Adewale Maja-Pearce

Friday, 2 August 2013

Kill and go

Last month, a 25-year-old undergraduate, Ify Gabriel Nwainokpor, and his friend, known simply as Kazeem, were lynched by local residents in the Badagry area of Lagos on suspicion of being members of an armed robbery gang which had recently terrorised the area. It seems that they were initially accosted by a ‘vigilante group’ under the directive of one Asiribo, who ‘came to the scene with a locally-made pistol and a pair of handcuffs’. Without allowing them to identify themselves, he ordered that they be dragged off to be interviewed by the local baale, oba, chief - whatever - whereupon his gun accidentally went off as he was tucking it into the waistband of his trousers, killing him instantly. This ‘infuriated the youth’, who ‘blamed the boys’ for the misadventure, proceeded to ‘beat them to death’, an event which apparently took them six hours to achieve. As with a previous such incident involving four students in Port Harcourt last October, the event was filmed and posted on the net. In both cases, the assailants ignored their pleas of innocence, to the evident approval of the assembled local residents. Police officers were present on both occasions but declined to intervene in either case. Worse yet, one plainclothes officer was alleged to have actively participated in the Badagry incident and can be heard shouting, ‘Who send you? Who send you?’ as he beat each in turn with a wooden plank while the mob brayed: ‘Die, die, burn them, burn them.’ According to the father of one of the victims, events of this nature were not uncommon: ‘Someone was beheaded not too long ago in the same area after being accused of being a thief…’

The Lagos State police commissioner has since vowed to get to the bottom of the matter (or leave no stone unturned, I forget which) and promptly summoned the local DPO for questioning – ‘Actually, the Divisional Police Officer did not present the matter to us the way it happened. When we started asking questions, we discovered that the two people who were killed were not armed robbers as alleged’ - but this can only be cold comfort to the parents. Perhaps a miracle will occur and the officers involved will be brought to justice – ‘When we saw the video clips and watched the way those boys were killed, we told ourselves that we would be failing in our duties if we fail to bring everyone involved to justice’ – as if ‘armed robbers’ aren’t routinely murdered within the precincts of police stations, a practice that has gone unchecked for many years.

Readers’ responses to both these videos were as one might have expected - barbaric, jungle justice, uncivilised etc – but what was striking was their evident lack of faith that anything would come of it all. One of them took the opportunity to name a certain DPO Okoro at Area E in Festac Town, who he alleges to be ‘a criminal [of] the type that will arrange a robbery operations [sic] with their trusted fellow policemen when he’s broke,’ which might be why the police commissioner himself was pleased to announce his intention to bring together ‘the best hands in my command…under the leadership of [the] DPO of Maroko Police Station, whom people have discovered to be an upright police officer,’ such probity evidently being a scarce commodity - by his own admission.

Much the same was said following the killings in Port Harcourt – ‘We have a police post in Aluu. If our men showed dereliction of duty, the IG will take it up’ – and where the same sort of mob also brayed – ‘die, die, die’ – while the self-appointed pillars of the community took turns to club each of the accused in turn with a wooden plank before torching them. We are yet to hear whether the murderers have been brought to justice, although this may not wholly be the fault of the police. The executive secretary of the National Human Rights Commission, Prof Ben Angwe, immediately ‘vowed to monitor the court process to see that justice was done at the end of the day’ in the course of a fact-finding mission in the wake of the killings, during which he also took the opportunity to commiserate with the victims’ relatives and assure them ‘that all those that should be brought to book were made to answer for their roles in the heinous act’. We are fortunate to be living in the age of the internet, only a pity that the commission’s own website (or what passes for such) remains silent on the ‘court process’ that its executive secretary vowed to monitor - or indeed any mention of the case whatsoever.

It says something about our levels of cynicism that we are not surprised at the sight of a police officer committing murder in broad daylight, or that he should be seen to be working in cahoots with armed vigilantes, this being the nature of the criminal enterprise that is the Nigerian state. Only recently, for instance, the same IG who was supposed to take up the matter of the Badagry and Port Harcourt murders was instead busy incarcerating a citizen for allegedly defaming another citizen in a community listserv, this not being a criminal matter in the first place, only that the person allegedly defamed happened to be close to oga at the top. So it goes. This much is given but what about the ‘innocent’ bystanders who cheered on the murderers? Later, when it was all over, the locals in Port Harcourt claimed that ‘the sad incident was not committed by indigenes of the community’ but in an area ‘inhabited by strangers’, which was understandable enough for public relations purposes but hardly credible, and one can only guess at what might happen when they eventually get their hands on the real thieves, the ogas at the top who are the ultimate objects of their misdirected hatred, if only they knew it.

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

Friday, 26 July 2013

Whose country is it anyway?

Earlier this week the Lagos State Government packed 70 people into either a trailer or three buses (the stories differed) and drove them overnight under heavy police escort to Onitsha, where they dumped them. According to their own testimonies, they were arrested on the streets by officials of Kick Against Indiscipline ‘for alleged wandering and other minor offences’ and taken to a warehouse-like structure in Ikorodu Town, where they were initially held for a number of months. Some among them were said to be insane, unable to remember their names or where they originated from. The idea seems to be that they were all beggars although at least one among them claimed to be a petty trader and another an office worker. A terse statement by Lateef Ibirogba, the Lagos State Commissioner for Information, denied deporting anybody on the grounds that ‘everybody has the right to live in any part of the country’ while nevertheless ‘emphasizing that people must live within the law’, a non-sequitur if ever there was one and the reason why I choose to disbelieve him, especially since he is contradicted by, amongst others, the Red Cross officials who attended to the deportees.

Besides, this is not the first time the Lagos State government has shown its disdain for legal niceties, an irony given that it is headed by a SAN. It wasn’t so long ago that a different set of officials from Alausa descended on Epe and demolished over 200 houses while the matter was still pending in the courts. But we need not labour the point. This is the nature of the Nigerian ruling class with its disdain for the people from whom it derives its mandate - and never mind the claims of the party concerned. A ‘progressive’ in Nigerian politics must be measured in relative terms, which is why we are happy when a few roads are repaired and a few trees are planted, desirable though they are. It is one of the tragedies of Nigeria - perhaps the mother of them all, as it were - that our standards have fallen so low that we celebrate what others take for granted.

Nor need the story be literally true in order to resonate with so much that is wrong with Nigeria that it might as well be true, beginning with the vexed issue of who is and who is not an indigene, and whether any of it makes any sense. As the unforthcoming Lagos State commissioner acknowledged, any Nigerian citizen is free to live anywhere they like in Nigeria although bitter experience has shown otherwise; and it is hardly surprising that many of the comments in the few newspapers which carried the story should draw the obvious conclusion: ‘This is the beginning of sorrows, kill them in the North, deport them from Lagos...’ The only mitigating factor, perhaps, is that there is at least one Igbo representative in the upper echelons of the offending state but then he’s a ‘Lagos boy’ and a politician to boot, hence his silence, at least in public.

Then there is the matter of uniformed officials wandering about the streets arresting their fellow citizens under the pretext of a colonial relic we thought we had jettisoned but made worse in this case by the area-boy nature of the exercise. Since when did state officials usurp the powers of a police force which the state government itself has no authority over, much to its chagrin, and rightly so in a federal structure. And not only arrest but detain for months on end. This would amount to kidnapping in saner climes, and a capital offence in the US we pretend to model ourselves on, although given what the US itself gets up to, what with forcing down foreign presidential aircraft for wandering about the open skies, the lesson in hooliganism might have been learnt only too well.

But all this is wearisomely familiar. The police themselves are just as casual about the rights of Nigerian citizens who they routinely kidnap for ransom, as a visit to any police station in the country will demonstrate. This much is given and only made possible by the passivity of those they do this to. After recounting her harrowing story, the office worker quoted above thanked her God (always God) that, ‘I am now free and I want people to help me so that I can find my way home’, grateful perhaps that she wasn’t among the 29 she claimed she saw die during her incarceration. And there the matter ends. The media which broke the story have moved on to the next outrage, the human rights community is otherwise busy with more pressing concerns (pressing, that is, according to the criteria of their foreign funders) and the insulted and injured have little faith, less money and no time to invest in a criminal justice system which can in any case be safely disregarded by those who have done this to them, as who should know.

And then, of course, there is the all-pervasive, ever-present ethnic factor, exemplified by this very case; as another commentator put it: ‘Keep on fooling yourself with false propaganda that Igbo developed Alaba and Idumota, just go back and developed [sic] your Eastern region, Yoruba should not waste their resources to cater for miscreants and destitutes [sic] from Igbo States.’ In fact some of the deportees were apparently from other parts of the country, and few in any case were from Anambra itself, but these are just the details. In the meantime, the Senate President is trying to explain how it was that he and his overpaid colleagues were blackmailed (his word) into approving underage marriage, and the First Lady is seeking to impose her preferred candidate as the next governor of Rivers State even as she battles the incumbent with the help of the police commissioner. Why, it’s enough to make your head spin.

and Dream Chasers.

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

Friday, 19 July 2013

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.

and Dream Chasers.

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

Friday, 12 July 2013

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.

and Dream Chasers.

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

Friday, 5 July 2013

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 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

Friday, 28 June 2013

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.

and Dream Chasers.

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

Friday, 21 June 2013

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.