Work in progress 3

Presently, my friend Joké appeared. It was unusual for her to come so early in the day, as if anticipating the drama she relished in her own life - and brought to mine. I had met her soon after I started returning to Nigeria when I dropped in at the National Theatre with some friends. We were on our way to VI for a dinner in honour of our Nobel laureate’s sixtieth birthday just months before the dramatist was chased into exile in fear of his life by the General who drowned baby mice and hanged Saro-Wiwa. She was doing something or other with the National Troupe and tagged along with us. Like me, she had one of those foreign surnames which denoted ‘family’ but things were rough with her. She never had any money and she dressed shabbily and I never did find out what she did for a living. It seems that she was alone in Lagos because her father was dead and her sister was in America, although there was some mystery about her mother, who she claimed was working as a nurse in Saudi Arabia but who eventually turned out to be living in Lagos.

 

As with Prince, who was now acting as my enforcer in my running battle with my recalcitrant tenants, it was difficult to know what to believe; as with Prince also, one somehow never got to see any papers. I couldn’t even be sure of her age but I guessed that she was in her late thirties or early forties. The only thing I knew for certain was that she had lived in London because she was familiar with my old haunts around the Notting Hill Gate/Ladbroke Grove axis, including The Ship restaurant I used to patronize on giro day when I returned from Canada and was writing never-to-be-published short stories in earnest at the rate of one a day in a purple attic bedsit. She was a good mimic and caught the London Rasta accent beautifully and whenever she did so I had the feeling that she wanted to go back but somehow couldn’t, not necessarily because London would have been easier than Lagos but because it wasn’t here. She herself put it down to ‘spiritual reasons’, i.e. that her enemies were blocking her, a line that would appeal to a great many Nigerians anxious to see evil lurking everywhere.

 

From the start, she was keen I consider her a sister, which was just as well because I didn’t find her at all attractive. She had a bulky, misshapen body with pendulous breasts and yams for calves, although she also had one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen, made more so by her perfect dentition. She was also loud, drank too much and had a habit of sitting with her legs apart, leaving nothing to chance. On the plus side, she was a superb cook and kept me supplied in women, although in this as elsewhere she was inclined to overdo things, another trait she shared with Prince. One weekend, for instance, she brought a nineteen-year-old I had noticed at the Shrine only to bring her mother the next, as she later confessed before revealing that the father and husband was high up in the navy at a time when we were still under military rule. I pointed out that I could have been horsewhipped, at the very least, but she just laughed as if it was a huge joke – ‘You too dey fear,’ she said - and perhaps she was right.

 

All the same, she couldn’t have come at a better time. The first of the tenants was at long last being evicted and the bailiffs were busy about their work under Prince’s supervision. Just as I was explaining this to her Ngozi, the evictee, emerged from her flat in tears to curse me for being a ‘bastard’ at the same time as the Alhaji, the next in line, came bounding upstairs to insist that I was an impostor and not part of the Pearce family I claimed to belong to. Joké flew out.

 

‘Shut up your mouth you fucking bitch otherwise I will slap you just now,’ she screamed, hands on hips, her face not two inches from her adversary’s, as pumped up as I’ve ever seen anyone. Even Prince, who had come out to confront the Alhaji, was taken aback.

 

‘Look at her, bleachy bleachy,’ she sneered, but this was merely rhetorical: Ngozi was naturally yellow, without the disfiguring blotches from the skin-whitening ointments supposedly banned but freely available. Chastened, she retreated to her rapidly emptying flat as Prince quietly ordered the Alhaji back downstairs to await his own turn, which he did with surprising meekness.

 

‘See as she dey bleach come talk nonsense for my broda,’ Joké continued. ‘Wo, I go beat am, eh? I go beat all de one wey she bleach commot for him face. Useless bitch. Asewo.'

 

Prince calmed her down and I introduced them. He smiled and nodded and told me to give her money for bread and eggs for the boys, along with enough for another bottle of Chelsea. Joké was delighted. She giggled girlishly as she went about her assignment.

 

By noon, it was all over. I stood on the front balcony watching a distraught Ngozi, still in her nightdress, wandering about in confusion among her goods piled up in the street. It was hard to credit the amount of stuff she had crammed into her flat and I thought I heard her say something about the ice cream in the freezer melting. Presently, Joké joined me.

 

‘See her, she never even bath self,’ she said. She was silent for a moment. ‘Na so her toto go dey smell,’ she added laconically before returning to the kitchen, where she was cooking egusi soup. She surpassed herself that day as she giggled and fluttered while ‘Baba’ Prince wolfed down two large helpings before we all retired to the empty flat he was now to occupy.

 

© 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.

Work in progress 2

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 1999 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 he 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 his office. The rest of the flat was bare.

 

Moreover, since it soon transpired that his aspirant never actually paid him for his services (a common enough practice with many Nigerian employers, as I came to understand), and there wasn’t in any case very 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, then as now - too many vehicles, too few roads, no alternatives despite the city’s extensive waterways - and there were twenty-six of them altogether, although they were eventually whittled down to three in order 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.

 

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. Whenever he exerted himself - and he wasn’t one to do things by half: ‘What is worth doing at all is worth doing well,’ was one of his popular refrains - his laboured breathing pointed to the problem which killed him. 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.

 

‘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 that she refused to move. 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.

 

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 where the young male teacher took erotic delight in spanking the bottoms of his adolescent female charges. By and by, I felt confident enough to entrust him with extending my Nigerian passport.

 

‘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 also a tenant.

 

‘The Alhaji!’ he exclaimed. ‘But I thought he was the owner of the building. That is what he has been telling people.’

 

‘Which people?’

 

‘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. I have the cassette; I’ll bring it for you to listen.’ He shook his head. ‘He is a big man,’ he continued. ‘Whenever he threw a party in those days he would block the entire close and nobody could complain. He has many houses. I know of at least one in A_.’ He mentioned a place where the gutters overflowed whenever it rained because the state government was tardy about clearing the canals, which invariably filled up quickly with the household rubbish which the state government was equally tardy about collecting, although it should also be said that Lagosians, many of them from other states come to make money in one of the world’s fastest growing cities, were careless of their surroundings, careless about littering the already dirty environment.

 

‘So he can move into it whenever he wants,’ I said.

 

He shook his head emphatically. ‘Alhaji can’t go and live there,’ he said, making a face. ‘The place is too far and there are too many armed robbers. He is only renting it.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, the building has no bathroom or toilet. He wanted to save money. The tenants have to go and shit in the bush behind.’ He paused. ‘And now he’s gone and fallen on bad luck,’ he added dramatically.

 

‘How?’

 

‘Haven’t you noticed that he no longer has his official car?’ I had noticed – one vehicle less was cause for celebration – but hadn’t thought anything of it.

 

‘They sacked him,’ he added.

 

‘Why?’

 

‘They said he tried to embezzle five million.’

 

‘When?’

 

‘Just before you returned from England.’ He shook his head. ‘He was due for retirement soon. Now he has lost everything – gratuity, pension, everything. He should have got at least one million handshake after all his years of service. They say he is going up and down to Abuja begging them to turn his dismissal into retirement but they will never do that. Government doesn’t change its mind. I should know; I was in the system for nineteen years.’

 

© 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

Work in progress...

Safely back in England again at the age of sixteen, I finished school and went to university. Then I got a scholarship to do a Master’s in Canada but dropped out after the first semester to become a writer, an ambition I had first nurtured when, at the age of seven, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in my bedroom overlooking the lagoon and was captivated by the way the words on the page transported me to a magical place that was just as intense as the one I inhabited in everyday life, if not more so. I even entered the cupboard and closed the door behind me. The other side did indeed open up, many years and adventures later, and the world it revealed was certainly magical, although not in the way I could ever have imagined. Later, just before I left for Canada, I read Faulkner’s masterpiece (‘the first purely American novel’), along with Crime and Punishment (‘Has there been any other novelist except for Dostoevsky who could have conceived and written Light in August?’), both of which I picked up in the university bookshop one Friday afternoon. By Monday the die was cast.

 

But no sooner did I begin writing than memories of Nigeria flooded back. My first publishable book was a collection of short stories centred on my boarding school years, although I quickly abandoned fiction for the essay, a form better suited to whatever talent I thought I might have. When, on the only occasion I turned my attention to England, I discovered that I had nothing to write about except ‘race’, a subject which didn’t interest me no matter how hard I tried to work it up, and which I only persisted with over the entire span of a book because I had a contract to fulfil. Not that I hadn’t encountered racists - or their apologists. Once, when I was at university, two of my closest friends worried that I would insist on following them to watch a newly promoted Swansea and be offended by the banana skins thrown onto the pitch when we had plenty of monkeys pleading for evolution in the bush the Nigerian government was busy not protecting in the interests of our collective heritage but, then, I didn’t like football anyway.

 

At bottom, I suppose, I never felt estranged from England and it never really occurred to me that it was in anybody’s power to make me feel so. On the contrary, I was very much at home there. This was perhaps because, as a native speaker, English was not strange to me, language being what a professor once called more than just an analogue for a culture but its essential life. In other words, I was English to the core. Not so with Nigeria, which was just as exotic, as virgin and as unknown as it had been to my mother, and made more so by the fact that Nigerians themselves, listening to my accent and observing my features, took me for a foreigner in a way that the English, more accommodating to the notion of multiculturalism as a fall-out of Empire, never did.

 

The pity of it was that my fate should have condemned me to a country where ordinary, decent values had become so distorted that it was impossible to live a halfway decent life without feeling that you were being continuously pulverised between the fairy tale and the reality; between the dream of what it could be and the sordid facts of what it had ineluctably become. It is hardly surprising that Nigeria should feature amongst the most corrupt countries in the world although too much can be made of this, tying as it does with such other places as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Russia, the difference being that Nigeria also happens to be part of a continent which fits neatly into the shared mythology – by Africans as much as by others - of the dark heart forever condemned to poverty, disease and hopelessness.

 

On the other hand, the stresses and strains of what was essentially an unstable hybrid with a past it couldn’t or wouldn’t use and a present it therefore had problems embracing provided plenty of fodder for one who also happened to share something of its attenuated condition, however obliquely. For all the country’s challenges, it represented, to me, fertile ground, not as fiction – I simply didn’t know enough about the inner lives of those I might have wanted to investigate – but in terms of ideas, which are the proper currency of the essay. What the novelists had taught me was never to lose sight of the individual without whom the ideas themselves become sterile in the way of the mulatto, the half-breed, the coloured on the part of those who subscribe to a reductive notion of human beings: ‘I said all the time that he wasn’t right. Wasn’t a white man. That there was something funny about him. But you can’t tell folks nothing until –’ as one of the characters in the Faulkner novel says of Joe Christmas when he discovers that the stranger in their midst is ‘really’ a ‘nigger’, although this was news to the really niggers themselves: ‘It’s a white man,’ he said, without turning his head, quietly, ‘What you want, whitefolks?

 

© 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

Still on Buhari

My last blog elicited some interesting comments when it was republished in Sahara Reporters but then Buhari has always been a polarising figure. I should say at once – for the avoidance of doubt, as it were - that I find the retired General antipathetic. This was a dictator who imprisoned journalists for writing the truth and executed three young men with a retroactive decree. Perhaps, as some argue, he has become a born-again democrat, although as late as 2011, when he unsuccessfully contested for the presidency for the third time, he declared that he had no regrets over the judicial murders and would do the same again. This is not the kind of mindset I want in my President.

 

But most comments concerned this business of sharia. In my previous blog, I quoted a newspaper report from 2001 which had him saying that he was committed to the total implementation of Islamic law throughout Nigeria. Some disputed that he ever said any such thing and that the source was a Yoruba journalist who misunderstood him. This may be so. Nigerian newspapers are notoriously tardy about these matters. They are also as guilty as the society itself over ethnic issues although blaming the Lagos-Ibadan axis is counter-productive given that anyone is free to publish their own newspaper, especially in these days of the internet, as indeed Sahara Reporters demonstrates.

 

That said, Buhari’s actions, utterances and – more sinisterly – his silences make one uneasy when it comes to this business of religion, which should properly be a private matter, especially in a multi-everything country like Nigeria. So, for instance, it is alleged that when General Murtala Muhammed attempted to push through his so-called ‘Islamization Plan’ in the Supreme Military Council before he was assassinated he was supported by Buhari (along with Shehu Musa Yar’Adua and Ibrahim Babangida). How true this is I cannot say since the study of history has been discouraged in our schools and universities for obvious enough reasons.

 

Then there is the matter of Boko Haram. Consider, for instance, the following: ‘When the Niger Delta militants started their activities in the South-South, they were invited by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. An aircraft was sent to them and their leaders met with the late President in Aso Rock and discussed issues. They were given money and a training scheme was introduced for their members. But when the Boko Haram emerged in the North, members of the sect were killed.’ Now this statement, which he certainly made and is easily verified, is a travesty of the facts. In the first place, the Niger delta militants were – and are – fighting a just cause by any yardstick which he, a former petroleum minister, ought to be aware of. In the second place, the militants never killed civilians even when they hijacked the foreigners they had previously warned to stay away from the area. Boko Haram, by contrast, which appears to have no cause but a hatred of all things ‘western’, has deliberately and consistently targeted civilians, even blowing up churches on Christmas Day during morning mass.

 

The fact that Buhari has been loud in his opposition to the state of emergency in the three northern states also sits uneasily with his steadfast refusal to condemn the killings of Christians in the north, which has itself led some to consider him sympathetic to the activities of the same Boko Haram that once nominated him as a possible member of the amnesty committee. For a man who is not slow to speak out on matters of national interest, his silence in this regard can reasonably be taken as tacit support. These are the facts and little is to be gained by pretending otherwise in assessing a man who would be president of all Nigerians, Christians as well as Moslems, southerners as well as northerners. And it is in this context that it is easy to believe reports of a hidden agenda to Islamize the entire country.

 

Unfortunately, Nigeria being what it is, the facts are always at the mercy of what we like to call ‘primordial sentiments’. So it was, for instance, that not a few commentators were quick to see equally sinister motives against the person of Buhari in my previous blog, with a number of them advising me to make as much money as I can from my PDP paymasters ‘as it is countdown for them and loss of the bribe money you receive to write nonsense’. Perhaps the propagandists who work for PDP will find my write-up useful for their purposes. I cannot help that. What is certain, in any case, is that those who believe that I am one of their number are themselves guilty of selective reading. If I don’t care for Buhari for the reasons I have attempted to elucidate it is equally true that I don’t much care for Jonathan either, assuming that he is to be the other candidate in the 2015 presidential election. Indeed, the whole thrust of my blogs to date  – all 26 of them since February this year - is that no good can possibly come out of the current political arrangement that is the antithesis of the federalism we purport to practice, and which alone will get us out of the quagmire that is slowly but inexorably sucking us under.

 

In other words, swopping Jonathan for Buhari will only postpone the day of reckoning. That this day is still some way off is borne out by the seeming impossibility of holding any sort of rational discourse without it immediately degenerating into personal abuse – ‘mumu of mumudom’, as yet another commentator tagged me – based on supposed ethnic or religious allegiances. The descent into personal abuse is an easy enough tactic by those who do not want to face the truth. So much the worse for the ‘giant of Africa’, which has, rightly, become a laughing stock in the eyes of foreigners who reap mightily from our mumuness, as even your average mumu is able to grasp.

 

© 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

What does Buhari want?

One might have guessed it. No sooner was the new mega-party registered than Buhari declared that he would put himself forward as it’s presidential candidate come 2015, contrary to the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that neither he nor Tinubu would vie for any elective posts but would throw their weight behind a younger man, possibly from the North. However, being a born-again democrat who believes in ‘internal democracy’ he promised to abide by the rules. If another clinched the prize he would ‘still support the party’, which is as maybe. In an earlier statement some months back he appeared to make this contingent on the emergence of ‘a formidable and better candidate than me’. Who might such a candidate be? And will he bow to the party’s wishes – internal democracy – should he consider the chosen one (a subjective matter) less ‘formidable’ than himself? This is said against the background of his evident messiah complex, and amply demonstrated by his three previous attempts to regain the crown snatched from him by the ‘evil genius’ all those years ago after an all-too brief tenure. On the third occasion he even ditched one party for another he himself registered for that sole purpose. One might conjecture that by entering into this new alliance he had already calculated that his chance of victory if he contested again would be enhanced in what was always likely to be his last shot given his age.

 

My own prediction is that he will scuttle the new party’s prospects if he is thwarted but then the alliance was always going to be problematic given the egos involved, although the hysteria emanating from the presidency suggests that PDP, riven as it is by all kinds of factions and represented at the top by a man who is clearly floundering when he isn’t being publicly upstaged by his ‘formidable' wife, is genuinely worried at the prospect of defeat. But the question remains: why is Buhari so insistent on his ambition? And what does he want to do with it if and when he achieves it? The answer to the first goes beyond the person of Buhari himself to the generation he represents, the men and women who emerged on the scene in the immediate wake of independence and have carried on as though the country belonged to them. Their sense of entitlement was given voice by Buhari’s nemesis who, putting himself forward in 2011 to contest in an exercise he had himself subverted when he had the chance, opined that the younger pretenders were ‘not capable of leading this country and so we feel we should help them’ on the grounds that ‘they were not given the proper education’. Considering the mess this same generation has made of the country one wonders whether others could have possibly done worse.

 

Buhari, of course, has the reputation of being ‘disciplined’ and ‘upright’, what with his War Against Indiscipline which saw grown men and women flogged in the streets for failing to queue at the bus stop or for crossing the road under a bridge, traits which he himself talks up at every opportunity, but is it true? I alluded in an earlier blog to the retroactive decree he once passed which executed three young men, as well as the imprisonment of two journalists who published an article which, though true, ‘embarrassed’ the regime. A democrat he is not.  He is also a religious fanatic, having once insisted on the ‘total implementation of the Sharia legal system in the country’ which, he said, ‘he will not give up on’. But there are those who, overlooking his previous transgressions on the grounds that he is a reformed character (we once thought the same of Obasanjo until his second coming) with the necessary gumption to tackle what we are pleased to call ‘the cankerworm of corruption’.

 

And therein lies the rub. Corruption is indeed the bane of Nigeria but to suppose that those who benefit from it, which is to say all the representatives of a venal ruling class – the executive, the federal and state legislators, the civil servants – will somehow sit back and wait for the Lone Ranger to ride into town and put them behind bars is a fantasy that can only be dreamt up by someone who views the world through the eyes of the rabble cheering him on, the uneducated, dispossessed potential foot soldiers of Boko Haram whose entire political philosophy is based on the rejection of the imperatives of the modern world.  There is also the matter of his own party unless he supposes that Tinubu, for instance, an unlikely Tonto with his penchant for nepotism and endless rumours of his fabulous wealth, will himself become a reformed character anxious to do the right thing in order that the country might move forward.

 

To put it at it starkest, nothing less than a revolution will rescue the country from the depredations of those who think that stealing is the be-all and end-all of governance. This will not be achieved at the ballot box for the simple reason that those who count the votes are hardly going to count them against their own interests. Indeed, they hardly even wait for it to start before they begin their shenanigans, as the Governor of Rivers State has lately discovered - and he one of their own. By insisting on his ambition Buhari will only end up destroying ‘his’ party and thereby pave the way for PDP to continue its uninterrupted reign it once promised would last for 60 years. Not that it will make much difference to the state of the nation in its onward march to the final disintegration that is already well underway. In this sense, Buhari is merely one of the many distractions we allow ourselves in the hope (always hope) that things will somehow get better without our own volition. God will do it, as we like to say; God will touch their hearts. Big mistake.

 

© 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

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

 

 

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

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.

 

© 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