Category: Korede Yishau

The late Afrobeat maestro Fela sang about animals in human skin, who wore suits and ties, and wore agbada. NoViolet Bulawayo’s sophomore novel, ‘Glory’, has characters who are animals but their actions and inactions are those of human beings.

The novel evokes the memory of George Orwell’s Animal Farm Several lines in this book will force those who read Orwell to remember the folks in his ground-breaking allegory.

Like Orwell’s novel, the characters in this book by a Booker Prize finalist are not humans; they are donkey, horse, pig, dog and many other dirty animals. And in this kingdom called Jidada, some animals are more equal than the others.

Like those in Orwell’s novel, the animals in this book are very political in nature and their ways are similar to those of the politicians whose actions and inactions have made our world worse. These animals behave like men and women who love making the world difficult for the lower class. Unlike Orwell’s characters, these ones are modern animals who love going viral on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.

The work is about an African country ruled by Old Horse, an animal who is regarded as the Father of the Nation. The country is considered his because of the revolution he led against the colonial masters and he is seen as leader for life even when age is slowing him down and his mental faculties begin to play funny jokes on him.

It takes off during an Independence Day celebration. Old Horse, his wife fondly called Dr. Sweet Mother, and the vice president, Tuvy, give speeches.

Old Horse’s speech is slurred, baffling and mired by incoherence, a development which makes his deputy remark that he be taken off the stage before further disgrace. But like a typical African politician, when the deputy mounts the podium, the encomiums he showers on him contrast with what he feels about the president, a man he obviously wants out of power, dead or alive.

Tuvy’s plot against the Father of the Nation is not hidden from Dr. Sweet Mother, who on mounting the podium, dresses him down. She rants on and on and on about people who say the opposite of what they have in mind.

Tuvy’s convoy is soon involved in a ghastly accident. He is assumed dead. Rescuers search the scene and pick up bodies of his aides, but no matter how hard they search, he is nowhere to be found among the remains.

It turns out the deputy isn’t the only one who feels he deserves to succeed the Father of the Nation. Dr. Sweet Mother, a female donkey from a humble background, also begins to believe she deserves the crown despite the patriarchal nature of leadership in the country.

The battle for the soul of the country soon sees the vice president, after surviving the accident, smoking the dried shit of mermaids, being douched with flowers and mutis from the crushed bones of fearsome beasts, and chewing their livers and drinking their urine. He also drinks juice from boiled barks and leaves of rare trees, smears his body with magic potions and performs sacrifice after sacrifice. All to counter Dr. Sweet Mother.

Within one week, Tuvy is hit by a hailstorm, has three more road crashes, four attempts are made to abduct him, and he is the target of four drive-by shootings. He survives them all. All glory to the cat, his sorcerer.

The country they are angling to lead is not one with gold-paved streets and homes. It is one with an army of unemployed, with businesses dying, with security officers wearing worn-out boots, with labourers not receiving their wages, with roads full of potholes, with streets littered with trash, with brutes, murderers, sorcerers in key positions, with a university system quick to award a doctorate degree to an undeserving First Lady, with power cuts, with miserable public schools, with fluctuating crime rates, with atrocious pass rate in national examinations, and with drought. It is also a nation where scarce resources are wasted on Minister of Order, Minister of the Revolution, Minister of Propaganda, Minister of Things, Minister of Disinformation, Minister of Corruption, Minister of Homophobic Affairs, and Minister of Lootin, among other ridiculous appointees. It is clear that these animals seek power for its grandeur and its grandeur alone.

Despite all the shenanigans in this nation, cows still moo, cats still meow, sheep still bleat, bulls still bellow, ducks still quack, donkeys still bray, horses still neigh, geese still cackle, chickens still cluck and peacocks shamelessly scream. It is the height of sycophancy. There are, however, some rebels like the Sisters of the Disappeared who protest naked during the Independence Day celebration to show that their nation’s days of glory are long gone.

Later events in the novel show that nothing lasts forever. Things fall apart and the centre fails to hold.

In ‘Glory’, Bulawayo’s Father of the Nation has so much in common with Zimbabwe’s late Robert Mugabe who tried unsuccessfully to become life president and not ex-president. Like Mugabe, Father of the Nation started out as a freedom fighter but, in no time, saw no one else that could rule his country and he kept ruling and ruling and ruling. The flag of Jidada also shares similarities with Zimbabwe’s, and the difference between Dr. Sweet Mother and Mugabe’s wife is like six and half a dozen. Tuvy also shares so much in common with Zimbabwe’s current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who ousted Mugabe, a longstanding ally. Like Mnangagwa, Tuvy’s nickname is Crocodile. Many a scene can be reconnected with real-life events in Zimbabwe, though the characters are now animals. No doubt, this allegory is about Zimbabwe, the army of sycophants who made Mugabe their god and its power brokers.

Using animals to tell this story seems a protestation from the author; it is as though she is saying these men and women acted like animals and dragged the country down while mouthing revolution, colonialism, land reforms and anti-West slogans.

The novel is dark and vivacious. In it, you struggle to look for saints because almost everyone is flawed. It also tells the story of the corruption at the heart of African societies. And we see so many other anomalies in it.

The themes include abuse of power, sit-tightism, prejudice, deceit, failure of leadership, dictatorship, power play, and the thin gap between being a freedom fighter and a dictator.

Written in a mixture of narrative voices (third person and ‘we’) and in a blend of the present and past tenses, Bulawayo cleverly uses horses, donkeys, dogs, cats and pigs to tell a story of the past and present in an absorbing, stirring manner. Here horses represent the ruling class and dogs are in charge of defence and security.

My final take: Bulawayo’s prose is beautiful and evocative. Her writing is mesmerising and dazzling and leaves a reader with a Hobson’s choice of just following and following and following and trailing and trailing until the alluring last lines: “And every one of them felt warmed by the beautiful lotus fire. And every one of them heard the flames of that fire fan and flutter and roar right in their hearts. And every one of them understood that whatever they heard within those hearts was the new national anthem, tholukuthi, an anthem that spoke of the kind of glory that burns eternal and glows with living light.”

My final take: Leaders should lead well and not carry on like animals. We have too many animals in power. We certainly can do without them. Now that we are going into another electioneering period, we all need to open our eyes very well and separate the animals from the humans because animals do not deserve power. They usually mess things up and the last thing we need as a nation is mess. We have enough of it already and the time to clear them is 2023.

They are determined to add salt to our injuries, to make us suffer and suffer and suffer and continue to feel severe pains acetaminophen tablets cannot relieve. They have a curious kind of love for us; this love is so much that the only way they are showing it is by distressing us with more afflictions. And something tells me that as we get deeper into the electioneering period, we will be shown more of this undesired love.

To make sure we get the gist of their affection for us, they— within three days— struck at an international airport and on a hitherto-safe train route and they left sorrow, tears and blood: Their regular trademark, as Fela would have said. They came in huge numbers to the Kaduna International Airport on Saturday, shooting dead a security officer of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA). The invaders— a report claimed they were over 200—overran the runway and prevented a Lagos-bound AZMAN aircraft from taking off at about 12:30pm.

The invasion forced the authorities to temporarily shut down the airport, while the military battled the gunmen. That was on a Saturday. By Monday, it was the turn of the Abuja-Kaduna train route. The road trip from Abuja to Kaduna had become a suicide mission; so, the train was the option for those unwilling to play games with their dear lives. Now, the terrorists have found a way to render this unsafe. About 400 passengers were said to be on board when the devils struck around Katari and Rijina area of Kaduna on Monday night, with about ten people confirmed dead, scores missing and some believed to have been abducted. It looks as though people will now have to travel using some supernatural means beyond these terrorists’ sphere of influence. As usual, President Muhammadu Buhari has called for the heads of the perpetrators. We are not certain anything will come out of the directive to the military chiefs to smoke out these cursed men claiming to be fighting for Allah who obviously is self-sufficient to fight for Himself.

The notoriety of these terrorists, who should never be called by any other name, keeps mounting the pedestal in a manner we have never experienced. Hardly does a day pass without them committing one evil or the other. From Lagos to Owerri to Kano and Kaduna and elsewhere, they sneak in on people and leave sorrow and blood. They steal, they rob, and they plunder people’s lives with hot lead.

They know no class; their victims can be the bourgeoisie, the middle class and at times the poor who are daily begging to eke a livelihood. They once killed an ex-judge and ended the dreams of a former political adviser. And farmers are regularly captured and made to pay a ransom. In Niger State at some point, farmers had to borrow money from cooperative societies to buy their freedom.

There are instances when they operate like bandits, who plunder and dash into the bush to hide and share the loot. At times, they are terrorists who maim and kill and are even ready to die for what they believe in. They are so powerful that they have defied the police, the army and the secret police. Once in a while, the authorities apprehend one or two of them, but largely they succeed in wreaking havoc and escaping into anonymity. They grant audience to the like of Sheik Gumi, who was doing a yeoman’s job as their mouthpiece and always warning us to stop calling them bad names. He said they were not bad, but only made worse by circumstances and were willing to turn a new leaf.

For these terrorists, no land is sacred. They are attacking police stations and sacking officers and burning them down. They are burning electoral commission offices across the country. They have operated in churches, mosques and schools. When they invade schools, they grab students— male and female— in their hundreds and demand ransom in millions of naira, when they operate in churches, they grab pastors and priests, and when they operate in mosques, Imams become their prey.

They are so talented to the extent that when governments refuse to pay, they threaten the relatives of the abductees and get them to cough out the money. In one instance, they got the parents to raise N180 million. In another, they even got relatives to borrow money to pay them off. Such devilish ingenuity!

They are so disrespectful that when our president, our dear Muhammadu Buhari, reads the riot act to them, and when he asked that they be shot on sight, they became emboldened and I assume that they have formed the habit of laughing at our dear president and have, perhaps, labelled him toothless.

They have made our country a bad place. They have made foreign missions warn their citizens against travelling to certain parts of Nigeria and they seem to have no qualms. To hell with Nigeria seems to be their message. Nigeria has failed them so they see nothing wrong in failing Nigeria. What they, however, fail to realise is that in dealing with Nigeria, they are actually misdirecting their anger. They are turning against people who have also suffered the side effects of inept leadership.

Before now, we were told the seven virgins in heaven were the bait for terrorists, but these new terrorists in the horizon are not suicide bombers. If anything, they do not appear like one ready to die without enjoying the spoils of this world. And if everyone else needs to die for them to enjoy these spoils, so be it seems to be their anthem.

In case they do not know, everyone is discontent and they are adding to the bad situation. I worry for our nation; I cry, and I wonder why they have chosen to pour pepper on our wounds.

In the last few weeks, electricity supply has been at an all-time low, fuel scarcity has spread across the country, universities have been closed and eking out a livelihood has been a Quadratic equation for millions. Even the rich are feeling the pang and are crying out. Companies are in their throes as they have had to be running on diesel almost throughout the day. Service estates now find it difficult to supply electricity to their clients. In the estate where ace musician Timi Dakolo lives, it used to be a sin for homeowners to have personal generators because the estate managers supplied electricity with a central generator. Now, it is to your tent oh Israel because the managers have been unable to cope with the cost and difficulty of getting diesel. I understand so many estates have either followed this path or have had to increase service charges. The Redeemed Camp on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway has its power plant but the scarcity of gas has made it difficult to meet the demand of the residents. Now, power is rationed. The last I know electricity is only supplied at night. This means businesses on the camp are now run with private generators at a time when even getting fuel to buy is akin to planning a trip to Mount Everest or Mount Kilimanjaro.

At a time of so much difficulty in the land, the terrorists have developed wings. Or how else can one describe a situation where they attacked an airport on a Saturday and, on Monday, they attacked a train? It can only mean they are determined to add salt to our injuries. Or can this madness be explained away by a passage in Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel, ‘Vagabonds!’, in which the devil enters people’s head, body and soul at will and do bad things through them? It kills, it maims, it has sex, it just turns people into zombies.

My final take: These terrorists love us so much that they have found the right time to show us that they can capture new territories, especially supposedly secured fortress such as an international airport. They have also shown us their crazy love by taking away the comfort and the joy associated with commuting on the Abuja-Kaduna train route. And they choose a time when hardship seems the middle name of an average Nigerian to show their kind of love.

‘In this glistering and moribund restaurant called Naija, hunger dies of lack!
Yesterday’s sour meals of sordid stories are still on today’s menu, the maggot-ridden appetizers of money-laundering cuisine are strung on the white linen thoughts of national prosperity.
Political pests continually finger and break into the lump of our national pudding with their greed-infested fingers.’
— Moribund restaurant (Taiwo Michael Oloyede)

United Bank for Africa (UBA) chairman Tony Elumelu spoke from the heart some days before marking his 59th birthday on March 22. He spoke about the state of our dear Nigeria. His words are pleasing to the oppressed but depressing to the oppressors.

In a series of tweets, the philanthropist and founder of the Tony Elumelu Foundation wrote: “This morning, I am listening to my colleagues at the office bemoan the very pressing issues that they face every day in this country, and how things have been getting worse and worse – no electricity for 5 days, hikes in the price of diesel, frightening food inflation, etc.

“How can a country so rich in natural resources have 90% of its citizens living in hardship and poverty? I have often said that access to electricity is critical for our development, alleviation of poverty and hardship. And speaking of security, our people are afraid!

“Businesses are suffering. How can we be losing over 95% of oil production to thieves?

“Look at the Bonny Terminal that should be receiving over 200k barrels of crude oil daily, instead it receives less than 3,000 barrels, leading the operator @Shell to declare force majeure.”

Since this frank exposition, those who should take action have feigned ignorance and life is going on with millions in pain. Severe pain.

Elumelu’s intervention represents the kind of things we need to tell ourselves at a time like this when we are about to choose our next set of leaders at different levels of government.

This is a season when we need to tell stories that are also confessions. In these stories, we should learn how many of us have enabled our political pests’ access to our national purse, how many of have sharpened the teeth with which they are biting us, how many of us have enabled era and error combined, how many of us have just generally messed up things for ourselves and generations to come, and how many of us have helped to fall things apart and make it difficult for the centre to hold.

This season, when men and women who want power have started currying our favour, is the time we need to tell ourselves that many of us have played critical roles in the pains we have borne since Independence. We need to tell ourselves that many of us have helped usurpers win fraudulent elections. We need to tell ourselves that many of us regularly attend rallies where personalities, rather than issues, are discussed. At these rallies, many of us wear shirts with faces of men and women who become overnight billionaires courtesy of the offices we catapult them into. We need to tell ourselves that many of us have chained ourselves by cheering men and women with no clear-cut agenda for us.

We must tell ourselves that elections are not won on Twitter and Facebook. Elections are won at the polling units. Shout from today till tomorrow on social media and your candidate will lose if you do not mobilise votes for him through door-to-door tactics. We must admit that without voter cards, our noises on social media are barren.

We must also not forget to admit that over the years many of us have allowed the corrupt ones to use their filthy lucre to buy us. We need to admit that an army of us has treated our abusers as friends once they give us cash, rice, noodles and things that evaporate in no time. Those in the government lie to us that the government is ‘broke’ and yet no one has resigned from office because there is no money to run his or her office. They always say there is no money in the government yet every electioneering season, politicians spend millions and, in some instances, billions to run for government offices that supposedly have no money in them.

Every electioneering period and beyond, many of us defend our abusers on social media and turn against ourselves when what we all should be doing is what Elumelu did: Speak truth to power.

Looters who display ill-gotten wealth on social media have become heroes to many of us. Many of us praise them, many of us follow them, many of us comment on their posts, like their posts and make them feel cool with themselves. It matters not to many of us that their lavish lifestyle is funded by what should have built us hospitals, schools, industries and fix the power sector. Many of us act as though we are in bondage and have no choice but to sheepishly do as our master’s command.

Every electioneering period, many of us allow politicians to claim we beg them to run, they allow them to claim they either buy them nomination and expression of interest forms, and they allow them to claim all sorts when these men and women are out to serve no one but themselves and their cronies.

We are not born to suffer. This is the truth we must tell ourselves. We were not born to drive on pothole-riddled roads. We were not born to relish power cuts. We were not born to attend miserable schools. We were not born to be loyal to people whose goal is to keep us in perpetual servitude. We were born to have basic amenities working and working well. All the time.

After telling ourselves the bitter truths, we must resolve that the end must come to exploitation, to corruption, to cronyism, to mediocrity, to fraudulent elections, to miserable schools, to potholes, to power cuts, to queues at filling stations, to businesses shutting down, to injustice, to insecurity, and to every affliction we have battled for ages.

We certainly deserve more than we are getting. We are so lagging behind that we need leaders who can make us run like Usain Bolt. We cannot afford to have leaders who find crawling herculean. Let us all play our parts to get to Canaan.

My final take: We have acted helpless when men and women in power debase our laws again and again. We should take responsibility for our failures and decide to toe a better path this time around. Our scars should be enough reason for us to say enough is enough, and ensure it is truly enough. And thanks to Elumelu for saying the things we need to tell ourselves.

Nigeria’s United States’ chancery sits pretty on a hill’s crest at 3519 International Court NW in the Cleveland Park neighbourhood of Washington, DC. It represents life in a village, a Nigerian village specifically, with individual buildings built around a central courtyard.

With about 100,000 square feet, it rivals that of China in the diplomatic district. Though construction work on it started in the late 1980s, political instability in Nigeria delayed its completion for some ten years. It was not until 1999 that it got the nod of the National Capital Planning Commission. This was under military Head of State Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar. It was ready under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in early 2002, and was inaugurated on May 5, 2003 by then Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Its beauty caught the attention of the Washington chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which awarded it a 2002 award for excellence in architecture, and featured it on the cover of the Winter 2003 issue of ’Architecture DC’, the association’s magazine.

Calling the shots at this magnificent chancery is Dr. Uzoma Elizabeth Emenike, who celebrated her first International Women’s Day as ambassador on Tuesday. Dr. Emenike holds the record of being Nigeria’s first female ambassador to God’s own country. Before her, it had been all men affairs.

When the embassy was opened at Independence on October 1, 1960, M. J. Garba was Charge d’Affaires ad interim. By December 15, 1960, Julius Momo Udochi took charge. He gave way to N. Ade Martins on October 18, 1965. By February 28, 1968, Joe Iyalla mounted the saddle, which he yielded to Mr. E.O. Kolade on April 30, 1972.

Kolade gave way to John Mamman Garba on August 10, 1972. By October 30, 1975, Edward Olusola Sanu was in the reins. He handed over to Olujimi Jolaoso on August 11, 1977. And by June 10, 1981, Mr. M. T. Gbashah became the Minister-Counselor Charge d’Affaires ad interim.  He was in charge for only twenty days before Chief, Abudu Yesufu Eke replaced him.

Some three years later, in August 13, 1984, Ignatius Chukuemeka Olisemeka took charge and gave way, on May 22, 1987, to Alhaji Hamzat Ahmadu.

The men affairs continued when he was replaced, on May 30, 1991, by Alhaji Zubair Mahmud Kazaure. Kazaure yielded the floor to Alhaji Hassan Adamu on July 26, 1996.

The first person to take charge on return to civil rule was also a man, Jibril Muhamed Aminu. He was appointed on November 29, 1999. It was the turn of another man on May 27, 2004 with the appointment of George Obiozor. Other men who came after Obiozor include Oluwole Rotimi, Ade Adefuye and Sylvanus Nsofor.

When these men were in charge, they were plagued by the regular problems facing Nigeria’s foreign missions, which recently made Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila cry out. At a meeting with the Foreign Affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, the speaker deplored the foreign missions’ poor funding, filthy environment, poor working conditions and crumbling infrastructure.

Gbajabiamila said: “Even within Africa or outside of Africa, we call people ambassadors. I think the meaning of ambassador is very clear. They are a reflection of Nigeria. But when an ambassador does not have a car or his car is 15 years old, and it breaks down every single time, the car has even broken down with me in it before. And they had to hurriedly roll up the Nigerian flag and put it in their pockets to avoid embarrassment. You go to an embassy, the toilet is not working. You ask them why? They say there is no money. You go into an embassy the air conditioners have packed up. I can go on and on.”

Onyeama didn’t dispute the funding gap. He also could not give bankable commitment that all would be well soon.

Gbajabiamila added that the inadequate funding of the foreign missions had engendered corruption and inefficiency.

Ambassador Emenike encountered challenges while in Ireland as envoy and, as attested to by Nigerians there, she surmounted many of them, a record which recommended her to become our first female ambassador in America. She is tackling challenges in the U.S., and she appears to be winning, but I am afraid her pace would have been faster if all things are equal. One of the areas she is trying to turn things around for good is in the issuance and renewal of passports to Nigerians in America. Going by the words of a Nigerian medical doctor, who lives in DC, things are looking better in this area. The doctor narrated his recent experience with the embassy: “The embassy told me that my new passport will be mailed to my address on November 3. You’d be shocked to know that they missed that timeline by mere one week. The passport was put in the mail on November 10, and it was delivered at my house in three days on November 13 – talk of an efficient postal service. The last time I checked my mailbox was Friday evening and I hadn’t checked my mailbox this morning before going to the embassy. If I had checked my mailbox this morning, I wouldn’t have had to go to the embassy at all. Despite my doubts and skepticism, the Nigeria Embassy, Washington DC, actually delivered this time.”

She is also curbing the activities of fraudsters who are trying to fleece Nigerians in the U.S. via crooked websites promising heaven on earth as far as passport issuance and others are concerned.

Now, no transaction with the embassy can be made in cash. Only electronic transmission of funds is acceptable. All bookings for passport or biometrics appointments are now to be done through the dedicated website. Consular services about shipment of human remains to Nigeria, emergency travel certificate, life attestation, and others, have also been streamlined.

The challenges are many, but surmountable, if the ministry and the Federal Government play their parts. No doubt, Dr. Emenike has what it takes, education and training wise, to deliver the goods. Intentions and preparations alone, however, do not achieve results. That is why the government must give her the funding and other support to bring her Alpha game to bear. She deserves all.

My final take: It is time we enforced the 2022 Appropriations Act which authorises embassies to spend the capital components of their budget without approval from the ministry. And Nigeria must fund the foreign missions abundantly, half measures are not welcome.

Your flight was 11.50pm. The airline advised that you should get to the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos four hours earlier. But before you could be eligible to fly, a negative COVID-19 test result was compulsory so you woke up from a Ketu flat in the morning, headed for a sample collection centre, brandished evidence of payment for the test, filled necessary online forms and the samples were collected via your nose and your oesophagus.

You chose to get there two hours earlier than the airline advised. You and the colleague who dropped you found out that new construction work as a result of the attempt to link the old and the new terminals meant you could not drive straight to the terminal. Your colleague dropped you on the new bridge at the airport. He went to park his car while you navigated your way to somewhere close to the departure wing. He joined you some minutes later and you both joined a crawling crowd of travellers and well-wishers trying to get past security screening zone. Airport officials stood at ease at the screening point sieving out passengers from well-wishers. You knew their tactics of doing this was to ask for passport and ticket so your colleague was armed with his passport and something that looked like a ticket. They let both of you in. No fewer than twenty minutes was wasted at this point. That done, you joined the crowd trying to check in. You were told to weigh your bags first. They were small and so fit the requirement. Your effort to carry the bag with the handle left it partially damaged and you gnashed your teeth as you joined another queue for physical examination of your bags. As you got closer to the officers checking the bag, an official urged you to approach a counter with your luggage and she began a series of questions: Can I see your COVID-19 test result? Where are you going? What are you going there to do? Did you pack your bags yourself? Did anyone give you something to deliver? Between the time you packed your bags and your arrival at the airport, where were the bags? And more and more. You answered as truthfully as possible, including showing off that you were a frequent traveller who understood many of the things she was explaining. Off you went to the physical examination tables where you unlocked the bags for the officials to search. Unlike many others, you had no oproko, garri, dried fish and the likes in your luggage so you spent less time with the officer and, pronto, you joined the check in proper and within minutes, you had your boarding pass. By this time, it was already past 8pm, meaning two hours was gone.

You looked for your colleague who was watching a match his club ended up losing after a penalty shootout. You walked to a corner where an officer was asking if you had filled the Immigration yellow form and you replied that you were not ready to go through Immigration yet. You saw a bureau de change and asked your colleague to find out the exchange rate, it turned out they were using the black market rate to sell Personal Travel Allowance (PTA). Of course, you were not shocked because even the Central Bank was finding it difficult allocating foreign currency for travellers’ PTA. You later bought moimoi and chapman at a Mister Bigg’s. Your colleague was not interested in having anything. The match seemed to have taken over his life. You had your food and soon was in the mood to go past the Immigration point. Your colleague was not ready to go because he wanted to see the end of the match, which he was watching on his mobile phone. You joined him and soon his club lost.

You saw him off, wished him well and proceeded to the Immigration point. Nothing made you know you were going to be on the queue for about two hours, see many agitated over missing their flights, notice officials sneaking in people and witness a power blackout of about thirty seconds. You were so tired by the time you got in and some drug law enforcers called you for a round of questioning. That was after some officials at a screening point pleaded for ‘something’. As you were with the enforcers, you could hear arguments break out on the queue you had just escaped. It seemed blows might be exchanged. You were happy to have crossed the Red Sea. Many had blamed the Immigration officials for not being diligent enough with their work: Some were playing with their phones and others were just sharing gist amid tired legs and bodies seeking comfort. A lady was so tired she was looking for where to sit. At a point, you started resting on a rail used to partition the queuing point. So, it was a great relief to be on the side of the drug law enforcers.

The enforcers let you go after you revealed your identity. You walked into a duty free shop and walked to the corridor of the departure gates where you received a call from a friend and lamented your plight. You later walked into a KFC and bought fried rice and chicken which you washed down with Pepsi. You stayed back there for some minutes and found your way to the last point before you board the plane. Here, you were frisked, your hand luggage was searched amid grumbling from passengers who felt harassed by the over screening.

Soon you walked into the plane, located your seat, found no space in the locker for your bag and was advised to pit it under the seat in front of you. Sleep was beginning to set in, you craved red or white wine to aid the sleep. You looked forward to a fantastic trip after the hassle of the last six hours. As your flight took off, you were convinced that travelling out of Nigeria can certainly be stress-free if Immigration officials do their jobs diligently, favouritism is banished and everything that contributes to time wasting is eliminated.

Jumoke Verissimo’s ‘A Small Silence’ has a ring around it: Silence.

In this novel, silence tells stories. There are times characters say so much even without opening their mouths. Through silence, they sometimes communicate love, guilt, sadness and so many other human emotions. This motif runs vastly in this debut of debuts.

There is also another ring: Darkness. This darkness is like the one that envelopes Nigeria, the one Nigeria has spent billions trying to get over unsuccessfully, the darkness that has kept us on the backseat in the comity of nations, the one that makes immigration officials at foreign entry points look down on Nigerians, the one that makes us far less than we should be, and the one that makes the few bad eggs the focal point instead of the millions that are shinning across the globe. From the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) to the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, darkness persists. The name changes but darkness looms.

The darkness in the Nigeria in this novel goes beyond power supply; it shows in other areas of its life, in the take-home pay that cannot take workers home, in the people in power who steal more than armed robbers, in a mother who is at ease asking a brilliant employee to write SSCE for her daughter in exchange for a tertiary education scholarship and in so many minute details of Nigeria’s socio-cultural life captured in this work.

The novel tells the story of Prof, a victim of government high-handedness who ends up in prison. He comes out feeling: “They took me away. I am not the one in this body anymore.”

He is released at a time Olusegun Obasanjo has just defeated Muhammadu Buhari to win the second term of office. He returns to his father’s house where he chooses to stay in darkness except for the light that strays in through the window in the sitting room.

The part of Nigeria he returns to is a place where the general opinion seems to be: “We just have to make something work somehow, somehow, in this country. We don’t have a government. We find ways to do things.”

Darkness regularly takes over the area because of systemic failure which allows noises to leap from generators. Things are programmed to fail and ‘big-big men’ and ‘big-big women’ (and not merit) decide who gets what.

The darkness hovering around the Prof clouds his neighbours’ gaze. They see him as not normal, they imagine him living on cockroaches and insects, they imagine him as carnivorous and they picture him screaming atop his voice. They see so much more from their blurred viewpoints.

He refuses help from his childhood friend and mother. His mother, however, cultivates the habit of dropping by from time to time pleading to be let in, singing his oriki and dropping provisions by the door and upkeep cash through the hole at the lip of the door.

Living alone and in darkness leaves Prof with no choice but to, with open arms, accept instructions and pieces of advice from voices in his head—  one of which he personifies and christens Desanya, who constantly engages him in arguments on issues he is struggling with.

For Prof, “You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking darkness is bad. Sometimes having light is the problem. Darkness is a cypher. Things, possibly, are created in darkness— think of the Bible story in Genesis; the total darkness that engulfed the earth brought light. What brings darkness? Darkness welcomes light all the time. We can see in darkness, only if we let our eyes master the dark.”

With time, he starts letting in a young girl, Desire Babangida Jones, into his dark sitting room. Desire is a ‘crazy’ girl, the type bold enough to tell a boy “I’m good in bed. Try me” and buys two packs of condoms on her first visit to him.

Prof and Desire, whose father actually named Undesirable because he wanted a boy, chat almost every night until the grandfather clock chimes it is midnight. They talk about politics and everything else— all in the dark.

The young girl knew him before his time in prison, when the government demolished Maroko to pave way for the high and mighty to turn it to Lekki Peninsula. Her love for his activism at the time drives her to him and keeps her knocking and knocking until he opens the door for her to become the only visitor to his dark chamber.

The novel is also a different kind of Lagos story; the Lagos it portrays is one less seen in fiction: Lagos suburbs. Abesan Estate in Ipaja comes alive in this work; so do Ojo, Oshodi, Mushin, Isale-Eko and the now-dead Maroko on whose remains we now have Lekki. Lagos suburbs pop up in unflattering prose that depicts stench, hard drug usage, street hawking, traffic gridlock, decrepit infrastructure and broken spirits. Using these places, urban Nigerian life is imaginatively recreated in this beautifully imagined work, which also exposes the nakedness of the giant of Africa.

Mental health and the hush-hush way it is handled in Nigeria also come alive in Verissimo’s treatment of Desire’s mother’s condition.

The work equally highlights the evil of decades of military rule in Nigeria, which have erected in the people a destructive impassiveness that permits repressive systems.

The use of fringe characters, such as streetwise Basira, Remilekun—the daughter of Desire’s benefactor who is being forced to acquire a tertiary education— and Ireti, help Verissimo to deliver a work with stunning range, pitch, pacing and depth!

Verissimo uses several literary tricks, including a close third person from Prof and Desire’s points of view. One particular trick is striking: the way she lets the reader in on the possibility of Prof having a child he is unaware of. Like a slow burner, the trick evolves. The author first drops the hint of a resemblance between Prof and Ireti, aka Ghandi Reloaded, then that discussion between Desire and Prof about a love child and other bit-by-bit related revelations.

This is a not-so-linear work, which goes back and forth to beam the light on dark patches and makes us grasp scenes and sceneries. It displays the author’s unsparing panache with writing about sadness.

Verissimo tells an intriguing tale with unusual characters whose actions and inactions thrill and, in the same breath, give us more than a glimpse into human connections in ways we are unlikely to consider on our own.

The last bit of the book is very intense. It is what a climax should read like: It keeps the heart pulsating.

This is a persistently solemn work with the capacity to pull the reader into its melancholic world.