did nothing while civil war raged in Côte d’Ivoire until the French took it upon themselves to sort out the mess in its former colony. And when Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi vowed to exterminate the ‘cockroaches’ he had ruled for nearly three decades, it was President Jacob Zuma of South Africa who was to be seen everywhere speaking on behalf of the continent. It is true that we contributed our quota to the turmoil in Mali but the initiative came from elsewhere and the French (again) had in any case made the area safe for democracy - to say nothing of the remaining historical artefacts.

 

Insofar as Jonathan has a foreign policy, it seems to be anchored on ‘attracting investment to support the domestic programmes of government with a view to achieving not only our Vision 20: 20202, but to bequeathing an enduring...legacy of economic prosperity’, as he put it in a speech he gave in New York late last year. This seems to be a particularly myopic approach for at least two reasons. The first is that we have - or ought to have - more than enough money (and in dollars at that) to engage all our unemployed youths to undertake the ‘domestic programmes’ so desperately needed but for our obsession with buying houses in England and educating our children in Switzerland, both of whose banking systems we seem so intent on aiding. The second is that the West Africa region we insist we have an economic relationship with would seem to offer huge potential for growth, as indeed countless Nigerian traders have long known, bemoaning as they do the unhelpful attitude of their home missions, which appear to regard them as a nuisance, perhaps because they have better things to do.

 

So it was a surprise to discover that we actually had an opinion about the latest events in Egypt, to wit: ‘The unfortunate development is a gross violation of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which prohibits unconstitutional change of government. It constitutes a serious setback of the remarkable progress which Africa has made in fostering [a] culture of democratic governance in the continent.’ One might pick holes here and there, for instance the ‘remarkable progress’ we have supposedly made in ‘democratic governance’, at least here in Nigeria, where, for instance, a would-be national statesman with his sights set on unseating the ruling party come 2015 insists on foisting his daughter on a local association of market women, having previously installed his wife as a senator. As for the ‘unconstitutional change of government’, we know perfectly well who crafted the 1999 effort we are currently labouring under but it was assuredly not ‘the people’ it lays claim to, ‘the people’ themselves being an expendable commodity.

 

Still, one can understand the unease of those whose lifestyles invite their own overthrow but for our collective experience of military rule which would make any such intervention deeply unpopular. Clearly, the jubilant Egyptians never suffered under the likes of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha - and Goodluck to them. I don’t like Islamic fundamentalism with its myriad hatreds but it is hard to argue with an apparently free and fair election in Egypt, certainly freer and fairer than we have managed here since we began this new experiment in democracy, and which seems doomed to remain forever ‘nascent’.

 

For the first – and perhaps only – time I find myself in agreement with Nigeria’s official position on the goings-on in a fellow African country, however popular the coup in Egypt has so far proved, especially among those who initially fought for a modern, secular state that is ultimately the only option we have in the brave new world we inhabit. No army, anywhere, should ever intervene in their country’s domestic political arrangements. The Brotherhood is right to reject this abrogation of the people’s will, as we would be here if our own army were to oust the current crop in the National Assembly on the grounds that they are corrupt and self-serving. Indeed, Buhari once did just that, with what results we had to endure for the next fifteen years, which is why Nigerians are hardly likely to follow the Egyptian example, even if we also crave a mass movement that will frighten the government into taking itself and the country more seriously.

 

The deeper problem we have in Nigeria, any why I recommended boycotting the 2015 elections in a previous blog, was the constitution’s insistence that political parties must show national spread – offices in two-thirds of the 36 states - before they can be registered. My own take is that people with a common interest should be free to come together and contest for any position they like, from local to state to federal, the more so in a country with any number of minorities. This is what democracy means. The current arrangement only perpetuates the ‘money-bags’ politics that excludes ‘the people’ in the interests of the cabal that has ruined the ‘giant of Africa’ over the last half-century of our so-called independence, but which has proved just another form of servitude. Unfortunately, the so-called constitutional review recently undertaken by the National Assembly has merely confirmed that everything stays the same. Given this, we may indeed be faced with the Egyptian scenario come the 2015 elections that has long been viewed as the trigger for the country to descend into the chaos which successive governments have only just managed to contain. Like our Egyptian brothers and sisters, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

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

If the shoe fits

It seems there is to be a diplomatic row between Nigeria and her former colonial ‘master’. The issue concerns a proposed N723,000/£3,000 bond payable by Nigerians intending to travel to the UK, which will be forfeited if the traveller overstays their welcome and thereby becomes a potential burden on the British taxpayer. The external affairs minister has summoned the British high commissioner to ‘explain to government if the plan is true and why Nigeria is a target,’ worried as he apparently is ‘about the highly discriminatory policy which tends to portray the country in a bad light.’ He was quickly followed by  the chair of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, who opined that it would ‘not foster true relationship’ between either country because it was against ‘the spirit of the Commonwealth’.

 

Perhaps the first question to ask is why so many Nigerians – at least of the well-heeled variety - are so obsessed with travelling to the UK given that the world is full of countries only too ready to have us visit them with our hard-earned foreign exchange – and cheaper to boot. In fact, all it does is betray our continuing subservience to the ‘mother country’ that is the raison d’être of the Commonwealth which the House chair sets such great store by, being merely a more acceptable nomenclature than the one it replaced, with its bogus connotation that we are all the same now, no more the coloniser and the colonised - but with the Queen of England as its head. The only consolation is that we are not alone in this ignominious league. Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are also included as those countries which constitute ‘the most significant risk of abuse’ to the UK’s extensive social security system.

 

In a swift reaction, Professor Itse Sagay, the constitutional lawyer, argued that the proposed new visa regulation showed that the British authorities ‘have a wrong idea of their importance to us’ on the grounds that, ‘[w]e are more important to them than they are to us,’ which simplifies the matter somewhat. The British do indeed know that this is the case given that they were among the recipients of the estimated $120bn lost in capital flight from Nigeria between 2001 and 2010, UK banks being perhaps the least scrupulous about accepting dodgy money, and also the least likely to repatriate said money (Switzerland included). This is to say nothing of the $16bn Okonjo-Iweala caused to be transferred to the Paris Club in one fell swoop in 2004 in order that Nigeria might be ‘forgiven’ the original $8bn lent to corrupt military regimes prior to 1999, the country having already paid $11bn but for our tardiness in meeting up with the terms of the repayment schedule under the rubrics ‘principal’, ‘interest’ and ‘late interest’, a 419 if ever there was one. As I have argued elsewhere, the once and present finance minister was clearly a stooge sent by her World Bank employers in order to plunder the nation’s treasury. No self-respecting country would have deemed her worthy of such a sensitive position, instead of which we lauded her patriotic zeal in freeing us from the foreign debt we have begun amassing all over again when the current administration, overwhelmed by her credentials and anxious to be in the good books of the lords of poverty, begged her to come back and was duly grateful when she accepted ‘because considering the position you were holding at the foremost World Bank, it is difficult for you to come back to serve as minister in a country’. We wonder whether colonialism has ended; we should wonder instead whether slavery has ended.

 

In other words, the British authorities are not mistaken about our value to them even as they gratuitously insult us over the proposed visa levy. They know an abject people for what they are having had ample time to study those they forged in their own image. They also know that all the huffing and puffing by both the minister and the House chair amount to playing to the gallery. For one thing, neither of the aforementioned will be affected by the proposed policy given their privileged positions in the scheme of things; for another, both of them know perfectly well what to do if they are serious about forging a country in which such a scenario will be inconceivable. Nigeria can only be insulted because we have invited it upon ourselves by what we have done as much as by what we have left undone. It wasn’t the British – or anyone else, for that matter – who contributed to the ‘squandering of riches’ over the five decades of our so-called independence that has brought us to this pretty pass.

 

As things stand, it is by no means certain that the UK authorities will go ahead with the proposed visa levy, especially since India, a far more important country, has also expressed its outrage. If so, the underlying problem of what we have become – have allowed ourselves to become - in the eyes of the world (and not only the UK) will hardly be obviated. In terms of potential alone, Nigeria is far more endowed than the ‘mother country’, as all the statistics readily testify: more oil, more gas, more land, more people. Indeed, if not for the hash we have made of the independence we clamoured for, it is Nigeria, not Britain, which should be the one imposing the levy. Besides, given the evident eagerness of Nigerians to patronise the UK banking system with money meant for the development of Nigeria, it might be in order for the Nigerian government to impose the levy on its own citizens wanting to travel to the UK but for the fact that it is government officials who are themselves the culprits, as the UK authorities well know. Either way, we can well do without the sanctimonious outrage of our ministers and legislators.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

 

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,

and Dream Chasers.

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

OMG, I'm gay!

Righteous indignation is always to be discouraged in politicians. Their crimes are bad enough as it is, especially in these parts. And now the House of Representatives, following in the footsteps of the Senate two years ago, has gone and passed a bill stipulating 14 years’ imprisonment for same-sex marriage, along with10 years for those who arrange, enable or support same. All that now remains is for Goodluck Jonathan to sign it into law. He himself is not known to have expressed an opinion on the matter although he recently pardoned a certain army major convicted for sodomy, which may or may not say something but probably not since he also pardoned the disgraced former governor he was deputy to in the days when he could hardly have dreamt of such an unlikely scenario.

 

According to David Mark, the Senate president, the bill merely reflects ‘the wishes of the generality of Nigerians desirous of living within our cultural bounds,’ which is true enough. In a much-cited opinion poll, over 90 per cent of Nigerians approve the bill, and one only has to read the comments on the few blog sites which have broached the subject to understand the virulence many harbour towards those they regard as indulging in ‘unnatural acts’. But then many Nigerians believe many things. They believe, for instance, that wife-beating is acceptable and even necessary in order to keep women in line, and it’s only a pity that Mark and his fellow senators seem comfortable with a colleague who took a 13-year-old Egyptian as his fourth wife despite the provisions of another bill outlawing child abuse.

 

In other words, by playing to the gallery, which is what the legislators are doing, they raise the question of just what, exactly, constitutes ‘our cultural bounds’.  As I wrote in my last blog, Mark himself was alleged to have pocketed $70m in his previous incarnation as communications’ minister under IBB and now we hear that he’s building a private university, no small undertaking, even with the over-bloated salaries our morally upright legislators voted for themselves, yet another bill they were quick to pass. This is to say nothing of the legislator who was filmed emerging from an oil magnate’s house in the early hours of the morning flush with dollar bills in return for doctoring a report implicating said magnate in dodgy business practices that rip off Nigerians, this being the only way to make serious money in this country. One could go on but to what end? Nigeria did not earn its reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the world because the world irrationally decided to make it so, but then maybe that’s OK, maybe stealing is one of ‘our cultural bounds’.

 

As the few brave spokespeople for the gay community have pointed out, targeting a minority which poses no threat to anybody would seem to be a particularly vicious undertaking in a country with so many other pressing bills to be attended to, beginning with a basic social security system in the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter. It is unseemly to want to incarcerate consenting adults for what they do in private while public officials openly accused of gross corruption (complete with the sums involved) throw the kind of lavish parties that has made Nigeria the second-largest importer of champagne in the world, and Nigerians the third highest spenders in London.

 

But why the hatred of a severe minority of fellow-Nigerians who merely desire to express their sexual preferences outside what is considered the ‘norm’? One needn’t concern oneself with the much-touted argument that such a union is necessarily fruitless and therefore a sin, as the pastors have been queuing up to testify, being themselves politicians under a different guise with an equal penchant for private universities. A childless couple are no less married for that, and Nigeria is awash with abandoned babies in need of good homes that is the price of that champagne. As for homosexuality being un-Nigerian, which some are keen to peddle, why, then, the need for legislation? Besides, I went to boarding school here in Nigeria and we all knew what went on after lights out. Nor can I begin to count the number of times I’ve been groped over the years on long journeys in shared taxis.

 

In fact, what really obsesses Nigerian homophobes, who are less concerned with lesbians (when they don’t get off on them, if certain rumours are to be believed, but let’s not go there, life being complicated enough as it is), was posed by one Dele Blog: ‘why shld u fuck a fellow man's ass?’ Indeed so, the problem being that this is the condition of the Nigerian male who is daily fucked in the ass, for instance by a man accused of looting $70m who then proceeds to parade himself – is permitted to parade himself - as a guardian of public morality even as we cheer him on. One doesn’t have to look far to unearth the trouble with Nigeria, the leadership being the least of our worries (and all apologies to the recently departed). 

 

As I have argued in previous blogs, the time has come for us to wake up, like the Egyptians did yesterday and as the Brazilians are doing today. With that in mind, let me say it once and for all so that those who would lecture me on what they claim are ‘our cultural bounds’ can come and arrest me: I would be honoured to arrange, enable and support any of my fellow citizens desirous of expressing their fundamental human right to marry whoever they choose. I’m gay for it, you might say. Ten years? Well, fuck you, too, as it were.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

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

Much ado about constitutional amendment

Should the president and governors have a single, six-year term or should we stick with the current two, four-year terms? Jonathan was at first vociferous in maintaining the status quo (he’s that sort of fellow) and then quickly changed his mind (he’s also that sort of fellow), with the proviso that any such constitutional amendment should not come into force until 2019. In other words, his position was solely dictated by whether or not he would be eligible to contest in 2015, after which the legislators were free to do as they liked. In the meantime, he is yet to make up his mind about whether he does in fact want a second term, except that everyone knows he does. So the Nigerian ship of state is buffeted this way and that while those who claim to be at the helm obsess over how they can remain there at whatever cost to the nation (and ultimately themselves), but that is hardly a new story.

 

What is a new story - and has been since we began this adventure called Nigeria by the geography books - is the vexed issue of the sovereign national conference, which everyone knows is the only hope for negotiating our way out of the stormy waters we have spent half-a-century precariously navigating, lucky to be still afloat - if only just. And that goes for everyone, even – or especially – those who profess to believe that tinkering with what was a bogus constitution to begin with will somehow fix the problem of too many feeling too aggrieved in a system which delivers only hardship. State police or not state police, the legislators pretend to ask themselves, before coming down firmly on the side of everything staying the same, and yet these same legislators know better than anyone that the present arrangement is not working, hence the state of emergency they recently rubber-stamped in three unfortunate states now being rampaged by soldiers answerable only to themselves, at least judging by the silence of (again) these same legislators amid reports of murder and mayhem. But nobody ever voted against their bank balance, at least in Nigeria, and so any hope that the few who continue to benefit from the present arrangement will suddenly wake up and do the right thing is like asking Obasanjo to forgive his enemies, Baba being perhaps the one who could have made the most difference but for the fact that his enemies turned out to be the people of the nation he ruled over twice, both times by an accident of fate.

 

As I have argued in earlier blogs, the time is long overdue since we, the people, should have taken matters into our own hands if we are at all serious about ‘moving the nation forward’, a venture which might even now be too late. The first thing to forget about is the 2015 elections even as the INEC chair assures us of a better outing than 2011 but which can only mean that we just might be lucky enough – enfranchised enough, if you please – to swop one set of rogues for another. It is noticeable that, in all the brouhaha surrounding the proposed constitutional amendments, and which has taken all of fourteen years to get thus far, nobody has raised the issue of independent candidates contesting under parties which do not have to conform to ‘federal character’, the concept itself being one of the greatest wheezes ever devised by any government anywhere.

 

Unfortunately, we still seem unable to grasp just how fragile this ship is, or how many rocks we haven’t been smashed up on, this apparently being because ‘God is a Nigerian’, as IBB once joked when referring to the bigger joke that was June 12. Take, for instance, The Patriots, the prominent group of ‘elders’ who came together many years ago to fight for ‘good governance’ but who lately resorted to begging the president and the legislators ‘to take all necessary steps for convening a national conference for the people of Nigeria to deliberate and agree on the terms and conditions on which they are to live together in peace and unity.’ It’s only annoying that they continue to feature so prominently in the pages of the newspapers, testimony to their perceived relevance in a society paralysed by the worship of authority and exemplified by The Patriots themselves.  Only recently, they hit upon the idea of calling on twelve ‘fathers of the nation’ to intervene with the presidency in their noble cause of restructuring Nigeria by sleight of hand. I’m sure the president will be delighted to give audience to the likes of Shehu Shagari, Grace Alele Williams and Maitama Sule in order that they might discuss their various failures that is the reason for the meeting in the first place. It will be noted, in any case, that the all-important ‘sovereign’ is necessarily excluded by the logic of the exercise, but which happens to be the only thing that matters.

 

What, then, stops this ‘sovereign’ – you and me, our friends and relatives – from coming together to write its own constitution, as the South Africans did even before Mandela embarked on his twenty-seven years?  Not a lot now that we can call each other on the telephone, a development which the current Senate President once famously thought laughable when he served as communications minister in a military regime, during which time he was reputed to have pocketed $70 million, enough to buy everybody a telephone except that telephones weren’t meant for the masses since they didn’t own golf courses in Ireland. Perhaps swapping khaki for agbada has made a democrat of him - if not a patriot – but, as William Hazlitt put it, ‘miracles occur, to be sure, but they are not to be had wholesale, or to order’. We will have to do it all by ourselves, just like our brothers and sisters did in the South Africa that Nigerians are now flocking to.

 

© Adewale Maja-Pearce

Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

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

All quiet on the north-eastern front

During the long years of military rule the Nigerian press was consistently singled out – along with civil society organisations – for fulfilling its role as ‘the people’s parliament’ in its opposition to what Wole Soyinka called ‘this denigration of the popular will’ that had reduced Nigerians to ‘a second-class breed of humanity’. The military itself was quick to return the compliment. Those were the days when newspapers were proscribed by decree, journalists were imprisoned for coup-plotting and the concept of ‘guerrilla journalism’ entered the national lexicon.

 

All that changed with the advent of democracy in 1999. In place of a once vibrant press, which was sometimes forced to publish on the hoof in order to evade the security forces on their trail, we now appear to be saddled with little more than mouthpieces for power-drunk politicians waving brown envelopes - when indeed they don’t own these same newspapers. In a ‘normal’ country, which is to say one that is at relative peace with itself and with a more-or-less coherent road map of where it is going, this would be alarming; in a country which is very much at war with itself and without any sort of map, road or otherwise, this is tragic.

 

Consider the following from The New York Times (5 June 2013): ‘The military just opens fire and kills people, and throws bombs and kills people, for no reason... That is why you see these people here... That is what is happening now in Nigeria.’ The ‘here’ referred to by the speaker, a shoe salesman, is a border town in neighbouring Niger, where up to 10,000 people have fled the fighter jets and helicopter gunships of the avenging military in full flow against Boko Haram insurgents. But you wouldn’t know any of this from the Nigerian press, for instance the ‘flagship’ Guardian (6 June 2013), which simply quotes the Chief of Army Staff - ‘It would... interest you to note that the communities in places where these operations are being conducted are very happy and they have been expressing their joy to the officers’ – in the course of his visit to Ebonyi State to sort out some obscure community clash that got out of hand. Coincidentally – but perhaps there is no such thing as chance – the military has also flooded Onitsha in order to ensure that the MASSOB-directed stay-at-home this Saturday is averted, the better ‘to ensure that lives and property of the people are protected’ given the people’s propensity to loot their own homes.  But that’s Nigeria for you, wahala everywhere.

 

More worrying still is the seeming indifference of a populace which believes itself immune to the incipient civil war in its midst on account of the fact that President Jonathan, in declaring the current state of emergency in three north-eastern states, has at last shown the resolve it feared he lacked – if only! - even as his peace and reconciliation committee continues to trundle around the country looking ever more foolish. No doubt everybody is heartily sick of Islamic fundamentalists who think nothing of blowing up churches and generally terrorising innocent people going about their business in what is already a harsh economic environment, but giving the military carte blanche merely results in the same terrorism which is otherwise deplored. Moreover, as many have already observed, a previous emergency in selected local government areas only resulted in greater hardship for ‘the people’ who had to stay at home whether they would or no. As for the terrorists, they simply relocated elsewhere, as indeed they appear to be doing now.

 

The problem isn’t only a Nigerian one. The War on Terror has justified any number of human rights abuses against natives and foreigners alike by supposedly more enlightened countries, including, above all, the US, which is now anxious to assist us to get rid of this scourge in our midst. Again, according to The New York Times article quoted above: ‘They are killing people without asking who they are,’ said Laminou Lawan, a student who said he had fled here 10 days before. ‘When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot. They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.’ As many have also pointed out, nothing is more calculated to drive the insulted and injured into the arms of the terrorist group they are supposed to be fighting.

 

The apparent quiescence of the populace in what is being done in its name, aided and abetted as it is by what appears to be a supine media, can hardly bode well for the civil liberties of all Nigerians as we approach the 2015 elections that some have seen as the tipping point in what is already a fragile polity. Jonathan has not hidden his second-term ambition, hence his current struggle to unseat the chair of the duly elected governor’s forum, and now the way is left open for him to use the military to achieve his ends almost a decade-and-a-half after we thought we had jettisoned this ‘denigration of the popular will’.

 

Seen from this perspective, the activities of the terrorists provide the perfect cover for him to achieve his ends. Indeed, there is nothing to stop him from deliberately fomenting trouble in any part of the federation and then imposing a state of emergency in the interests of ‘peace and stability’. To that end, he will also be able to count on the support of an international community which has proved itself inimical to the values it claims to hold most dear when confronted by anyone deemed to be a terrorist on mere suspicion alone. One might even go as far as to say that the real threat to our corporate existence – always assuming this to be a desirable thing given our experience so far – is not the terrorists but our own complacency.

© Adewale Maja-Pearce


Adewale Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Dream Chasers.

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