Category: Sam Omatseye

He entered the hall at Brown University without drama. Maybe there was drama, but the sort that jolted with its silences. Everywhere suddenly froze. Lips froze.  Moving hands seized. Tongues retracted and retreated. Eyes stopped to stare except at a particular spot. Inanimate objects bowed to the petrified logic of the moment: pens, pads, doors. All wrapped in awe.

The man, the object of both affection and curiosity, did not seem to stir either. Chinua Achebe, who came in on a wheelchair, looked forward, as though contemplating. What was he contemplating: his next controversy? His next essay, next plot in a novel, or the prospect of an intellectual brouhaha in his colloquium organised yearly at one of the world’s top centres of learning: Brown University? Remember, he was a man of storms.

Throughout the two-day event, Achebe’s lips never creased into a word. His voice, known for its soft but arresting register, was a dramatic silence at his own event. It was an indicator that health was no longer at ease for the legend, a man who had written himself into literary grandeur, who had engrafted the African narrative on a cold and cocky Western world, who glided into controversies like a crocodile into a stormy water. He was lacking in the vim and fire of the author of A Man of The People.

Some of us at the colloquium on Africa last December wondered what would happen to the annual event once the man passed. He was all of 82, and he was wheeled around by one of his sons. He did not even stir much when Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), the governor of example, squared up to his then raging book, There Was A Country. The governor had pitched a battle against the effete logic of a book that preyed on the divisive struggles of Achebe’s generation. Fashola asserted that succeeding generations had transcended his book.

It turned out to be his last book, and his only stir at the colloquium was when he clapped at the performance of the willowy Nigerian artiste Nneka who thrilled everyone with the acoustic sweetness of her guitar and the didactic, if plaintive melody of her voice.

But as the news came last week of Achebe’s death, I thought to myself that the man had lived a full life, a life of the writer, the life of the warrior of the word, the life of exile. It is the concept of exile that seized me the most. If you read any of his works, whether it was Things Fall Apart, or No Longer At Ease, or his non- fiction The Education of British-Protected Child, he was preoccupied with the inability of the Nigerian self, especially Achebe, to locate home. His was a life of the perpetual search for a fitting shelter. Things Fall Apart was a novel as rejoinder, a piece in reaction to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Both works denigrated the African past and cast a slur on a continent’s dignity, and Achebe fumed. He fumed with his counter-narrative.

The novel pits one of Africa’s most memorable characters, Okonkwo, against the crudities of a civilising Europe. Okonkwo dies a suicide, a loner in a place where he struts like a cock. Achebe felt such a sense of alienation when he fled Lagos in the tumult of the Nigerian crisis of the 1960’s. When he went to the East, which was home, he and his family lacked root, as bombs, bullets and the bloody chaos of war pulled them from place to place. He too became an ambassador, and moved around the continent, Europe and North America, a secular, nationalistic pilgrim evangelising the virtues of Biafra.

After the war, he still could not accommodate the idea of Nigeria, and he elucidated this point in The Guardian Lecture Series when he noted that he had a tough time reconciling his Igbo identity with the Nigerian after the disappointment of the 1960s. This lacerated his soul and, by his own admission, froze his creative faculties as he did not produce any novel for 20 years. So he also suffered literary alienation.

He left Nigeria for Europe and returned. He found out that he had to leave again, for the United States. How could he reconcile with a people who uprooted him from his beloved Lagos, killed his kinsmen in the North, bombed his home in Enugu, razed the East from city to hamlet. These were the same people his people pointed guns at, killed as well and harassed with the primitive ingenuity of the Ogbunigwe.

He was not going to return for a while, and when he did, he taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, but he had to leave again. He did not visit for a long time, and when he did, he almost lost his life in a motor accident. But for the rest of his life, the warrior launched his battles from within the confines of a wheelchair.

The alienation was probably complete: alienation from his Igbo home, from Nigeria, from the West, from his art, from a healthy body. It was possible that Achebe was perpetually angry with his country. A man who drew people from around the world to the dignity and magnificence of his culture did not savour the society he so doggedly and elegantly evangelised. He was a contrast to his leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu- Ojukwu, who rekindled an exemplary Nigerianness after the war without quenching his Biafran fire.

Even when he visited Igboland a few years back at the invitation of former Imo State Governor Ikedi Ohakim, he panned his people for their fealty to materialistic glory rather than the higher reaches of knowledge. He asserted that the progress of any society was not possible without those exalted ideals of knowledge and character. His fidelity to Igbo roots was sometimes so irredentist that he forgot that the acclaimed father of African literature had transcended insular claims of a public kind. He described Awolowo as a tribalist when the sage died. In his last book, he asserted the Igbo as the superior race. The irony is that he could not live even in Igboland. That was perhaps his most potent alienation.

When he wrote a book of nonfiction, it was aptly titled, The Trouble with Nigeria. His alienation with Nigeria took on another colour. He said the problem with Nigeria was leadership. That clarified a new righteous rage signposted by rejections of two national awards, one from Obasanjo and the second from Jonathan. He was not at peace with the Nigerian state.

In spite of this, he was a writer in whom many around the world were well pleased. His Things fall Apart sold at least 8 million copies around the world, won him the Booker Prize for his lifetime work, earned doctorates in many upscale schools, was sought after for speeches everywhere. For a man who was so loved, it must have been painful to be Chinua Achebe. He agonised over a world of disconnections. Yet, if you read Things Fall Apart, the character that critics see as embodying Achebe’s views was Obierika. That character, unlike Okonkwo, urges accommodation. But Achebe’s life reads more like Okonkwo in terms of an insistence of principle and absence of accommodation. His was a Joycean island.

His narrative style was also not audacious. He was a cagy genius, a follower of a path of familiar perfections. That is the contradiction in a man who urged change but abided tested tropes. Yet he was a literary pathfinder by introducing a subject that kindled a new generation of literature. He did not win the Nobel Prize, a thing of personal frustration to him. He demonstrated this in his attack on Wole Soyinka’s triumph. He said that he won the European prize did not make Soyinka the Asiwaju of African literature. Soyinka replied, with dramatic irony, that it was not his intention to be an Ogbuefi of African literature. The Nobel alienation was perhaps felt the most by those who felt he deserved it.

No one can deny that Achebe was a jewel in the African narrative. He brought African letters out of the shadows in the modern era. That alone places him, for all the imperfections of his poetics, as a genius for the ages.

In different ways, the resignation of the old pope and the philosophy of the new one indicate one thing: that popes are human after all. They may bubble with the spirit from on high, but they are specimens of blood and flesh. Even Jesus, when he sojourned as the inaugural martyr of the spirit, showed in his last days that the tug of the flesh was powerful. Hence he wept and even begged God to let the cup pass.

When Pope Benedict XVI relinquished his high office, I told myself that the Bishop of Rome had revealed a quality that the church had veiled for centuries: the fallibility of the supreme pontiff. The Roman Catholic Church after the reign of Pope Pius XII had established as a dogmatic reality what it termed the infallibility of the pope. The pope could do no wrong in matters of faith and virtue.

Infallibility of the spirit did not imply the infallibility of the flesh, but a pope that is infallible of spirit should have fought to the finish in the battle of the waning of the flesh. He would not have capitulated to the prompting of the flesh by worrying about its effect on his work. By resigning, the flesh had a say.

For the new pope, it appears to be a triumph of the poor in an age of material obsession. This also takes away from the perception of the papacy as out of touch with the commoner, a papacy of the people. Hence, the new pope named himself after the saint that some psychologists and historians described as the saintly fool, a man who emphasised the dignity of poverty over the frills and grandeur of the high throne of the priest.

Both pontiffs have shown that the pope is one of us. I see both developments as good not only for the Catholic Church but also for the human race. Pope Benedict’s resignation has been located in the tumultuous eight years of reign, especially the eruption of sex scandals that unveiled the hypocrisy of priests and questioned the moral authority of the church. But that oversimplifies it. The papacy is coming to terms with an age of rampant materialism and invasive agnostics. In the past century, we have witnessed burgeoning waves of technology, the rise of individual ethos, the collapse of traditional authority, the flowering of prosperity and the retreat of the fear of God. When German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead, he did not mean that He existed in the first place, but that humans killed him in their hearts where He was born. Blasphemy has become one of the truculent undercurrents of the modern age. It is because of these factors that the West has called for a doctrinal revolution in the church, including the ordination of women as priests, the acceptance of homosexuals and gay marriage, the abolition of priestly celibacy among others.

The calls for these doctrinal reversals do not take cognizance of the church as a spiritual, and not human institution. If Christianity did not have a text, it would lie in the hand of the priest to say what is right. Christianity is nothing without the Bible. But those who call, for instance, for the acceptance of homosexuals want the church to discard the Bible. If you do that, you open the gate to a flood of permissive reversals and, in the end, Christianity becomes a church, not of Christ, but of the human. That is why some critics do not accept the concept of papal infallibility because it places too much power in one man. As for the ordination of women, scripture frowns at it, and even Jesus did not pick a woman either as an apostle or among the 70 disciples to teach. Many women condemn St. Paul who firmly condemned it in his epistles to Timothy and Corinthians. We cannot cherry-pick scripture. We cannot choose what we want to be God’s will.

But women were accepted to play leading roles in the Bible only when men failed, including when Mary Magdalene visited Jesus’ grave, when Deborah judged Israel and when Miriam played a leader. That can be a Biblical justification for women to be priests today since the Catholic Church admits to shortage of priests when some women can play the role. It will be a capitulation of men as indicated in the book of Isaiah who condemned men who allowed women to dominate them.

But in the case of celibacy, the church has no Bible support. It is a convention, not an instruction. Even Paul, a Bishop who never married, urged the Bishop to be “blameless, the husband of one wife.”

The resignation of Benedict represented his inability to persist in this battle, and he has surrendered it to Pope Francis. By resigning, we see the pope come down from the lofty pedestal of the spirit, where he alone had the authority to speak to God more than any other. He has become one of us.

We should not forget that even St. Peter from whom the Pope allegedly springs was not perfect either before the death of Jesus or after the day of Pentecost. He was human. He died in the battle of the spirit. He is regarded by the Catholics as the superior apostle, but Paul, who rebuked him once, did not accept it as he said he was not behind any of the apostles.

Those who praise Pope Benedict for not hanging on to office only look at the institution as a human one. In democracies, we expect leaders to step down.

If Peter was human in spite of his spiritual office, how did we expect the pope not to be the same? The former Pope only made the office connect with the common man by accepting that flesh matters even if the spirit is supposed to be superior. By resigning and becoming pilgrim, he has shown that you can be spiritual and human, and the pope’s humanity makes it easier for the flock to see the spiritual as attainable.

The ascent of Pope Francis reinforces the point as he wants the papacy to remember the poor. I particularly love this as the Pentecostal variety has tended to overplay the material. In Nigeria, pastors have not soared to God until they ride, not on the chariot of the Lord, but on private jets.

This is in a society where the poor beg for funds to afford danfo to the same churches. If the idea is to evangelise, why not buy helicopters that can take them to the poor in the villages and creeks, where their jets and limousines are forbidden. They also use the money of the poor to set up schools for the rich.

Pope Francis’ down-to-earth theology reminds one of the history of the papacy when it was simple. But Pope Benedict’s resignation shows a time when the papacy was human. At one time, the pope, to quote my history teacher Professor Femi Omosini, “became extremely worldly. He wined and dined with secular authorities and bargained openly for the expansion of the papal territory.” One of the notorious was Pope Alexander VI who ran a papacy like a mafia don and was said to be “flagrantly addicted to wenching.”

The reason the church came up with a number of austere rules was to revamp it as a moral and spiritual force. The celibacy of the priest was to stamp a moral grandeur; the Petrine succession to give it the backing of scripture; and infallibility to invest it with a power that transcends all things earthly. Both Benedict and Francis are beneficiaries of these rules.

Those were extreme. It is high time the papacy recognised that all doctrines be based on scripture and elevate the word above the world while not leaving it behind.

I am sure not a few Nigerians flew into the fury of the righteous when the roll call became news. We heard the names of Nderibe, Dantata, Atiku Abubakar, Folawiyo…these are the princes of oil.

But if you examined their minds deeply enough, many Nigerians would know that they were lying who cried foul. They were guilty of the perfidy of hypocrites. They might have had a moment or two of envious resentment against the princes. It might have lingered or flashed across their minds in the form of these words: “why was I not in their shoes? What would I not do with all that bloc of oil!” They might have dreamed of the life of the big, bright Babylon, the palaces, the cars, the decadence of leisure, the trips of the fantastic as well as the choice toy of the well-heeled among us, both secular and pastoral: the private jet.

We all know that the fabulously rich in our midst are casino merchants, those who reap bountifully where they did not sow. They are the Jay Gatsbys of our generations, those who never sweat except from the exalted exertions on golf courses or the whirligig of the dance floor. We have never as a people condemned unearned showiness. Rather we praise them at parties, honour them with traditional titles, give them national honours, devote monuments to them.

If 83 percent of the oil blocs go to the North, why is Boko Haram festering in that same region? Unlike in saner societies, the Nigerian elites have not factored any sense of responsibility into their acquisition of wealth. Our primitive rich do not know value of money. For them, wealth is to donate token buses to church or throw huge parties to the poor on Friday afternoons. But wealth is responsibility.

What writers, columnists and sundry commentators have said over the news is serious, if predictable: that the North should keep quiet over the Niger Delta states’ allocations. They own the oil, but others enjoy it. Others who enjoy are those who say they don’t have it. But that argument, true as it is, undermines the greater point. The northern wealthy are feudalists in the age of capitalism. They see wealth as their royal rights, and the people as their subjects who should be grateful to God for any crumbs delivered on Friday afternoons. What is also forgotten in the narrative is that even the oil firms have not favoured the indigenes in jobs such as engineers, salesmen, managers, accountants, etc. Other ethnic groups, from both the Southwest and Southeast, dominate those jobs in spite of qualified people from those states. The so-called local content policy is more mantra than practice.

If we want to understand the story of Nigeria, we need to understand the story of oil. Its malignancy is pervasive. It has dazed us into all the vices known to corruption. In the oil states, those who are wealthy are errand boys, they do the dirty jobs, like bunkering, stealing of pipes and equipment, etc. These same errand boys become the oppressors of their own people. They corral weapons, form cults of violence, flaunt money in obscene defiance and entrench a culture of indolence. Oil does not only attract oppressors from outside but recruits servile tyrants within.

Have we asked why the issue of amnesty was “resolved” in the Niger Delta without the question of oil bloc allocation ever raised as a matter of economic justice in the region? Why did the bloc go to individuals and not firms according to best practices everywhere? Why did the Niger Delta not get its share? We did not address it because the amnesty, at bottom, was not about economic justice but about appeasing a cult of greedy and disenfranchised youths. We wanted to let the oil flow for the rich.

The news also throws up the question of capitalism as an ideology of the rich for the many. The recent crisis of the ideology has made some to sound the death knell of capitalism. The crisis of Spain, Portugal and Greece and the struggles of the epicenter of dollar have shown how a few greedy individuals can entrap everyone else. But we cannot forget that a few men like Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, whose doings birthed what historians call the Gilded Age, triggered capitalism as we knew it in the 20th century. In spite of their excesses, the same society gave us the progressive era, where they were checked with several legislations including anti-trust laws. It was capitalism checking itself. The present age was birthed by the technological and mercantile geniuses, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. What these men did was to show that they could conquer the world. What the system showed was that law could chasten them.

The wash of derivatives and other insanities drove the system to excess and ruined everyone’s pocket. But we can say that this was a society that worked with money.

Ours is a society that does not understand that wealth is not for consumption alone but to empower the society for more wealth. In his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorsten Veblen showed that wealth can be used to build a life of leisure that can percolate from the top to the bottom. Harvard Professor John K. Galbraith demonstrated that if we don’t handle wealth properly we will have an affluent society but a mass of the poor with decaying social services and infrastructure.

That is the society we have today in Nigeria. We have affluent persons with the poor everywhere. That is why the irony is potent that where we have the most oil blocs have thrown up the most vicious threat to the society.

The death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has raised question on what to do with a nation’s oil wealth. He is a man as god today to his people. He redistributed for most part the oil wealth and reduced poverty by about 20 percent, with free education and health care, among other social services. The point has been raised whether that policy is sustainable where the money is distributed rather than used to stimulate more wealth as their Latin American counterpart Lula in Brazil did with capitalism. Lula brought 30 million people out of poverty.

Either system is better than ours where a few people acquire the wealth primitively and flaunt them as though they are the blessed of the Lord. It is oil that brought Boko Haram. Before oil, the North developed thriving agricultural and textile cultures. The Niger Delta had palm produce, groundnuts, fishes, lumber, etc. That is the wisdom in the Delta beyond Oil programme initiated by Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan.

Oil suffocated all. That is why the princes eye the gold of the creeks. Without oil or its abysmal use, the North would be quiescent with prosperity.

In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of two Cities, a big vat of wine cracks open by accident on a French street and everyone helps themselves with cups, hands, even handkerchiefs, and all are merry, holding hands and dancing. When it is finished and the effect dissipates, everyone remembers what they are doing before the revelry. The farmer to farm, seamstress to shop, butcher to the meat, all to their default suffering in pre-revolutionary France.

Maybe we are waiting for our oil wells to dry up before our liberation from the dazzle.

Then Jonathan went to Maiduguri, he did exactly what I predicted he would do. Rather than show love, he extracted debt. And without grace or finesse. But from the rhetoric of the urbane Governor Kashim Shettima, Borno will not go to the bank for Jonathan. Jonathan imposed an army of occupation instead of an embrace. He closed down the city. But it was because he was afraid. Like a snake, he masked it with braggadocio, dripping with venom. He said he would not negotiate with ghosts. So if they are ghosts, it means he cannot find the militants. Of course, he has surrendered. He should employ exorcists and withdraw the soldiers. He did not learn anything from the 11 wise men who visited before him. Of course, the governors were not John the Baptist because Jonathan is not their anointed one.

They crouched down to their bended knees and treated the subject with papal awe. It was not a place for pious worship, and neither was any god involved. But it was a case of white worshipping black, an irony for history.

It was at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. It is good once in a while when one is on vacation to leaven the languor with some intellectual spice. So that was how I got invited to the place in the world’s most powerful capital, more especially when the issue at stake epitomised the Nigerian story: oil and the Niger Delta.

The person at the centre of the gathering was the Governor of Delta State, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, and the audience, which filled the venue to overflowing, spanned the wide gamut of academics, diplomats, representatives of the United States State Department, students interested in Nigeria, human rights votaries and a sprinkling of potential investors.

But what struck me was their subject of worship: Oil. You did not sense this veneration while the Governor unveiled his doings in Delta State from his security agenda, his Delta Beyond Oil programme, his work on building and rebuilding schools and infrastructure, the revenue allocation controversy, due process, environment and transportation.

The question-and-answer session provided the excitement, and the audience had more questions than the time allotted. The moderator, Professor Peter Lewis, who heads the African programme, had to consolidate questions for Governor Uduaghan.

Most of their questions revolved around militancy, revenue allocation, job creation in the Niger Delta, the law suits against oil firms, the issue of oil tax and how to redeem the environment after decades of devastation.

I was amazed by how much these people knew about my country and the level of curiosity and concern over the fragility of the Nigerian state. For instance, on the issue of militancy, they knew that the programme has a sunset date, and when it expired the evil day may not redound to joy for Nigeria. What will happen when the token trainings stop, when the Federal Government’s funding retreats to other urgencies of development? It went back, as Governor Uduaghan noted, to addressing the fundamental questions of poverty and alienation, which meant that the government had to provide the enabling environment for work and self-fulfillment.

Will the evil camps revive with the growls of resource control and the hooded goons with ominous guns? Is the region ready for another era of militant yelps, a phase of youth rage? It will precede a crash of our crude oil exports with the consequences for plummeting levels of revenue streams.

This matter segued into revenue allocation, and that was where Governor Uduaghan, in spite of his tranquil mien, showed anger, however suppressed. Some listeners could not grasp how, in a federal state, justice did not accompany the allocation of resources, especially when oil took from the local communities more than it gave. Professor Lewis injected humour by saying that, “let it be noted that Governor Uduaghan is angry,” and a gale of laughter rippled through the venue.

He also argued that the Niger Delta states did not get more revenue than some of the states at war over the lopsidedness of revenue. He explained that the local government revenues gave some states, especially in the north, an aggregate edge over the cumulative takings of their Niger Delta states.

Concerns about the environment peaked when the governor gave an anecdote about his childhood days when the rivers and streams revealed like mirror its habitués: fish, prawns, crayfish, etc. Those were the days of nature’s innocence when oil, tenanted peacefully in the earthly bowels, did not violate territories. The wealth of trees, palm produce, cassava, and sundry cash and other products cohabited with black gold. That predated the coming of the big firms and things fell apart.

“In those days,” recalled Governor Uduaghan, “you could dip your hands in the water and pick your fish.” Dinner was assured. Not today when marine life chokes under a smothering sea of oil. Oil has disenfranchised the owners and immiserated their generation.

This led to a question on the recent judgment from a European court against Shell. The irony that concerned the woman was about the absence of local justice. This was not only a sort of vaudevillian lament over the absence of justice on that matter. For me, it was an indictment of our judiciary. Why was it that we had to travel several miles to ask a judge from a foreign land to give the justice we all know should be given to us at home?

The courts and their judges in Europe understood the importance of sacred environment. Environment is destiny, and beauty is not only the colour of the sky in its orange glory but also the purity of running streams, the chirp of birds, the statuesque pride of the iroko tree unthreatened by oil. It is this truth that reinforces beauty, and that was what the poet John Keats meant.

It goes deep into the fragile hope of the region, and the lingering sense of inequity. But that was what all the Americans in the audience meant. They came to worship oil, but it was not a god of equality, but a sleek potentate with hints of Armageddon – a god bearing mammon in its wings. So they were critical of the domicile of the god, and whether man had not woken the god from its resting place to torment us for seeking the bounty in its loins.

The West has harnessed that bounty for their good, with evidence of prosperity in the United States and Europe today. But we have done worse who host the god. Shall we blame the exploiter or us who allowed the god to punish our follies? We could not make the god in our image.

Governor Uduaghan says the answer begins when we address the issue as to whether those who host the oil should decide who own it. It is where fiscal federalism meets justice – at home.

We all love pictures, and we all resent them. We are not indifferent to that piece of technology that can record in still accuracy what we do not want seen for the ignominy it broadcasts, or what we want to keep as evidence of glory.

The word accuracy was celebrated in the early days of photography. It announced the concept of the picture as the sacrosanct reporter. The phrase, “a picture cannot lie” became part of the lore of story telling. The picture canonised journalism, vindicated and defamed witnesses, convicted felons in court, exonerated the noble, froze for posterity earthquakes, floods, a war hero’s soldiery, a coward’s perfidy, a traitor’s kiss, a cuckold’s evidence, a son’s fidelity.

It comes in evidence in a family tiff as it erupts for salvation in a political quarrel. We just had it in the past week over governors who propounded evidence of pictures to assure us of their health status. The two men are Governor Danbaba Suntai of Taraba State and Governor Sullivan Chime of Enugu State.

Before the pictures came to light, speculations filled the air. Suntai, who was away at a hospital in Europe, had apparently survived a plane crash that he piloted into a crisis. Stories flooded the media about plots to succeed him as some of his foes believed he could not return with mental acuity and his active limbs.

Then he jolted us with pictures. One of them was about him sitting upright with his twins and wife. The other one was with another governor, Jonah Jang of Plateau State. He stood full length with his colleague. The family photo preceded that picture. He looked better relaxed in the picture with his colleague as though family asphyxiated his ability to project an expansive mood.

Last week, Chime also reinforced the trend. He appeared in full length with three governors, Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State and Gabriel Suswan of Benue State. All four were apparently in a chat not unaware of the camera click, not unaware that it could travel to the front pages of newspapers. Their outfits and background reflected a car park in a wintry Europe.

But the pictures have failed to answer some questions for those who believe that still photography, as definitive evidence, is passé. The naysayers say both governors are not saying the truth with the pictures. Some have said the Enugu State Governor’s publicists sandwiched a photo of pre-illness Chime between the governors. Some other cynics have argued that Chime took the picture sometime ago with the governors when they were in Europe.

The same tirades of doubt came from Suntai’s critics. They say the family photo betrayed a sick man propped up for a credulous public.

One thing is clear: the picture has lost its innocence. In the post-modern age of Facebook, Twitter, blog, Photoshop, television, films, and what technologists call media convergence, it is difficult to vouch for the integrity of any medium.

The governors did not err by sending us their pictures, but the issue of transparency is not about pictures alone. It is about transparency. When the late President Umar Yar’Adua’s illness hid inside a fog, his publicists sent us a voice tape, and it did not answer many questions.

Part of the problem is that the governors have failed to understand that transparency is about faithful updates from the beginning. When they fell ill, they should have told us. When they undertook tests, the publicists should have sent a press release. Before they travelled, they should have unveiled the state of diagnoses and why they had to travel abroad. Then they ought to have told us what hospital and in what country.

While in the hospital, we ought to know step by step how the treatments went. Were they making progress? The doctor would tell us and also report the prognosis. If there were complications, we ought to know.

If they followed these steps, no one would be speculating as to what kind of illness they suffered or whether they were dead or alive. They leaped over those stages by sending the pictures. Expecting many Nigerians to believe the pictures was therefore a leap of faith.

Last week, a source told me that Chime was operated successfully for cancer around the nose area. Before that, speculations were rife about the man dying from leukemia. Some speculated AIDS.

When the governors’ men came out with the pictures, they expected Nigerians to believe them instanta.

The pictures were clear but they befogged the mind. If they had followed these steps, they would have fulfilled the fundamental feature of modern democracy: communication between the governed and the elected. A chasm gaped between them and that is why the pictures did not settle the matter. They eased the general frenzy in some circles, but doubts still linger. The absence of evidence gave them away to critics as evidence of absenteeism. What is at stake is not the governors or their health, but the integrity of the rule of law and due process but above all, decency and honour. There are hospitals to improve, roads to build, schools to upgrade, and lives to elevate.

It is an irony that our military leaders understood this more than some of our modern democrats. When military president, Ibrahim Babangida, had leg injury known as radiculopathy, no Nigerian ached with doubt. Before he left the country, we knew about it. A picture of him squinting with pain at the offending leg revealed him. He travelled abroad and we knew the hospital, his progress and he returned in the full view of television. The Guardian ace reporter Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo counted for posterity the number of steps he took on the tarmac.

When General Domkat Bali took ill, he told us. Even in this democracy, Senate President David Mark, a former soldier, also was transparent about his situation. We have some redeeming evidence when Abubakar Atiku was ill as vice president and when Governor Bola Tinubu went abroad to treat his distracting leg.

We don’t have such transparency today.

We live in a world of technology, and technology trumps technology. But what we needed in this matter was an old and thriving technology: the written word.

For the governors to follow the steps of communication, all they needed was to convey them in words couched in press releases. They were sure to subvert the photo.

If pictures are worth a thousand words, it is not the case in this instance. Words would have created the right pictures as novelists, poets, dramatists and, of course, reporters would. Words did it in the case of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Hilary Clinton of the United States and Viktor Yushchenko of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. When the words are credible, the pictures come alive. Or if the pictures come out early when the illness begins, its truth will inspire sympathy like the story of Tancredo Neves of Brazil whose infirmity drew tears and group prayer sessions across the country.

Up till the time of writing, the governors have not told us anything other than still photography. But what we want is not just pictures but facts.