Fuck it!

‘I’m a pan-Africanist. I belong to this continent.’

                                        Binyavanga Wainaina

My friend and brother, Binyavanga Waianaina, recently ‘outed’ himself. He did so partly – or even largely - in response to President Goodluck Jonathan’s anti-gay bill. Bin, as I know him, is a frequent flyer to our shores where, by his own admission, he invariably has ‘lots of fun’. He has vowed to come back as soon as anyone invites him, the occasion of which he said will be an ‘adventure’. Good for him. We stand ready to receive him, only apologetic that he should want to return. His own native Kenya is marginally better only in that it has not made gay marriage a punishable 14 years in prison (or 10 for aiding same), homosexuality being (as in Nigeria) a criminal offence anyway; and Uganda’s President Museveni was only dissuaded from signing a bill that would jail gays for life by the ‘Western’ threat to withhold aid, which might or might not be a good thing, for Uganda no less than for Nigeria – or even Kenya.

 

And, yet, any discussion of the love that dare not speak its name - in Nigeria, at any rate - must acknowledge the popularity of Jonathan’s latest demonstration of craze. It seems that the majority the president would seek to please find the supposed mechanics of male-on-male sex baffling, if not distasteful, getting our asses fucked being our collective experience in this country, which is why lesbians have been entirely absent from the narrative. This no doubt reflects the patriarchal nature of the society where a senator of the federal republic, i.e. one of the authors of the bill, asserts his right to penetrate 13-year-old girls, early marriage being, in his elevated opinion, ‘the solution of about half our problems’, and this from a Western-trained economist apparently willing to sacrifice his six-year-old daughter ‘if I want to and it’s not your business’. Except that it is my business - and therein lies the problem.

 

It is unfortunate that the West should have threatened to end their so-called aid if the bill was passed, whereupon our former colonial master promptly did an about-turn by increasing our ‘development’ from £200mn to £270mn (or two days’ crude oil earnings), thereby giving hostage to those much enamoured of our independence from her decadent embrace.  ‘Culture’ was the abstraction most bandied about by legislators who promote the parallel idea that kleptomania is also among our time-hallowed values, hence the travails of a former governor doing time at her colonial majesty’s pleasure (or is it Her Satanic Majesty’s Request?), along with his wife, his mistress, and his wife’s sister, oga and madam having themselves previously done time for shoplifting.

 

Amid all the brouhaha over what two consenting adults can and cannot do in the privacy of their bedroom, we can safely say that north and south, Moslem and Christian are for once united in an unholy alliance that can hardly bode well for the secular nation we claim to be nurturing. For Jonathan, who can’t but be alive to suspicions of barefoot illegitimacy, playing the religious card also has the cynical advantage of garnering at least a modicum of political capital amongst those who profess themselves so keen on their purity that their state governments sponsor parallel (and unconstitutional) police forces to raid brothels and beer parlours. And yet it is the ‘people’ who betray the supposed sinners in their midst, a case of Neighbourhood Watch run riot. It is also these same ‘people’ who loudly demand for the death sentence for the innocent-until-proven-guilty outside the Area Courts staffed by corrupt old men with little or no knowledge of the laws they casually enforce (chapter and verse supplied on request).

 

Flogging females, preferably young ones, seems to be something of a cultural value in our bigoted country. We recall the 2000 case of 13-year-old Bariya Ibrahim Magazu who was charged in Zamfara State for engaging in premarital sex and bringing false accusations against three men she claimed had slept with her. She was found guilty and sentenced to 180 lashes. The punishment was administered before her appeal was heard. The men themselves were nowhere to be found because, according to the law, four independent male witnesses were required to testify that they had actually seen the penises of the accused inside her vagina.

 

From flogging to stoning to death – the prescribed punishment for buggery as well as adultery - is not a big step given our much-touted religiosity, especially with the advantage of the foreign holy books we now swear by. It wasn’t so long ago that two women – Amina Lawal and Safiya Husseini – were sentenced to this medieval notion of justice. As with the Magazu case, the men went scot-free because, according to the judge, a man is not a woman whereby she will have a 'protruding stomach' to show for it. On that occasion the authorities backed down from carrying out the sentence. This time, it seems, the baying crowd might do it for them, which might or might not satisfy our irresponsible legislators seeking to divert attention from their own moral turpitude.

 

‘Prominent’ Nigerians have deafened us with their silence over this fascistic law, along with our professional associations - ANA, ASUU, NBA, NMA, TUC – who would otherwise have the country’s best interests at heart, but perhaps they are themselves poisoned by the bureaucratic torpor of our indolent civil servants cowed by a system they have given carte blanche to in exchange for their sitting allowances. That being so, they might care to remember the famous quote during the Nazi era about keeping quiet when they came for your neighbours, only to find there was nobody to speak on your behalf when they finally came for you.

 

So, Bin, my friend and brother, come, we are here. As for Jonathan's new law, you were already a criminal when you came here before, so: Fuck 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

Revisiting Uwais

With the countdown to 2015, all the talk is about the coming showdown between PDP and APC. In Nigerian parlance: Who will win who? The assumption here is that APC is some sort of ‘opposition’ party which will liberate us from the sleaze-ridden behemoth in power since we became a democracy again, as if it was somehow different from the one it is seeking to replace. That it is not is self-evident, although why so many should choose to believe otherwise is a question all by itself. Perhaps it has something to do with our profound unbelief and its concomitant: our seeming helplessness to bring about the kinds of real changes that will indeed transform us into the economic powerhouse recently envisaged by a foreign economist on an eight-day freebie to the country, courtesy of a foreign network.

Following the ‘do or die’ 2007 elections, which even the normally complaisant international community baulked at (with one or two honourable exceptions), the recipient of the stolen mandate prevailed upon a retired chief justice of the federation to recommend how we might do better next time as a palliative to the insulted and injured. The Uwais Electoral Reform Panel made many suggestions. The two most important - independent candidates, and who gets to appoint the ‘independent’ Oga of INEC – were eventually jettisoned, but then it was all a scam from time (to stay with Nigerian parlance), much like the present National Dialogue. There’s nothing like appointing a committee to keep everyone distracted while also leveraging political patronage, this being the sum total of Nigerian politics with the oil money otherwise meant to transform us into the fabled economic powerhouse.

To all intents and purposes, we might as well still be under military rule given that the ‘ordinary’ Nigerian - the 80 per cent or so who apparently live on a dollar a day, according to the same foreign economist - are denied a voice in their own country given the amount of money needed to bankroll offices in 24 of the 36 states just to contest for local councillor. In other words, I must go all the way to Abuja, where I am to have my HQ, in order to contest Surulere Local Government. This is justified under the rubric of national spread, thereby engendering federal character. And it’s not as if Nigeria began life as a cohesive entity. On the contrary, there can hardly be a more patchwork arrangement under the sun, the majority of them too small and insignificant in the scheme of things to ever hope for any kind of representation in an arrangement so heavily skewed in favour of those with the sheer numbers. As with the unexpected bonanza of crude oil (to say nothing of the ‘good inner demographics’ identified by said foreign economist), our diversity is neither a curse nor a blessing but what we choose to make of it. That we have consistently embraced the former is a truism hardly worth repeating but then a cabal which writes the rules – which is permitted to write the rules – can hardly be expected to reform itself.

Among those rules is that only Oga at the top can appoint the person who will count the votes of the election he is contesting in. To know what will happen in 2015 we need only look at what recently happened in Anambra, where it was apparently difficult to ensure that the ballot papers arrived on time. We excused the 2011 lapses on the grounds that the new-look INEC headed by an incorruptible political scientist who once fought the detested military had little time to prepare even as it demanded – and speedily got - N87.72bn for laptops, and is now demanding N92.9bn for even more of the laptops which had problems – the heat! the dust! - keeping an up-to-date voters’ register, as also happened in Anambra. Perhaps our problem is too much money, as a former head of state once quipped, doubtless to his eternal regret now that the 20 per cent (if that) have cornered the bulk of it and are using it to ensure that everything stays the same, however they otherwise dub themselves.

Gone are the days when they could send in the Gestapo to ensure that the ‘people’ voted for the chosen candidate, even those who couldn’t attend the polling booth in person, which didn’t matter anyway when it came to the actual counting. Our foreign well-wishers who insist on monitoring our shenanigans profess not to like such heavy-handed tactics. It’s bad for business and anyway looks indecent, democracy, along with trade, being a game of numbers, as our politicians never tire of reminding us, hence all those laptops, which are hardly the neutral objects they would have us imagine (ask Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, for starters), especially when it comes to number-crunching. But we are running ahead of ourselves. Nigeria’s ‘good inner demographics’, i.e. our excessively young population, can only be good if they can actually read and write, which most of them can’t, and never mind turning on the laptops they were once promised for free in the absence of electricity because they all had to go to INEC.

Whether APC will in fact hold together long enough to get to 2015 is in any case doubtful, although much the same might be said of PDP given its current woes under a clueless leadership. What we might be witnessing, in fact, is a case of thieves falling out among themselves in the scramble to acquire ever more wealth to add to the one they can’t finish in several lifetimes, although their children will probably do it for them in one lifetime. As the late Bola Ige put it, We go just siddon look, only a pity that he didn’t follow his own advice when he dined with the devil. Entertaining it will certainly be if you have the stomach for that kind of movie.

© 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

 

Of oracles (and gurus)

In 2001, Jim O’Neill, the British economist and former Goldman Sachs bigwig, coined the acronym BRIC to identify the coming economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (with the later addition of South Africa to become BRICS). By all accounts, he got it about right, although some of his fellow economists wondered at the gap between China and the rest. A decade later, he has coined MINT for the next big four: Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, and is now all over the BBC telling us about them. It seems that Nigeria was not on the original list until someone pointed out that South Korea, a smaller economy than Nigeria’s at the time of our independence in 1960, was in fact already developed, but then MINT is a more pleasing acronym given the object of the exercise.

 

The late inclusion of Nigeria is understandable. While the other three rank in the world’s top 20 economies, Nigeria languishes at 39.  Infrastructure (or the lack thereof) is primarily to blame, notably electricity, as Mr O’Neill readily acknowledges, with Indonesia, for instance, generating 24 times more than we do. Perhaps the Jonathan administration really will solve our power problem (his no less than the country’s), in which case we are assured that we will grow by up to 12% annually, in effect doubling the size of the economy every six years, but even without we are apparently growing at 7%.

 

The percentages may be as Mr O’Neill calls them, having spent 32 years ‘looking at a Reuters screen from when I got up at 6am in the morning until 9pm at night. Before I would go to bed I would predict what the dollar rate would be...’ Understandably, perhaps, he is enamoured of the man who predicts the naira rate, the ‘extraordinarily talented’ central bank governor, as well as the ‘charismatic’ finance minister, but then he had only eight days to measure the weight of this global economic powerhouse in the making (however many days he otherwise spent staring at the computer screen).

 

According to Mr O’Neill, the advantages all four countries possess are lots of people, good geography, abundant commodities (Turkey excepted) and ‘good inner demographics’. Nigeria is indeed a populous nation with abundant commodities and ECOWAS is ours for the taking but for the federal government’s tardiness in empowering our entrepreneurs who have, for instance, usurped France as ‘the leading supplier of imports’ to Ivory Coast, but what if most of your surplus young (no more so than in Nigeria) are illiterate? Whatever Awo’s faults, he ran the only government in this country which set about educating its children, with the then Eastern Region quickly following until this forward-looking enterprise was truncated by those who shun progress. Had they done the same we might by now be the South Korea which Mr O’Neill calls the only example in his lifetime of a country which went from third world to first (apologies to Singapore) on account of having ‘one of the highest levels of education’ in the world.

 

Mr O’Neill has been described as an ‘oracle’ (and sometimes a ‘guru’) on account of an acronym or two and perhaps he is, having successfully managed $800bn of other people’s money. He himself warns that his predictions are long-term – 30 years - so be careful where you put your money. He is also mindful of the scourge of corruption for which Nigeria is infamous, although he agrees with the overly-endowed central bank governor that this needn’t be the bugbear so often portrayed in the Western media since ‘[s]uch views are important to listen to, as an alternative to our often simplistic Western way of thinking’, to wit: ‘For many credible people in the Mint countries, corruption is a consequence of their weak past, not a cause of a weak future, and certainly not the number one challenge. It falls way down a list compared with the costs of energy and the breadth of its availability and, of course, infrastructure,’ although some might think that our energy and infrastructure problems were, in fact, the consequence of the corruption he so casually brushes aside. During his eight-day stay, Mr O’Neill was much inconvenienced by a delayed flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos, and was mightily relieved to be offered a private jet from Abuja to same, only a pity that he didn’t have time to sample the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, where he would have seen for himself the corruption attendant upon the busiest road in Africa.

 

A large part of Mr O’Neill’s assessment – surprisingly for an economist – is what he called the ‘wow’ factor, as in, ‘In Turkey, visits to white goods manufacturer Beko and Turkish Airlines, the world's fastest growing airline, definitely made me go "Wow", and in Nigeria, I was saying it all the time.’ He was less-enamoured of Indonesia because, ‘The country's challenges are as big as I thought and I didn't hear too many things that made me go "Wow" in terms of trying to deal with them. The country needs more of a sense of commercial purpose beyond commodities, and has to improve its infrastructure.’ It’s fortunate that we can ourselves peer at our computer screens all the hours God sends and gauge the gap with a country which we were also at par with half a century ago.

 

By all accounts, Mr O’Neill is a fanatical Man U supporter – his walls at Goldman Sachs apparently bore testimony to this, and he was once on its board – so it was perhaps fortuitous that he met his match (as it were) in the Lagos State governor, who allowed him to win a penalty shoot-out. And who knows? Nigeria may yet score in the economic league table although it won’t be because of oracles (or gurus) pinpointing a central bank governor who studied Islamic Law at the University of Khartoum, or a Harvard University graduate seconded from the World Bank. The pity of it is that dem no go let person drink water put cup down because of the oracle (or guru) who anointed them, but worse again is our own gullibility in the sordid enterprise. Nigeria will become great when it decides to become great, and will in the process re-write the rules Mr O'Neill is so enamoured of.

 

© 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

Happy Amalgamation

‘Yes, Nigeria was amalgamated by our colonial masters in 1914. By 1st January next year, Nigeria as a state will be 100 years old. But I totally agree with our man of God that it was not by chance, it was ordained by God.’

                                                                                         President Goodluck Jonathan

According to one reading of history, we will be one hundred come tomorrow. That was when the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was amalgamated with the Northern Nigeria Protectorate to realize the country we now have. The Jonathan administration is set to mark it in grand style, which means that a coterie of the usual suspects is in for another bonanza. Meanwhile, there is much discussion concerning whether the document which amalgamated us has an opt-out clause; and, if so, whether that means the end of Nigeria as presently constituted. Nobody seems to know the details, including the many professors in our proliferating universities who should have long since provided us with footnoted tomes on what would appear to be an issue of some importance, at least on the surface, which is what Nigeria is all about anyway, hence the impending celebrations with nothing to celebrate.

 

More troubling again is that nobody seems particularly perturbed by the secrecy surrounding what should otherwise be regarded as a fairly basic document given its implications for our future, especially since the amalgamation itself has been controversial since it was first enacted. It is indicative, for instance, that not a single newspaper appears to have considered invoking the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy, content as they are to merely repeat what everybody else is saying, and so much for their reputation for confronting ‘duly constituted authority’, as the saying has it.

 

As to whether there is such a thing as a north-south divide is open to question. Indeed, one may go further and see it as one of the many myths we labour under in a nation that is itself a fiction, hence our inability to cohere in any meaningful way. The so-called ‘north’ and the so-called ‘south’ were themselves the results of a series of amalgamations of disparate kingdoms (or fiefdoms, or republics, or whatever you will) until they took the final shapes they did in order to be finally brought together under one jurisdiction, the logical end of the imperial project the president now equates with God, rather like Moses handing down the Ten Commandments. It is written in stone and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. No wonder only the chosen are privy to its contents.

 

Indeed, the problem isn’t with the document per se, which might stay in the British Foreign Office (or wherever it is archived) for the next century for all it ought to matter to us, only it does matter, which is at the heart of the tragedy of a country which promises so much but delivers so little. Nor is it the only illegitimate document which continues to hoodwink us. Absolutely everybody is in agreement that the ‘We, The People’ preamble to the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is easily downloadable in PDF, tells a lie against itself, including the fact that we somehow operate a federal republic modelled on America, where every local government maintains its own police force, while our own state governments are even forbidden from counting the people (I almost said citizens) they are supposed to govern.

 

Not that the majority of Nigerians believe in any of this, not being able to read anyway, as was designed to be the case, and which will yet backfire on this coterie which perpetuates the myths it feeds on, the senate president himself being either north-central or middle-belt, depending on the source of your livelihood. Call us a wretched people if you like, which everybody else believes anyway. And why wouldn’t they, what with the domestic epistles flying about that are our excuse for the long-awaited national discourse we are intent on evading, perhaps waiting on God – or ‘our colonial masters’ – evoked by a president who appears to believe them synonymous; who believes, in other words, in the sanctity of a document which apparently birthed us, and under which we have been labouring an entire century in order to deliver a stillbirth.

 

So what is to be done? This was the exasperated question Lenin asked on the eve of the Russian revolution, whereupon the revolution happened. Few would doubt that Nigeria is ripe for such an eventuality, caught as we are between an impervious, decadent ruling class and the teeming, impoverished masses with precious little hope in any forward movement that will alleviate their blighted lives any time soon. Added to the frenzy already attendant on the approaching 2015 elections, which can only be expected to ratchet up once we slip into 2014, and the likelihood of an implosion next year seems like an attractive bet.

 

Not that I would wish for it. Any student of history knows only too well that the terror always follows quickly in its wake but then the study of history is not something we have encouraged in this country (and deliberately so), which is why we don’t appear bothered by the absence of even the most rudimentary documents that brought us together and are content instead with speculation and hearsay – and any number of opinions - over the facts.

 

On that note: Happy Amalgamation.

 

© 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

My baby she wrote me a letter

The former president, Olusegun Obasanjo (that name again!), recently wrote an 18-page letter – almost 7000 words - to the current president, Goodluck Jonathan, which has excited much controversy. Even more controversy was generated by a subsequent letter purportedly written by Iyabo, the former president’s first daughter, which, at just over 4300 words, was equally garrulous, defined here as ‘excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters’.

 

To be sure, Obasanjo made one serious charge, that Jonathan was ‘training snipers and other armed personnel secretly and clandestinely acquiring weapons,’ which he compared with the bad old days of General Abacha when death squads were deployed to assassinate awkward voices, often in broad daylight on the public highway. Indeed, this was the one issue in Obasanjo’s epistle which many have pounced on (as well they might), and have asked the House of Representatives to launch an investigation, which they are bound to do anyway, at least if they take their responsibilities seriously. Not that anything will come of it even if they do. Nigeria is a country of rumour and hear-say where hard evidence rarely if ever comes to light, like the story that Obasanjo himself kept a killer squad in Aso Rock which eliminated Bola Ige, Funsho Williams and Marshall Harry (among others). The fact that nobody in these and the other cases was ever charged would seem to give the rumour substance.

 

For the rest, Obasanjo’s letter was full of generalisations which only served to indict the person who wrote it. Accusing the Jonathan administration of corruption is laughable against, for instance, the $16bn his own administration looted in the process of not giving us electricity, as the interested parties publicly confessed to the House of Representatives. Worse again was casting aspersions on his successor’s ‘honour’ for wanting to contest for a second term after privately promising otherwise when his own honour allowed him to try for a third term against the provisions of the Constitution he had publicly sworn to uphold. But Obasanjo is the avatar of the Nigerian condition, one who embodies everything that is wrong with this awkward colonial creation; as his daughter’s purported letter put it: ‘Nigeria has descended into a hellish reality where smart, capable people to “survive” and have their daily bread prostrate to imbeciles.’

 

Which just about sums it up and this whether Iyabo did indeed pen her fortuitous epistle in her unlikely, melodramatic prose:‘This is the end of my communication with you for life’. At least one person has insinuated that it bears all the hallmarks of a certain garrulous (that word again!) ‘sycophant’ of the current president’s inner circle who writes the opposite of what he used to when he was on the outside, itself testimony to the harsh reality of survival in a country ruled by imbeciles. Or perhaps it is just a manifestation of the ‘greed’ she also deplored in the national psyche. Besides, the letter describes her as ‘a child well brought up by [her] long-suffering mother in Yoruba tradition’ with its injunction of not insulting your elders (but especially your father), which is what allows our fathers to continue to chance us with ‘impunity’. In his own letter, Obasanjo deplores the current administration’s non-effort to tackle the corruption he helped foster, and corruption in a deeper sense than he ascribes to his successor. It was the same Obasanjo whose own son accused him of sleeping with his daughter-in-law in exchange for oil contracts, which might very well qualify as ‘oil stealing’ but in any case could hardly be expected to ‘improve the present poor management of the industry’ - as Obasanjo faults Jonathan.

 

Jonathan’s reply, a full nine days later (and coming in at a tad under 5000 words), was altogether more respectful – he addresses his adversary as ‘Baba’ five separate times – but also suggested the iron fist: ‘Your letter is clearly a threat to national security as it may deliberately or inadvertently set the stage for subversion.’ He also refutes the allegation of training snipers to assassinate political opponents as ‘incomprehensible’ and comes clean on 2015:

 

You will recall that you serially advised me that we should refrain from discussing the 2015 general elections for now so as not to distract elected public officials from urgent task of governance. While you have apparently moved away from that position, I am still of the considered opinion that it would have been best for us to do all that is necessary to refrain from heating up the polity at this time. Accordingly, I have already informed Nigerians that I will only speak on whether or not I will seek a second term when it is time for such declarations.

This is somewhat disingenuous given that not declaring is itself ‘heating up the polity’, a cliché in the Nigerian lexicon first used by General Abacha when he was equally anxious about extending his tenure, tenure extension being the sole ambition of Nigeria’s rulers, Jonathan no less than Obasanjo, hence the corruption Obasanjo makes such a great song-and-dance about, thereby leaving the way open for Jonathan to desecrate the memory of the late Fela: ‘That corruption is an issue in Nigeria is indisputable.  It has been with us for many years. You will recall that your kinsman, the renowned afro-beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti famously sang about it during your first stint as Head of State.’

 

But reading all these 18,300 words, one question kept nagging away at me: Does any of this matter? Does all this English grammar help ‘move the country forward’, another of the clichés our rulers glibly trot out? I fear not. Indeed, at the end of it all, I felt as if I had been privy to a marital squabble which had little or nothing to do with me unless I made it so, but to what end? Where is my own in all of this, itself the tragedy of a nation that has sunk to this level of banality.

 

© 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 South Africa's snub

Nigeria was the first African country the late Nelson Mandela visited after his release from prison in 1990. The front-line states apart, which had no choice in the matter, Nigeria was far and away his most generous supporter, a fact he was merely acknowledging. On his previous visit three decades earlier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had given him £10,000 to help prosecute the armed struggle that would land him 27 years. Only Tunisia, with half that amount, along with Liberia and Guinea, put their hands in their pockets. He never even got to meet Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the self-styled pan-Africanist. In the years that followed, Nigeria worked tirelessly to isolate the ‘racist regime’, even nationalising two British concerns – Barclays Bank and British Petroleum – for trading with them. Countless black South Africans were given scholarships to come and study here. By all accounts, they lived well.

 

The fairy tale happened. Four years after his second visit, Mandela became president of a free, democratic South Africa. Now he is dead and his Nigerian counterpart was snubbed at his memorial service which netted the most heads of state and government in the history of the world. Pride of place was given to America, whose CIA provided the intelligence that led to his capture, and our former ‘colonial master’, whose concerns we are now frantically un-nationalising, wasn’t far behind. Nigeria didn’t figure, which is to say that nobody even noticed us amid the celebrations of a life well lived. America shook hands with Cuba, which everybody agreed was in the spirit of the great man’s legacy; America, Britain and Denmark took a ‘selfie’ which went viral as everyone wondered whether Michelle was pouting or smiling, Denmark being very pretty; and Israel and Iran didn’t attend for all sorts of complicated reasons to do with the real politick that had condemned Mandela to a long stretch in the first place.

 

Shortly before his death, having ‘stepped aside’ after just one term (Jonathan, please note), Mandela professed himself disappointed with us in an interview he granted one of our diplomats: ‘You know I am not very happy with Nigeria. I have made that very clear on many occasions,’ he fumed, before launching into a broadside (of which the following is only part):

 

Your leaders have no respect for their people. They believe that their personal interests are the interests of the people. They take people’s resources and turn it into personal wealth. There is a level of poverty in Nigeria that should be unacceptable. I cannot understand why Nigerians are not more angry than they are… What do young Nigerians think about your leaders and their country and Africa? Do you teach them history? Do you have lessons on how your past leaders stood by us and gave us large amounts of money? You know I hear from Angolans and Mozambicans and Zimbabweans how your people opened their hearts and their homes to them. I was in prison then, but we know how your leaders punished western companies who supported Apartheid.

 

As our very own IBB said (as who should know?), ‘Mandela had a moral conviction and his moral conducts was very, very high and powerful,’ only a pity that he himself failed to exhibit these fine qualities when he truncated the very democracy for which his hero had endured the unspeakable; had, indeed, looted ‘people’s resources’ which he had turned ‘into personal wealth’, for instance the missing N12.2bn oil windfall when America invaded Iraq, a war which Mandela called them on: ‘Why does the United States behave so arrogantly... Their friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction but because its [sic] their ally they won't ask the UN to get rid of it. They just want the (Iraqi) oil... We must expose this as much as possible.’

 

But this is the world of real politick where presidents do not willingly step aside, which was what made Mandela unique, and not only in Africa, and why so many wanted to be counted (even taking photos of each other), including Nigeria, which had opened its heart and home – and its bank account – to the cause this man was ready to die for, the same man who told our intrepid diplomat what we all know: ‘The world will not respect Africa until Nigeria earns that respect. The black people of the world need Nigeria to be great as a source of pride and confidence. Nigerians love freedom and hate oppression. Why do you do it to yourselves?’ Why indeed? And what are we going to do about it? The obvious answer would seem to be to do what Mandela himself did when faced with a minority regime which was just as blind, as deaf and as dumb to the majority they were oppressing but which, when all said and done, at least built an economy that now gives the country mouth to talk anyhow to Nigeria. Would that we had done the same with the wherewithal we distributed so generously.

 

Nor is South Africa alone in its contempt for the ‘giant of Africa’. Another much-quoted article pointed out that Liberia had earlier done the same when they elected the first woman president in the continent at the expense of ‘Nigerian limbs’, before letting rip against the ‘fifty something other ungrateful lepers across the continent’ who ‘have been beneficiaries of the bottomless pit of petrobillions of Abuja...only to run to Washington, London...to give thanks’. And how they shone! America kept ‘Madiba’ on the terrorist list until after his presidency. These days, they water-board ‘terrorists’ without due process – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of justice’ – and drone children in Pakistan every Tuesday – ‘We, too, must act on behalf of peace’.

 

Maybe one day we will wake up to the world of real politick, just like Mandela asked us to, being himself not like that.

 

© 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

 

A tale of two countries

Nelson Mandela famously declared in the 1963-64 Rivonia trial that he was ready to die for ‘the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities’, and promptly served 27 years of what was supposed to be a life sentence. Nor was he alone, merely the chosen leader of a remarkable generation of men and women who lived to reap the rewards of their collective sacrifice. I never met Mandela himself although I was once privileged to interview Walter Sisulu, one of his staunchest comrades who did time with him. It was in the heady months following the first-ever democratic elections in 1994 and I was confronted with a modest man who had turned down the opportunity to join the government in any post of his choosing because he wanted to spend the few years left him with his wife, Albertina, whose conduct during her husband’s extended absence was the ideal of Caesar’s wife: above suspicion.

 

At the time I met Sisiulu we here in Nigeria were labouring under the tyranny of General Abacha, who had just then executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, and you could see the pain cross his gentle features when I raised the subject. He said something to the effect that teaching people the virtues of democracy was not easy and left it at that, implying perhaps that we had to figure a way of fighting our own oppressors. Mandela himself was more forthright. He blasted Abacha as ‘illegitimate, barbaric and arrogant’ and called on the opposition to intensify its efforts to get rid of him. Abacha returned the compliment (although he later apologised, as he might have) by remarking that he didn’t blame the freedom fighter who had ‘lost touch with the global socio-political trend’; and one of his ministers, Professor Ademola Adeshina, perhaps wanting to please Oga at the top, wondered how anybody can ‘spend 27 years in prison and still be sane’.

 

It happened that Mandela died when our present Oga at the top, who was quick to praise the dearly departed as ‘a wise, courageous and compassionate leader’, was apparently on a private visit to Germany, where he might or might not have visited a hospital for a possible illness he might or might not have contracted in London following his fifty-third birthday celebrations. He was accompanied by his wife, who was herself treated at this possibly same hospital for seven weeks last year, and who later confessed that, ‘I actually died; I passed out for more than a week. My intestine and tummy were opened.’ Dr Patience then seized the opportunity to mourn afresh the memory of her late sister, Stella Obasanjo, and recalled the ‘painful moment’ when the latter’s corpse was brought home, which would have been how ‘my corpse would have been brought here’, but for ‘God Himself’: ‘I am not Lazarus,’ she gushed, still marvelling at her resurrection, ‘but my experience was similar to his own’, and then promptly pre-empted her Biblical precursor - seven days to his four - but let us not be pernickety.

 

In amongst all this, we recall that it was Stella Obasanjo’s then president husband who justified all the money he pumped into the National Hospital at Abuja so that he, along with ‘the Vice-President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the ministers and top government officials will receive treatment instead of going abroad’, before promptly sending his wife to this same abroad, where she nonetheless died following a routine ‘tummy tuck’. But then even now, after all the billions supposedly expended, patients routinely complain about ‘the long delays’, the ‘sloppiness’, the ‘unprofessionalism’, the ‘lack of coordination between the different units’, the ‘inadequate personnel’, all of which is par for the course, including the lack of transparency concerning just how much of the nation’s resources were not spent achieving succour for the worthy amongst us who can nevertheless go foreign with the forfeited money.

 

President Jonathan himself seemed much taken with the spectre of the Grim Reaper when he expanded on his wife’s miraculous recovery. In his opinion, it put an end to the apparently superstitious belief that nobody ever left Aso Rock with his family intact: ‘The story was that one of us (the President or his wife) will die. Today we are celebrating her’; and added: ‘Her recovery has put an end to that belief. I am not too good in celebrating, but for this particular one, I think we have to thank God for keeping the life of my wife.’ With fifteen months to go before the April 2015 elections, this seems perilously close to tempting fate. It also has the disadvantage of making him sound shallow, especially when we recall Mandela’s famous speech I quoted at the beginning of this blog.

 

All of which reminded me of an amusing passage in Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where he recounts receiving treatment at a Cape Town clinic for TB 23 years into his sentence. The morning after surgery, he was served the full Monty: eggs, sausages, black pudding, baked beans, toast, marmalade... His horrified surgeon happened to be passing and immediately ordered it removed. The patient was to be on light foods to aid his recovery. Mandela, who had existed on ‘mealie pap porridge' for two-and-a-half decades, grasped the tray and declared himself ready to die for the sake of the eggs, sausages, black pudding...

 

Ken Saro-Wiwa was also accused of treason and one wonders whether, had he been imprisoned instead of executed, he would have even survived long enough to be treated at the National Hospital that Stella Obasanjo wasn’t killed in, but let us not be too despondent. According to the (extremely conservative) Economist magazine, ‘since Mr Mandela left the presidency in 1999 his beloved country has disappointed under two sorely flawed leaders, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma. While the rest of Africa’s economy has perked up, South Africa’s has stumbled. Nigeria’s swelling GDP is closing in on South Africa’s. Corruption and patronage within the ANC have become increasingly flagrant.’ Sound familiar?

 

© 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