The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • National Assembly and politics of policing Rivers State

    National Assembly and politics of policing Rivers State

    A situation where a Police Commissioner distorts facts does not augur well

    The National Assembly is not wanting when it comes to intervening in matters of governance within the jurisdiction of the executive branch of government. This is as it should be in a context of separation of powers. In both parliamentary and presidential systems, it is generally the responsibility of the legislature to monitor the use of executive power, in order to ensure that the citizenry is not shortchanged by wielders of executive power. It is, therefore, not surprising that some members of the House of Representatives are already mobilising others to get involved in preventing a crisis of governance looming in Rivers State, illustrated most graphically by the face-off or rivalry between the elected Governor of Rivers State and the Commissioner of Police deployed to the state by the federal government. As usual, the federal legislature is not departing from the tradition of scratching the surface of problems, as it chooses to cure rash instead of leprosy.

    The House of Representatives has set up a 14-person committee to liaise with the Police Affairs Commission, the Inspector-General of Police and the Rivers State Government to fashion out ways of improving relationship between the police posted to Rivers State and the state government. In a quick move to confirm that the goal of the Assembly’s intervention is to avoid the cause of the problem and focus on the symptom, the lawmaker who raised the motion said: “The motion was meant to find means of guaranteeing safety of the people of the state based on the prevailing circumstances because a former militant has raised the alarm that there is a build-up of arms in the state. This is not good for the state because both the governor and the police chief can guarantee their own safety but the safety of the masses is not guaranteed.” This statement was made after the lawmaker catalogued instances of altercations between the governor of Rivers State and the Commissioner of Police in the state, rather than between citizens and the police.

    It is conceivable for anyone who prefers to deal with the perfunctory aspect of problems to see the tension between Rivers State’s governor and the commissioner of police in the state as a personal matter. But a deeper look at what is happening in relation to law enforcement cannot but reveal the innards of the country’s flawed design of law enforcement. What the tension between GovernorAmaechi andCommssionerMbu suggests is that the same thing can happen to other governors. It may appear as if the issue emanates from personality conflicts between Amaechi and Mbu, but viewing the problem more analytically should reveal that it is not the persons of the two individuals that is at issue, it is the philosophy that a federation can have a state governor without powers to secure or enforce laws in his or her state that requires immediate and honest attention by federal legislators.

    As it is being speculated in the media, it is possible that what is at stake in the tension between the presidency and the governor of Rivers State over the matter of who won the recent election of chairman of Nigerian Governors Forum may have sparked uneasiness between the governor and the commissioner of police. To quote sections of the constitution, as the mover of the motion for legislators’ intervention in the tension in Rivers has aptly done: Meanwhile, Section 14 (1)b of the Constitution …empowers the governor to give directives to the Police Commissioner, but in this instance, the question is, ‘has the governor given such directive?’ appears to be more interested in quibbling than in solving the fundamental issue thrown up by the possibility of a police commissioner calling a state governor a dictator.

    What is the basis of the optimism that a police commissioner that has called a state governor a dictator should be expected to listen to directives from such governor? It is the kind of constitution that the country has which makes it possible for a police officer to call a governor a dictator. It is generally those who elect public officers that have the right to tell such officers that they are dictators when they have evidence for such claim. We have been witnessing that kind of right in Egypt in the last four days.

    A state governor in a democratic context has the mandate of his constituents to rule. Ordinarily ruling a state involves collaborating with lawmakers to establish laws and enforce such laws. In Nigeria, an elected governor only has a right to sign laws enacted by state lawmakers and no more than that. He or she is not in charge of enforcing such laws, even though he is the chief executive officer of the state. It is the police force under the monopoly of the federal government that is directly in charge of law enforcement all over the country. The police commissioner or even the police recruit in any of the states is responsible to the Inspector-General of Police, who, in turn, is responsible only to the president.

    The fundamental problem that should interest federal legislators, who also happen to be considering at present amending the 1999 Constitution that gives the federal government monopoly over policing in all the states of the federation, is what lawmakers should x-ray rigorously. If it is possible for a governor who is also a member of the ruling party at the federal level to experience the kind of frustration that Governor Amaechi has been reported to experience from the federal commissioner of police in his state, lawmakers need to embark on proactive legislation, capable of preventing other governors from having with police officers posted to their states, disagreements that can compromise security of citizens. If a fellow member of the ruling party at the centre that controls law enforcement nation-wide experiences any frustration from the hands of the commissioner of police in his state, then it is only God that can save governors from opposition parties.

    According to Sebastian Roche in a monograph on Federalism and Police Systems, democracy as a culture should have a space in the design of police systems. Democratic policing includes creating and supporting a police system that sees, as its primary duty, the protection of the freedom and human rights of citizens. A democratic police system cannot exist in a federal union in which only one tier of government monopolizes law enforcement, as it is in the current constitution.

    There is a Yoruba proverb: if you throw a cutlass down one million times, it will land only on its flat surface. The flat surface of the 1999 Constitution, which federal lawmakers have suggested several times since their one-day interaction with selected citizens over constitutional items slated for amendment, is the exclusive power given to the federal government over security and law enforcement. It is possible for Governor Amaechi to overcome what he sees as his present predicament, after reaching some understanding with members of the ruling party at the center. But what happens to him in relation to the commissioner of police in his state today can and may happen to other governors, for whatever reasons.

    And this will not happen just because the current president is less benevolent than he should be. It may happen because federal lawmakers appear not to be as concerned with creating benevolent institutions and structures of governance as they are about using their resources to act as fire fighters. What is more important is to prevent outbreak of fires. To do so requires that our lawmakers do more rigorous analysis of the constitution they claim they can amend to the satisfaction of all Nigerians, by giving Nigerians the freedom to determine the extent of powers they want to assign to states in a federation run by civilians. Our legislators need to come to terms with the fact that the federal and state governments are coordinates. As coordinates, no side should have the power to post police officers to either side, except in the situation of war. Contrary to the assumption of the 1999 Constitution, federal lawmakers need to realize that the federal government is not synonymous with the federation and thus cannot afford to continue to serve as the bouncer at the gate of the country’s security system.

  • Spooks, kidnappers and saviour Obama

    Spooks, kidnappers and saviour Obama

    In an attempt to apprehend the 30 year old American whistleblower, Edward Snowden, a plane that was carrying the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, was diverted to Austria on its way back to Bolivia from Russia. France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, based on intelligence reports from the Americans, closed their airspace to the plane because they believed that Snowden was on it and that he was being secretly smuggled back to Bolivia.

    This was a plane that was part of the Bolivian state’s Presidential fleet and that was carrying the President of that country. Bolivia is a sovereign state which is not at war with anyone. This act was not only grossly disrespectful to the Bolivian state but it also violated international law and all the norms and rules of international diplomacy and decency. It was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention on international flights which says that the aircraft of the leader of any sovereign state has immunity and cannot be treated in such a manner. To make matters worse the Presidential plane was searched and President Morales, by his own words, was treated as if he were nothing more than a ”common criminal”. I would have to agree with the Bolivian Vice President that in actual fact Morales was actually ”kidnapped by America, her European allies and the forces of imperialism”.

    He was eventually released and allowed to fly home but up until then President Morales was holed up at the airport in Vienna for no less than nine hours even though it immediately became clear to all that Snowden was not on his plane. This was a truly shameful episode. When the Americans and their allies treat leaders from the smaller and weaker nations of the world in such a way simply because those nations and those leaders have stood up for truth and justice and have resisted their ignoble quest to persecute the innocent and conquer the world it diminishes us all.

    From this incident alone it ought to be clear to every right-thinking and discerning person that America, under President Barack Obama, is a nation that has literally been driven mad by its own paranoia and obsessions and that is completely drunk on power. Their ultimate objective is to control the entire world and to impose their will on each and every one of us.

    I commend the courage of those truly progressive nations and leaders that have condemned the Americans and their allies on this issue, that have defied American imperialism and that have stood up for Snowden for exposing the illegal and immoral acts of the Obama administration. These nations include Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba and a number of other Carribean and Latin American countries. I also commend some of the key figures from the political left in Ireland, France, Germany and a number of other European countries and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organistation for standing by Snowden as well and I commend Russia and China for refusing to hand him over to America. The Scandanavian nation of Iceland has gone even further in their support for Snowden than any other by actually considering and debating the possibility of conferring him with Icelandic citizenship even though he has never set his foot on their soil and even whilst he is still in hiding in Russia. It is the courage of those world leaders that are strong enough and that have cultivated the fortitude, the resolve, the decency and the humanity to rise up to the occassion, to stand up for the weak and defenceless and to look the American bully in the eye and say ”thus far and no further” that keeps the rest of us going.

    Yet the revelations of the excesses the American state did not stop there. During the course of the week they were also caught spying on some of their own European friends. The fact that the American National Security Agency (aka ”No Such Agency”) have bugged the telephones and internet activities of government officials, government buildings and foreign embassies of their closest allies in the world was brought to the attention of the international community. The Europeans, quite rightly, have not taken the matter lightly. The reaction of the French President, Francois Hollande, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, has been one of absolute outrage and each and every one of them have wholeheartedly condemned the behaviour of the Americans in very harsh terms. They even went as far as to suggest that this matter could affect the massive deal on trade that the two economic powerhouses were about to begin negotiations on. All these illegal acts and dark secrets by the American state were exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the new PRISM system that the Obama administration is now using to spy on every single individual that has a phone and that is on the internet and every government in the world.

    The implications of this are frightful and obvious to even the dullest amongst us. It sounds like a scene from George Orwell’s book titled ”1984”. And frankly speaking it is disgraceful. Such is the angst that even the most powerful intellectuals and true patriots in America itself such as the celebrated author Professor Naom Chomsky and the reverred film producer Oliver Stone have condemned it. On July 4th at the Karlovy Vay International Film Festival Oliver Stone said ”it is a disgrace that Obama is more concerned with hunting down Snowden than reforming these George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques. To me Snowden is a hero because he revealed secrets that we should all know,that the United States has repeatedly violated the fourth amendment. He should be welcomed and offered asylum but he has no place to hide because every country is intimidated by the United States.This should not be. This is what is wrong with the world today. And it is very important that the world recognises and gives asylum to Snowden. Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States’ Big Brother attitude towards the world. We need countries to say no to the United States”. These are courageous words spoken by a true American patriot. And in my view he is absolutely right. Where are the defenders of America and the Obama-lovers now? Will they seek to defend this illegal, despicable and treacherous act of the Americans who have shown that they are prepared to go as low as to spy on even their own allies as well? I say shame on them and kudos to Snowden. He has exposed the illegal and indefensible acts of the American state and he has proved to the world that they seek to secretly watch, monitor and record the activities of every single non-American on the planet. It is left to the rest of us to either resign our fate to God and accept it sheepishly or to resist it as best as we can with our loud protests until we get our privacy and our security back. I am deeply encouraged by the fact that even our very own President Goodluck Jonathan was also taken aback by this appauling spying scandal and that, through one of his officials, he actually cultivated the courage to ”warn the Americans” about their unacceptable excesses and spying ways.

    This brings me to the issue of Obama’s visit to Africa. There can be little doubt that when President George W. Bush was in power he did a lot for Africa with his President’s Emergency Plan For Aids Relief (PEPFAR) initiative which pumped in millions of dollars that saved the lives of millions of Africans and protected them from aids. He also provided more financial aid and grants to African countries than any American President that ever came before him and he supported Nigeria’s bid for debt relief and and debt cancellation between 2005 and 2007. Quite apart from that he fully implemented the provisions of the African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA) which helped African businesses to grow, created jobs and wealth and reduced poverty on our continent by opening up the lucrative American market to some of our consummer and agricultural products. These are just some of the things that George W. Bush did for Africa. By way of contrast President Barack Obama has done next to nothing for us and has in fact dramatically reduced American aid, trade and support for our continent.

    It is ironic that Bush, who has no links with Africa and who is a conservative Republican, did so much for us whilst Obama, who is of African descent and who is a liberal Democrat, has done very little. Other than a relatively paltry pledge of 7 billion USD for the generation of power on a continent which is home to over 500 million people and in which there are 53 independent countries, the only things that Obama appears to want to export to Africa are “homosexual rights”, “same sex marriage”, “same sex parenting”, drones and drone bases, AFRICOM and the PRISM spying system. His utter disdain and contempt for Nigeria in particular, though cleverly veiled, is interesting and significant. Despite our size, our standing and our relative strength on the African continent he has snubbed us twice on his two visits to Africa by not coming here. Worse still he has simply refused to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation even though they have butchered no less than 5000 Nigerians in the last two years and even though he has put a bounty on the heads of three of it’s leaders. Why the contradiction? If the leaders of Boko Haram are terrorists then surely the whole organisation is a terrorist one as well. Had Boko Haram been responsible for the deaths of even one American anywhere in the world I have little doubt that the following day they would have been officially designated terrorists by the Obama administration. Yet that courtesy has not been extended to us even though thousands of our people have been slaughtered by that same organisation in just two years. The question is why the double standards? Is our blood not red as well? Are our lives not as important as that of others? If Al Shabab in East Africa, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Al Qaeda in the north African Sahel and in the Middle East, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines, the Janjaweed in the Sudan, the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, Hamas in Gaza, Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, the Islamic International Brigade in Chechnya and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan are labelled as terrorist organisations by the Americans then why is Boko Haram of Nigeria exempt from that same label? These are just some of the contradictions of Barack Obama when it comes to his policies and attitude to Nigeria. Yet his attitude towards us is nothing new. Between 2005 and 2007 whilst he was still in the Senate, he was one of the few American senators who openly opposed the campaign for debt relief for our country. Thankfully despite his opposition we still got that debt relief and by 2007 Nigeria had paid off all her foreign debts.

    Yet we are a very generous, forgiving and large-hearted people. Despite Obama’s indifference and his lukewarm attitude towards us the African people generally, and the Nigerian people particularly, continue to idolise him and slobber all over him as if he were the Messiah Himself, citing the fact that he is a black man, that he is ”one of us”, that he has a beautiful pepsodent smile, that he is ”drop-dead gorgeous” and that he is a great orator that delivers brilliant and inspirational speeches as some of their reasons for doing so. Goodness me. What a country and what a people we are! Those that are moved by Obama’s Adonis-like looks and engaging oratory forget that Adolf Hitler delivered beautiful, inspiring and powerful speeches as well and that he was idolised in a similar fashion by the German people until he showed them his true colours. Of course by that time it was too late and 50 million people, including 6 million jews and 20 million Russians, were killed as a consequence of nazi aggression and World War 11. So much for powerful oratory and beautiful speeches.

    For those amongst our people that still insist on fawning over Obama the questions are as follows. Do we have to bring sentiment into everything? When will we be governed by our heads and not by our hearts and our emotions? When will we appreciate the fact that a man ought to be judged by what he does and not by the colour of his skin or by what he says? They say that actions speak louder than words. Is that truism totally lost on us? Some say Obama is the ”saviour of the world” and the greatest thing since sliced bread, yet the same Obama has killed over 4000 innocent women, children and civilians in secret drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last 4 years. This represents a 200 per cent increase in the number of civilians that George W. Bush killed with similar drone attacks in the same area in the period of 8 years.

    The same ”saviour” Obama is supporting the most ruthless brand of wahabbi-inspired, Al Qaeda, islamist, salifist and jihadist forces in Syria who call themselves ”Syrian rebels” but who are in actual fact nothing more than a bunch of heartless and cannibalistic beasts that slaughter women, children, moderate sunni muslims, shia muslims, christians, secularists, priests, nuns, ethnic minorities and anyone else that does not share their barborous world view. They do not just kill their victims but they go a step further by cutting out and eating their hearts, organs and private parts after they have done so in the full glare of television cameras. These ”people” are Obama’s friends.

    As a final pointer saviour Obama has just appointed Ambassador Susan Rice as his very own National Security Advisor. She is the pretty lady that flew to Nigeria and served our very own President-elect MKO Abiola a strange cup of tea at a secret meeting on July 7 1998 after which he coughed violently and dropped dead before her very eyes and at her very feet. Perhaps we should all take a moment to ponder on the implications of that. Saviour Obama must love us very much. With friends like him who needs enemies?

    Permit me to end this contribution with a word on Egypt. Nothing exposes the sheer duplicity, deceit and doublespeak of saviour Obama more than his attitude and words about the tumultous events that occured in Egypt last week. Robert Fisk, the celebrated columnist with the U.K’s Independent Newspaper, captured it all very well in a brilliant article titled ”When A Military Coup Is Not A Military Coup”. He wrote ”For the first time in the history of the world a coup is not a coup. The army take over, depose and imprison the democratically-elected President, suspend the constitution, arrest the usual suspects, close down the television stations and mass their armour in the streets of the capital. But the word ”coup” does not- and cannot- cross the lips of the Blessed Barack Obama”. Fisk has hit the nail on the head. ”Blessed” indeed. May God deliver our world from ”saviour” Obama.

     

  • ACN national leadership endorsement: A defining moment for Fayemi

    ACN national leadership endorsement: A defining moment for Fayemi

    Ekiti people should still rally behind Gov. Fayemi

    A part from Ekiti’s demographic considerations which should ordinarily restrain Iyin-Ekiti born Hon Opeyemi Bamidele, MHR, (Iyin has produced two past governors) from wanting to contest the 2014 governorship elections in the state, one would have expected that a party leader of his standing, even if he could so easily discount friendship, would at least think of party solidarity, and control his ambitions, at least for now. Instead, so eagerly did Opeyemi pursue his ambition that very long ago, while Fayemi was making the rounds of Election Tribunals trying to reclaim a mandate Ekiti people have so handsomely twice given him, he had begun to expend enormous resources wanting to contest the 2011 elections with the believe that the then men of impunity would triumph at the tribunals.

    I got the first inkling of this from a very senior party leader in the Ise-Orun Local Government Area who asked me if the Central Senatorial District where Bamidele wanted to contest, extended to that Local Government Area. Asked why the question, I was pleasantly surprised to be told that Mr Bamidele, as he was then known, was already extending tantalising items to party members in the area. I would later have firsthand knowledge of how LG executives have been split down the line -no thanks to him. Then came the rancorous Senate primaries about which we need not delay ourselves here.

    Before the party’s national leadership came into the open with their heartwarming endorsement of a hugely performing Fayemi at the epochal meeting of of last week Wednesday, a lot of water has passed under the bridge as the national leadership has done everything to appeal to Hon Bamidele to rally round the party by supporting a performing governor with whom the party at all levels is happy.

    Opeyemi’s recalcitance was one of the reasons for the meeting and as Ashiwaju did not fail to say, the meeting was intended to settle all, and every disagreement, endorse the incumbent for the next election, and set the party ready on the path for the 2014 election. For this reason, Hon Bamidele was expected to be at the meeting with the national leadership.

    Both leaders, the Chairman, Chief Bisi Akande and the National Leader, Ashiwaju Ahmed Tinubu did not hide the fact that their mission at the meeting was ‘to set in motion processes to settle our in-house misunderstandings’, where any exists, just as Ashiwaju who said such meetings will hold in other states appealed to Bamidele when he said: ‘if anyone here knows Opeyemi, tell him that Jagaban has sent you to him to drop his ambition.’ He went on to say the party in the state should invite him and appeal to him. But if anybody should know Opeyemi, it should be the Jagaban. During a mid-night call I made to Ashiwaju the night before the 2011 Senatorial primaries rerun between now Senator Babafemi Ojudu and Hon Bamidele, the National leader told me how he had tried, without success, to dissuade Bamidele from unnecessarily fouling the waters, insisting on the Senate when he could literally effortlessly go to the House of Representatives.

    With that for experience, I wrote as follows on a forum to which Opeyemi also belongs a few hours after the National leadership endorsed Fayemi, thereby concluding the series of endorsements we have seen at all levels of the party in the hope that he could still be appealed to as sugested by the leaders:

    ‘It is a warm and hearty congratulations to our party and our hard working governor who remains an exemplar. I have got tens of calls concerning my absence at the defining endorsement meeting and these included the one from our Deputy Governor but the callers were mollified when they heard I was at an Annual General Meeting, which I chaired, a few hours earlier.

    It doesn’t get any better and because we need a united front to, once again, comprehensively deal with our ragtag, ever- feuding opponents, I hereby plead with my dear aburo, and Rep, the Hon Ope Bamidele MHR, to PLEASE heed the advice of the leaders. Like Otunba said, he did nothing wrong but we need all hands behind this performing governor. Opeyemi should wait for his time and, that time, God willing, he will have our prayers for success.

    He should not allow anybody to use him to burrow into the A C N fortress in the South-west and ignite an Akintola- type scenario. He should know that we are daily making history and should therefore be guided by what legacy attends to those political leaders who ignited intra party feuds in Yoruba land. Their ugly skeletons are strewn over the entire Yoruba landscape as they are remembered only with ignominy’.

    Opeyemi Bamidele comes from my Irepodun/Ifelodun LGA which forms a part of his federal constituency. He is, therefore, my Rep and he sure represents us well. That fact has made him, like some others, a target of that party with sundry minor surrogates, Labour inclusive, which, lacking good people, is running from pillar to post in the South-west looking for some of our progressive friends who would fly their governorship flags even when their own internal governorship wannabes would consider nothing reprehensible in their quest to be governor. The wise one should, therefore, keep them at arms length no matter how many times they had been led to the Villa. In case they are not far gone yet in the company of those who will not only use them to make Abuja money and dump them when they fail, as they sure will do, but are bound to shipwreck their future political aspirations because the Yoruba knows exactly how to treat traitors.

    Asiwaju had barely got home in Lagos when , with the Party Chairman, Chief Bisi Akande, present, Fayemi again launched what will go down in the state as a veritable milestone. At an impressive gathering at the St Augustines Comprehensive High School, Oye-Ekiti, of party faithful and representatives of Ekiti people from all over the state and amidst early morning showers of divine blessings, the governor distributed a total of N300 million as grant -in -aid to self-help projects in 82 towns and communities in the first phase of the trail-blazing programme.

    This was in fulfillment of his campaign promise and his resolve to develop and transform Ekiti and make it comparable to any state in the country. This developmental paradigm, said the governor, ‘is based on the principle that his administration will only do development with the people and not for them. This, he further said, was borne out of his belief that development is more enduring when the people take full ownership of what is done by government by not only suggesting what they consider most valuable to them, but also participate actively in its implementation and monitoring’. But the philosophy girding this developmental model is much deeper.

    On Saturday December 1, the governor brainstormed with the Chairmen and Secretaries of Community Development Associations in the State along the lines of the 8 point Agenda of the administration. The following were agreed:

    – Continual brainstorming for budget process, implementation and feedback by all stakeholders.

    – Creation of the Ministry of Rural Development and Community Empowerment to bring development to all the nooks and crannies of the state.

    – Grants in-aid to communities for self-help projects.

    – Revitalisation of Cooperative Development in Ekiti State.

    What transpired at Oye therefore was a clear indication that the Fayemi administration’s word is its bond. As part of its efforts to bring development to the rural communities where over 75% of the populace reside, the Ministry of Rural Development and Community Empowerment was created in January, 2013. All the stakeholders in the state were fully involved in the preparation of the year’s budget which is based on the zero budgeting method as is currently being practised all over the world. This means that the opinion of all the various strata/segments of Ekiti people were sought before the 2013 budget was prepared using a dynamic bottom-up approach.

    I am sure that a federal government, which by July 2013 is still at daggers drawn with the National Assembly on its 2013 budget, has a lot to learn from the Fayemi model.

  • Ironies of the master ironist: The literary politics of Chinua Achebe

    Ironies of the master ironist: The literary politics of Chinua Achebe

    What else can be said about Chinua Achebe the late Nigerian literary colossus that has not been said? Ever since his demise, the praises and tributes to this great man of letters have been overwhelming. His funeral cortege reminds one of the passing of a great king, drenched in paens and panegyrics and in the national colours of a country he had virtually given up on. It reminds one of the funeral of Victor Hugo, the great French author, who also famously quarrelled with his country.

    An African philosopher-king, the iconic Nelson Mandela, weighed in by noting that Achebe was the writer who broke down prison walls with his magical and immensely liberating story telling. It doesn’t get more royal and revolutionary at the same time. Chinua Achebe is on his way to being canonised and sanctified as the Nelson Mandela of modern African literature and cultural nationalism

    Yet it needs to be said that unlike Nelson Mandela, the praise-singing has not been universal. There have also been murmurs and even loud grunts of disapproval and, with touching irony, from the home front, too. There are many who view the late master story teller as a tribal bigot, an Igbo hegemonist, and a divisive and polarising figure who should be quickly buried and not be praised.

    There are those who claim that in addition to earlier infractions and indiscretions, his last book, There Was Another country, destroyed at once and forever, Achebe’s claims to a Nigerian nationalism. By the time he died, Achebe, they claim, had become a reluctant Nigerian and a Biafran revanchist to boot.

    These are grievous charges indeed and grievously has Achebe paid for them in some scalding and scarifying dismissals. But now that what is mortal of the paradigmatic novelist has been committed to mother earth, now that the protocol of henchmen and hatchet men alike have retreated to their dens and denizenry, it is time to explore the crucially neglected aspect of Achebe’s literary career on which his claims to immortality rests. That is his literary politics. It is literary politics that determines literary production. Literary politics is in turn determined by an author’s worldview and ideological temperament.

    As befitting of a master ironist, Chinua Achebe’s literary career is steeped in momentous historical, political and literary ironies. There is a sense in which Achebe himself recalls Okonkwo, his most famous fictional creation. Things Fall Apart has been described as an “Igbo national epic”. There is a glorious but illuminating contradiction about this very description.

    Many scholars of radical and conservative persuasion have argued that the modern novel, precisely because it is an organic and generic outgrowth of the dissolution of the material, economic and political basis of the old order and ancient society, cannot aspire to the soaring heights, the ideological solidity and sheer “epic” nature of the old epic. Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician, described the modern novel as an epic of diminution and futility. The old hero at one with his society has transformed into the new anti-hero at odds and variance with his society.

    But this was the contradiction of a colonially induced transition from the old society to a new society that Achebe’s novel captures and works out within its slender format in a moment of historic inspiration. Okonkwo is both a hero and anti-hero in the same breath. The infiltration of an antagonistic logic had destroyed the material, spiritual, political and military basis of the old order.

    At the beginning of the novel, we see the old Igbo society in its epic glory and grandeur. To be sure, there were internal murmurs of unease and approbation, but such dissenters and refuseniks, like Okonkwo’s father, Nnoka, were banished to the outer margins of society and eventually buried like paupers. Thus we see Okonkwo whose signal ascendancy was based on solid personal achievement. The hero is at one and on the same page with his society. He is the great historical personage who incarnates in his breasts the aspirations and core values of the society. Okonkwo is uber-man of Umuofia.

    But at the end of the novel, the hero is at stiff odds with his society. The falcon could no longer hear the falconer. Having returned from exile which itself was a symbolic trope for inevitable terminal banishment, Okonkwo could no longer understand the people he left behind.

    Mlungu, the white one, had arrived in his absence. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the Igbo world. It was an act of literary wizardry for Achebe to have zeroed in on Yeats memorable stanza as the organising principle of his novel. Yeats was also poetically engraving for posterity the dissolution of the old Irish order as it succumbed to the modernising terror of the English.

    It is a great and interesting historical irony that Achebe was able to capture this radical rupture of the old African order by colonialism, despite the fact that his Igbo people lacked the central political authority and centralised army with which to confront the colonial invaders in formal battle.

    The Benin empire, the Zulu empire, the military rumps of the old Oyo Empire, the caliphate army of Sokoto, all confronted the invading colonisers in pitched battles and epic bloodfest. But precisely because the Igbo people lacked this centralised resistance, Achebe was able to focus on the career and tragic downfall of an exceptional but solitary hero who then became a stirring universal symbol of African manliness and heroic resistance to evil. It was an epic achievement indeed. .

    Like Okonkwo, his greatest fictional creation, Chinua Achebe was also in the end dogged by a transcendental homelessness in which permanent exile became a home. The home of the homeless is homelessness. The alienation from an alien nation is so severe that Achebe could not come to terms with the new realities of contemporary Nigeria. Yet if there was another country, it was a mythical paradise in the imagination of the author.

    The comparison with Okonkwo is gripping and compelling. In the case of Okonkwo, it was the troubled transition from the old society to the new colonial order that proved fatal. The proud and narcissistic scion of old Umuofia society could not abide what he considered to be his people’s shabby accommodation with the new order and its debasing realities.

    In the case of Chinua Achebe, the transition from colonial to post-colonial order with its ructions and radical rupture of old certainties and verities and the ensuing collision of ethnic altars proved very traumatic indeed. The human sacrifice at the political shrine of the new nation has been prohibitive and on a Fordist scale of clinical and ruthless efficiency. Had the Igbo people been left to evolve into a nation of their own, the contradictions would have been less severe. But this same argument can be extended to each and every one of Nigeria’s major and minor nationalities.

    A situation in which the hegemonic ethnic groups of Nigeria have been forced to recreate the colonial chaos according to the dictates of their unique and resilient political imaginary was bound to prove even messier and more chaotic than the original colonial confusion. It is an equal opportunity terror machine and coups, counter-coups, civil wars, religious uprisings, economic insurgencies, and ethnic insurrections have been the result. When a master ironist like Achebe obsesses that his people have been hardly done by in what is essentially a kill and go colonial abattoir, then irony has deserted its own master.

    As we have said in an earlier tribute, the post-colonial condition is particularly hard and harsh on the great and gifted writers. It turns them into political hermits and mental recluses. In its worst manifestation, it turns them into psychological wreckages, leading to permanent exile or internal self-deportation without parole or the possibility of exit mercy visa. This is because as artists—and adult enfant terrible—- they are at the frontiers of the psychic unease and the great psycho-social dramas of their society. It is a situation that does not lend itself to equivocations or evasion of the truth as they see it. They do not come to praise Caesar but to bury him.

    But this will not take anything away from Achebe’s signal achievement as a game-changing novelist and master story teller. Things Fall Apart was, and remains, at the forefront and cutting edge of the decolonising project. To be sure, there were other great aspirants before Achebe. There was Casely-Hayford, the great nineteenth century Gold Coast writer, whose book, Ethiopia Unbound, was an early cry in the wilderness against the subjugation and colonisation of Africa. But it was a thinly veiled autobiographical polemic lacking craft and intrinsic literary merits.

    There was Thomas Mofolo, the great South African Sotho novelist, who was in every particular respect, Achebe’s forerunner and literary forebear. Mofolo’s four novels, particularly Chaka, a fictionalised biography of the great Zulu emperor, are a sublime and profoundly subversive critique of Boer imperialism that were quite sophisticated and enthralling for their time. This is not to discount the achievement of Camara Laye, the great Guinean novelist, whose lyrical rhapsodies about an idyllic African past remain classics of the genre. There was also D. O Fagunwa, the great Yoruba novelist, who should be justly celebrated as the father of African magical realism.

    All of these great men of letters must however pale in significance when compared with the momentous achievement of Chinua Achebe as a novelist, essayist and polemicist. Without any doubt, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel consciously and militantly conceived on the platform of cultural nationalism and woven from the intellectual fabric of mental decolonisation. It was a paen to freedom and liberation. This is why the saga of the man from Umuofia has continued to resonate with Black people and all those who are engaged in the project of emancipation. It gives artistic and intellectual voice to their political and cultural aspirations, and with clinical clarity too.

    It needs to be said that Achebe’s great novel was forged in artistic, political and ideological rebellion.. Politically and ideologically, it was a conscious and militantly radical rejection of the Conradian and Caryean depiction of the Black person as an irredeemable savage and primitive cannibal. Achebe’s thesis is simple but incontrovertible. Every human society has its own unique way of apprehending and coming to terms with the material and spiritual realities of its existence.

    Artistically, had Achebe listened to his teacher who famously dismissed his youthful effort as lacking in “form”, he might have been driven to produce some of the unreadable wonders of the language. In retrospect, it is clear that Achebe’s teacher was sold on the virtues of literary modernism with its stylistic razzmatazz, its high wire and sometimes haywire virtuosity. By sticking to his guns and to the canons of traditional realism, Chinua Achebe rescued the African novel and posterity from a potential literary disaster.

    There is always an element of militant self-belief that goes with all truly great writers. Achebe had this in fecund abundance. It was said that Cervantes, the Spaniard who is justly regarded as the first modern novelist, triumphed over his more technically gifted rivals simply because his staunch conservative nature prevented the outlandish experimentation which could have pushed the nascent genre in a perilous direction. So it is with Chinua Achebe.

    Perhaps the greatest irony of Achebe’s literary politics is the fact that while remaining militantly and consciously anti-imperialist in all its wiles and guiles, Achebe often came across as a mild-mannered and diffident British professor. There was always something of the quintessential English gentleman about the urbane, courteous and infinitely polite Achebe. He was a man of quiet, understated charms not given to exuberant one-upmanship.

    In the end, while Okonkwo, Achebe great fictional hero, fought with his cutlass and bare hands, his real life descendant fought with his pen. They were both proud rebels in the noblest sense of that word. Achebe fought a good fight and has gone home to rest. It is the novelist as an epic character in his own right. While all the indiscretions and undeniable bigotry would disappear with the passage of time, it is the great novels, particularly Things Fall Apart, that would remain as a cultural monument. This is Chinua Achebe’s portal to immortality.

     

    Culled from the current edition of Africa Today

  • This rot must stop

    Football is just a game. It entertains the fans. It also unites people. It belongs to them. They follow it passionately. It has also forced warring nations to sheathe their swords for it to be played. Need I mention the contrasting scenarios in Brazil at the 2013 Confederations Cup?

    Despite the protests from angry Brazilians over the state of their country’s economy, the Confederations Cup held. Football has global appeal. It ranks among the highest money spinners. It creates employment for the people.

    One is still pinching oneself to ask why any right thinking Nigerian will leak out unfounded information to necessitate the exit of the country’s flag-bearer at the CAF Confederations Cup competition, Enugu Rangers FC.

    One has heard of rivalry among club sides, which is permissible. But, providing facts to undo the other to the detriment of the nation is one offence that requires stiff sanctions for the saboteurs. We must denounce bitterness in our sports, which what this diabolic act translates to. I wonder if any country would do that. I ask: why are we so blessed?

    No matter how aggrieved any group may be, they ought to have known how to utilise all the channels of seeking redress than to wash our dirty linens in the public.

    Participating in continental competitions opens a new vista for the players, most who couldn’t make the national teams. This platform provides another exit route for the good ones, who later get picked for the country’s bigger soccer competitions. It is the denial of the motley group from seeking greener pastures elsewhere using Rangers’ Confederations Cup matches that should have pricked the conscience of these saboteurs before leaking out what appears to be the information.

    One doesn’t support fraudulent practices, provided they are proven. But with what the League Management Company (LMC) and the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) are brandishing as it concerns goalkeeper Daniels’ registration, it is only fair that Rangers are reinstated by CAF. Are both bodies telling the truth on this issue, especially with 3SC’s startling revelations?

    Interestingly, Shooting Stars Sports Club (3SC) officials argued that Daniels collected October 12 salaries from them.

    3SC’s spokesman revealed that their protest letter against Daniels, certainly in their away game against Rangers in Enugu was acknowledged by the Match Commissioner, Mr. E.E.E. Ebito, who included it (the protest letter) in his match report. A copy of 3SC protest, which was acknowledged by the Match Commissioner, is also attached for ease of reference, according to the club’s mouthpiece. So, where is the Rangers’ versus 3SC’s match report LMC and NFF? Is it true referee Ebito that the protest passed through you?

    They alleged that Rangers notified them of Daniels’ presence in their camp without negotiating for his transfers. They said that N3 million was the transfer fee discussed with Rangers, but the Enugu-based side’s management said they could only cough out N2.5million.

    What this means is that no deal was struck between 3SC and Rangers. How come Daniels played for Rangers in three Globacom Premier League matches? Who signed Daniels’ licence for Rangers without clearance from 3SC? In fact, one of the three matches was against 3SC? Will the LMC and NFF say that 3SC didn’t lodge a protest in the game against them? Haba! This case is looking like the one between Rangers and Warri Wolves involving Sunday Mba and Chibuzor Agbim. Clearly, it seems to me that the person who handled transfers for the Flying Antelopes does not know his job. When the dust on this issue settles, it is important that the NFF and the LMC review the whole gamut of transfers, beginning with the intra-club movements.

    Globally, intra club and inter-club transfers are revenue generators. But the scams associated with these two exercises are mind-bogging. Ordinarily, details of players’ move

  • Imperialism, immigration and UK visa bond

    Imperialism, immigration and UK visa bond

    The proposed decision of the British Government to introduce a UK visa bond of 3000 pounds for first time visitors to that country from six countries including Nigeria has understandably generated heated reactions. The Nigerian government has vehemently protested against the idea and threatened to retaliate. Many commentators have described the decision as discriminatory, unjust, racist, hostile and against the spirit of the commonwealth. However, others contend that there is absolutely nothing wrong in the British conservative government taking whatever steps it considers desirable to protect its perceived national interests. The Cameron government believes that citizens of the affected countries – Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – are most likely to violate that country’s immigration laws and compromise her security. Those who hold the latter view insist that Nigeria in particular, should get her act right, actualize her potentials, achieve rapid development and thus discourage her youths from seeking to flee the country to foreign havens at all costs.

    Of course, those who hold this view have a pertinent point. On a personal note, for instance, I have persistently and trenchantly refused for several years to acquire British citizenship despite my wife being a British citizen. I simply do not see how the average Briton will not rightly see me as a bloody parasite and second class citizen should I indulge in such an option. Yet many of Nigeria’s depraved and thieving elite after looting the country blind, deliberately travel abroad to deliver their babies so that such children can enjoy foreign citizenship! Talk of absolutely unpatriotic elite with no faith in the future of a country whose grave they are actively digging on a daily basis.

    For me, however, the proposed UK visa policy offers us an opportunity to re-examine the dependent role of Nigeria and Africa’s role in the global political economy and the way in which, at every point in time, her destiny has been determined by external interests to her continued detriment. Today, capitalism is in severe crisis and immigration has become a key issue in most western capitalist countries. The triumphalism attendant on the collapse of communism with Francis Fukuyama proclaiming the ‘end of history’ and capitalist democracy as the terminal point of human development, has largely evaporated. Global economic power is markedly shifting from the west to the east with the remarkable resurgence of China and other Asian countries, even as many western countries lie economically prostrate and millions of their citizens sink deeper into poverty.

    In their authoritative handbook and guide to the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, a group of radical scholars and activists including Susan George, Alex Callinicos and George Monbiot, point out ironically that at a certain stage in the development of industrial capitalism, the western countries caused the ‘forced migration’ of millions of people from the underdeveloped world through the human slave trade. As they put it, “The imperialists obtained labour by force, first through transporting between 10 and 20 million African slaves to work in the mines and plantations of the Americas, then through various forms of indentured labour in which over 30 million Indians and Chinese were more or less coerced to migrate. Africans and Indians were also forced, through tax demands and sometimes physically, to work for European colonisers”. Yet, these same countries, which had developed largely through the exploitative slave trade and colonialism that lasted over 400 years, are today “imposing ever harsher and more brutal restrictions against the movement of people (unless they are white or exceptionally rich). At the same time they are demanding policies which create unemployment and poverty which are at least partly responsible for the wars and political repression from which people flee”.

    In his immortal ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, Walter Rodney has demonstrated irrefutably the link between western imperialism and underdevelopment in Africa. Of course, some contend that several decades after the termination of colonial rule, Africa has no excuse for remaining mired in poverty and underdevelopment. This is a short sighted and simplistic view. Africa is the most brutalized, raped, oppressed and dehumanized continent in human history. The scars of the experience continue to haunt the continent. As Claude Ake so clearly put it “The circumstances of our history have conspired to produce an elite which cannot function because it has no sense of identity or integrity and no confidence, does not know where it is coming from or where it is going. This has to do with Africa’s long decline over the centuries and our domination by outsiders”. Nowhere best illustrates Ake’s thesis than the tragic experience of the Congo, one of the most resource-endowed regions of the world that is today a hotbed of mindless violence, brutality, unimaginable suffering and poverty. The current fate of the Congo can only be understood within the context of the brutal and savage plundering of the region by King Leopold II of Belgium in the colonial era.

    The same western countries that forcibly exported millions of souls from Africa over four centuries and stalled the continent’s progress are today trying all means to stop immigration of people fleeing the hell that is a consequence of their historical legacy on the continent. Worse still, even after the formal end of colonialism, they are still dictating the continent’s economic destiny, insisting on the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies – free trade, unbridled liberalization and deregulation of the economy, privatization, removal of subsidies, currency devaluation etc – that worsen poverty and deepen underdevelopment. These are the same countries that subsidise and protect key sectors of their own economies.

    In his classic, “Africa In The World of the 20th Century”, the late Professor Bade Onimode argues: “Why, this being the case, should the governments of developing countries not be allowed to exercise any controls on the entry of manufactured goods, capital, investment and technology into their countries, while the countries of the North stoutly shut out migrant workers (labour) from the developing countries, including Eastern Europeans, who want to enter their countries? Why should free trade, liberalization and globalization be good for manufactured products, capital and technology (intellectual property rights) and be bad for labour? Is this not simply because of the inequality between the powerful owners of commodities, capital and technology on the one hand, and the weak atomized owners of labour-power, on the other?”

    The pertinence of these questions posed over a decade ago has been highlighted by the UK visa bond controversy. It is not enough for the Nigerian government simply to declare its intention to retaliate against the proposed UK visa policy. The challenge is more fundamental than that. We need a government in Nigeria that will give Africa the intellectual and political leadership that will help liberate the continent from the grip of neo-liberalism and come up with policies that can effectively address the technological dependency that lies fundamentally at the root of our underdevelopment. The current leadership across Africa has proven pathetically incapable of rising to the challenge of containing rampaging neo-liberalism and devising original, alternative ideas for transforming the continent. Thus, the empty talk of an African Renaissance championed by ex-Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Thambo Mbeki of South Africa a few years ago has expectedly fizzled out into nothingness. It is tragic that dyed in the wool World Bank and IMF apologists have been in charge of Nigeria’s economic policies for the last 13 years. We can thus understand the continuing remarkable attainment of unprecedented economic growth without development, which enables Nigeria to get richer while the majority of Nigerians get poorer.

  • Sovereign rascality and  global democracies

    When  nations and world leaders   try to  hijack presidential planes or kidnap themselves and go on to deny such actions,  that is sovereign  rascality,  in my lexicon. When a president of a sovereign nation tells the world that a well known fugitive in the transit  lounge of an airport in his nation is not in that nation but on the move,  that again is diplomatic  mischief, which is another kind of sovereign rascality. Also when a nation  harboring a wanted fugitive in its   embassy  in the capital of another nation now turned round to accuse that host nation of bugging its embassy,  then that is carrying even sovereign rascality to the point of absurdity.

    This then is the kernel   of our discussion today as events unfold in Egypt where the Army is playing a love game with the Egyptian masses while suppressing their democracy,  albeit to their tumultuous cheers and approbation. More  bizarrely   though, the US, the catalyst of the whole scenario now has the temerity to warn the   Egyptian Army to return Egypt  to democracy as if that is the duty of the army which said it ousted former President   Mohammed  Morsi because he did not  ‘achieve the goal  of the people’  in Egypt,  as  if that Army   also  is the best or most suitable  judge of that too. Which means that in Egypt for now,  the Army  is the state,  or guardian  of the state, as long as the promise of election is in the air,  which reeks for now of the impending doom  and abortion of democracy in Egypt.

       Similarly   the   scenario in  Senegal where former President Hissen Habre of Chad from 1982  to 1990  is to face a special international court in that nation for crimes against humanity in his time as president , grips our attention in terms of  and  its deterrence,  even as we examine the problem of sovereign rascality amongst global democracies.

    Again,  I repeat  that  when nation states and their leaders say funny things they don’t mean, or say bluntly things they are  not expected to say ,  like  ordinary citizens of their nations, but this time  on the world stage  and in the comity of nations, then  they are indulging in sovereign rascality and making a mockery  of diplomacy which is the machinery for the conduct and process of international  relations in the comity of nations. Now let us look at the   specific  scenarios I have painted here today.

    We  start with Bolivia whose President Evo  Morale’s presidential plane was,  as it were,  ‘brought down to ground ‘in Vienna,  in Europe  for 11 hours  and searched purportedly for  carrying or hiding Edward Snowden the US citizen fugitive on the run from American justice. Morales has accused France, Spain and Portugal for being involved in scuttling his flight which was said to be  coming from a conference in Russia. Since Snowden was not seen on the plane, Morales was allowed to continue his journey but he has accused EU nations of ‘kidnapping him ‘for the time he spent at Vienna airport and France through its President Francois  Hollande has apologized, blaming the whole incident on poor communication. But the French embassy in La Paz, capital of Bolivia is already under siege and a conference of all Latin American states was called to address the insult to the Bolivian leader which the presidents of Brazil and Argentina have denounced as insult to all Latin American nations.

    So, really, what is the import  of this otherwise comical incident of people in high places and at the high altitudes of presidential jets? At  best  it is a comedy  of errors in that Snowden was not on the flight and the Bolivian president looked anything but presidential  in the shirt sleeves he wore in Vienna on the internet, raising rather pertinent burning  questions. Could the EU nations involved have stopped him on a private trip to embarrass him using the fugitive issue as excuse? If so must the whole of S. America go on umbrage on this? I  smell a rat in this fugitive on the run saga of accusations and recriminations and the mockery of location and transit status also fuelled by Vladmir Putin, Russia’s president who has not uttered a word on the Bolivia’s president trip to a conference in Russia prior to the grounding of Morale’s  plane or thereafter.

    Similarly the situation in the Ecuadorian embassy where  Wiki Leak fugitive Assange is hiding and the accusation that the embassy is being bugged beats the imagination. The  Ecuadorian authorities must be the original ostrich with its head buried in the sand. What do they expect of the British? Assange while holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London working and living in a room there, is on the internet coordinating the international effort to find sanctuary for Snowden, still in ‘nowhere  in Russia’  but a transit lounge, yet under the protection of Russia’s strongman Vladmir Putin. The  fact that the Ecuador Foreign Minister made the bugging charge in Ecuador and not in London showed how  unrealistic Ecuador  has been in the way and manner it is viewing the humiliation British diplomacy is going through over Assange’s stay in the Ecuador embassy while the British wait for him to step out   on a London street  and arrest him. That  wait in London  alone  must be the most agonizing and expensive wait for British foreign policy ever in modern times and Ecuador must just be careful.

    Going back to Egypt, a reversal of role especially for the army is palpable. The army is playing politics with the Egyptian people. It has supported their popular demand for the removal of an elected president and his party platform – the Muslim Brotherhood.  But the army and the Brotherhood are old acquaintances and sworn enemies. On getting Morsi elected as president the Brotherhood thought its time had come to get even with the army which suppressed it successfully under Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Housni Mubarak, Egypt’s three despots after the overthrow  of the Pharaoh in 1952. But the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi miscalculated in trying to rush in Islamic Law  and the army is the beneficiary of that error. The army is wooing the Egyptian masses with the air force drawing the sign of love in the air sky and soldiers observing their prayers even as they confront demonstrators to show that the army is as Islamic as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The new Interim President sworn in has promised a constitution that will stop Egypt from having tyrants and the Egyptian Army  is bidding its time. The fact that imprisoned Housni Mubarak was even asked to call on Morsi to step down is a pointer of sorts. Like the patient vulture,  the Egyptian army  is waiting to swoop  on the carcass  of the Egyptian populist democracy which  for now does not really know what it wants .Which really is  a pity.

    Hissen  Habre’s arraignment finally in Senegal  is good for the future of good political  administration in   Africa  generally. This is because I have a lot of respect for the new administration in that nation. The standard of democracy is high in Senegal and that was why the US president just visited the place. Also Obama  could not have influenced Senegal’s decision to try Habre who butchered  his people while in power as  the US  did  not subscribe to the EU propelled international Criminal Court of Justice   as  it has got a treaty not to bring US citizens  to the ICC. But Senegal has shown respect for African dignity in arraigning the trial in its capital Dakar rather than the Hague where Charles Taylor   of Liberia was taken. That is a clear message to African leaders who have no respect for the rule of law that although the mills of justice may grind slowly they grind exceedingly fine   and the Court  in Dakar may well  be an open house at the end of the day for all African leaders who rule and misuse power with impunity like Hissen Habre will soon find out as  he faces his own inevitable nemesis.

  • Your verdict on UK PM, gays and June 12

    Your verdict on UK PM, gays and June 12

    British Prime Minister David Cameron has cultivated a curious taste for picking on Nigeria. I pointed this out in my effort in this space last week. In that article entitled ‘Again, Cameron hits Nigeria, I offered my perspective on the £3000 (N750,000) which intending Nigerian travellers to the United Kingdom were required to deposit with the UK authorities before being allowed in.

    I remain as disturbed by that development as other Nigerians, but I argued in that article that the only reason Nigerians are harassed, punished and humiliated like that is simply because the UK sees Nigerians essentially as irritating pests from whom British people get little or nothing.

    I also culled a section of an earlier piece published in November 2011 dwelling on Cameron’s order that Nigeria must embrace gays or lose British aid.

    Readers were touched off by Mr Cameron’s unflattering disposition to Nigerians. They sent me their verdict on the 47-year-old British leader.

    Readers also reacted to another article published before the visa bond saga entitled “Cosmetics of June 12”.

    I print some of those reactions herewith:

    Again, Cameron hits Nigeria (June 29)

    •What don’t the British and Americans understand about the minority having their say and the majority their way? Who told them even the majority of Nigerian homosexuals want to be rescued, including the homosexuals in the National Assembly who voted for their own kind? Most Nigerian homosexuals know that what they do is immoral and despicable and therefore never openly flaunt it. I believe the few who openly admit it may not even be homosexuals but may be seeking asylum abroad because we will continue to speak against them until they change. I am proud that even though we are hypocritical in many areas and even though the whole world condones homosexuality, Nigerians will not disappoint God on this one!

    2347042325266

    •I have read your article in The Nation of June 29. If we had more people as bold as you, David Cameron and his “Great Britain”would  know that the land of Africa still has lions like Jomo Kenyatta and Kenneth Kaunda left on it. Do not give up because truth, bitter though, is satisfying.

    Terfa Ayua, BSU, Makurdi

    2347058385332

    •I read your article of Saturday, June 29 and I am so much impressed. It proved to me clearly that you are a good citizen of Nigeria and Africa as a whole. What would it benefit to embrace sodomy, lesbianism, gays? But because those white men, they don’t practise any religion and this gives them the privilege to go above the law as provided by God because they don’t understand who is God. Although, I am a Muslim and Islam does not give room or tolerate sodomy, gay, lesbianism and a host of others.

    Sir, my question to you is what sort of aid did British PM David Cameron want to offer the Adrican country that engages in gay relationship? Because he said it clearly that are not gay friendly would not gain any assistance from his country.

    Ahmadu, Kwara State

    2348169444651

    •Thank you for giving it back to Cameron in that piece. Gay marriage is a demonic invention thrown up from the pit of hell. Man was made in the image of God, not animals. Of course, if Cameron wants to devalue himself and his people to animal status he should be free to do so and shouldn’t extend such indecent and unholy arrangement to Nigeria. Before Lugard was born God had preconceived the historical reality called Nigeria, and never had in Britain in mind for our survival. We can jolly well move on without them. Perhaps to Cameron God has insulted him by elevating a small boy  like him to such Olympian height as the PM of his country. He now would want to throw it back to God with the introduction of gay marriage not only in his country but across nations. That is is own gratitude to his creator. And the same God who has the ultimate power to defend His cause will certainly reply him and associates in due course.

    Emmanuel Egwu

    2348037921541

    Cosmetics of June 12 (June 15)

    •Thank you, my brother. The third to the last paragraph of your write-up captured it all. Are the progressives not in the National Assembly. Did they push for anything symbolic in respect of the late MKO and to the logical end. We don belly-full and bother less about whoever hunger is walloping. That is Nigeria for you. May MKO’s soul continue to rest in peace. Ameen.

    Lanre Oseni

    2348023023745

    •Go and sue IBB, former military president about June 12 at ICC instead of wasting your time and money in Iocal media publication. A team of lawyers (SANs) are on standby to defend the former military president in any court or panel. The federal government cannot declare public holiday in respect of June 12. Also, Babagana Kingibe was a victim of June 12 but as a true Muslim and democrat he left everything in the hands of Allah to judge.

    2348108049113

    •You failed to say even ONE good thing that the nation benefits from either the NSGF or the NGF. To me your write-up is irrelevant.

    2348037064761

  • If President Jonathan were my father…

    If President Jonathan were my father…

    I have heard and read about people describ

    ing their parents as strict disciplinarians.

    But I often wonder if the disciplinary instincts of those parents were anywhere near my father’s. As a big time farmer and traditional ruler of my town for 42 years before he passed on three years ago, he could afford us some little luxuries, but he made sure that we got only things that were extremely necessary. Unlike many other children in the community, we hardly had time for leisure. We were woken up at 5 am for the morning devotion, after which we would perform some household chores or even visit the nearby farm before heading for school.

    And in spite of all that we had to do before going to school, we were in serious trouble if my father got a report that we got to school late. I remember a particular day we had to go to the farm after the early morning devotion. The farm in question was more than three kilometres away from home. By the time we returned to prepare for school, we were already late. As we made to depart for school, my father called the eldest of us and gave him a letter he addressed to the headmaster. Of course, we did not know the contents of the letter, but we were happy that he must have written to tell the headmaster that we were late because we had to visit the farm before going to school.

    Armed with the letter, we walked leisurely to school, believing that we were armed with a defence. But we had barely settled down in our various classrooms when the headmaster sent for us. On getting to his office, he read out the contents of the letter sent by our father and we were alarmed. He told the headmaster that we must be flogged because there was no reason for us to get to school late. While he admitted that we had to run an errand for him before coming, we ought not to have got to school late if we had not wasted time on the way. My father was highly respected by every teacher in the entire region because he had functioned as a headmaster and manager of primary schools in the district before he became a monarch. On account of the letter, we were so flogged that some of us had to be treated for minor injuries.

    But there was one among my elder brothers who suffered the most from my father’s intolerance for indolence. My father’s grouse with the elder brother in question was not just that he always got the last position in his class, but that he was not making enough effort to improve on his performance. At the end of each term, he was either scolded or flogged for performing poorly. Flogged continually by dad and derided by the rest of us, he decided to do something about the ugly trend. At the end of a particular term, he came 30th in a class of 30 pupils. He fetched a razor blade and scratched off the ‘0’ in 30th, but forgot to change the ‘th’ to ‘rd’, such that his position read 3th instead of 30th or 3rd.

    By the time he got home and presented his report card, the evidence that he had tampered with his position was so overwhelming that even a blind illiterate would notice. My father was too smart to know that there is no such thing as 3th position. Besides, the spot from which he scratched off the ‘0’ was not only rough, it also left a space that any blind man would notice. His aggregate score was simply too low to merit the third position. The remarks by the class teacher and the headmaster also did not help matters, as both of them described his performance as woeful. Convinced that my brother had compounded failure with forgery, my father could not resist the urge to flog him until he gasped for breath.

    I have not taken time to seek my brother’s opinion of President Goodluck Jonathan, but I am almost certain that he would wish the President were his father in those heady days. Were that the case, he would not have needed to go through the hassle of altering his position in such an untidy manner. Like Governor Jonah Jang did after losing the chairmanship election of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum to Governor Rotimi Amaechi, my brother would simply have gone home and claim that he came first from behind, and the President would have celebrated him the same way he is celebrating the man that claimed victory with 16 votes in an election his opponent scored 19!

    Indeed, given the way he has handled many critical national issues as the President, I am convinced that my siblings and I would have escaped many of the strokes we received as children, if President Jonathan were our father. A man who would indulge former Bayelsa State Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha with presidential pardon after he was tried and convicted for looting the state’s treasury, jumping bail in the UK and subjecting the entire nation to international disgrace will certainly bat no eyelid to overlook many of the offences for which our buttocks were whacked. If on the other hand my father were the one in Jonathan’s shoes, many of the characters who are flaunting power and parading themselves as the President’s men today would be rotting away in jail.

  • Niggers with attitude (4)

    (Portrait of the Nigerian as a ‘black’ ant) 

    We live to a devastating stereotype. Like fattened ducks, we waddle against the walls of institutionalized pigeonholes as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s jackknife. But we are no ducks neither are we cattle of any kind. We are humans, learning to live as livestock, because we think it’s shrewd and fashionable to do so.

    Freedom has a thousand charms to show, that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper and quite truthfully too. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us, in our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety. It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies. It’s what separates our foibles from what we term fate. And what symbolizes our mental inferiorities and political expediencies.

    But necessity, like William Pitt the Younger, would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.

    A 27-minute video among other things, distinguishes a select few of Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen from the gangs of glorified eejits – if I may insult poor eejits by comparing them to the country’s ruling class – that currently occupy the country’s corridors of power. The video is of the July 1961 visit of Nigeria’s first Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to the United States of America (USA).

    Great thanks to Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian scholar resident in the USA; after he stumbled on the video on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, he promptly shared it with friends on Facebook. The video is intense with charm and instructive with lessons in manhood, desirable pride, poise and refinement epitomized by the league of extraordinary statesmen that served Nigeria at independence.

    Between July 25 and 28, Kperogi, enthused and I confirmed in the video, the late Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a modest entourage of about 10 key government officials visited the United States on the invitation of the late President John F. Kennedy during which Tafawa Balewa visited major historical landmarks in representative parts of the United States and addressed a special joint session of the United States Congress that was convened in his honor.

    Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.” According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.

    Watching the video was as enchanting as it was delightful; Balewa’s address to the joint session was persistently “punctuated” by thunderous, standing ovation. In all the cities he and his entourage visited, Americans came out to wave at them hospitably, and U.S. government officials bowed very respectfully when they shook hands with the Nigerian Prime Minister. Thus was the depth of respect the pioneer Nigerian leader and nationalist inspired in 1960s America.

    Men like Balewa and his contemporaries at the period in the persons of the late Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe to mention a few, personified the infectious grandeur, unimpeachable character, progressiveness, patriotism, depth and self-assurance that remains the prime requirements of statesmanship that Nigeria and the African continent deserves. These men, despite their shortcomings, were no Nigerian niggers. The same can hardly be said of incumbent Nigerian leadership and citizenry.

    The Nigerian leadership today could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. The same may be said of the Nigerian citizenry. Our lust for unearned riches, acclaim and the west’s approval illustrates the shallowness and weakness of the Nigerian adult’s ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and retrograde. It is what makes Nigerian leaders pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury to embark on idiotic trips abroad to learn western-european governance styles to be ineffectually applied back home. It is what makes Nigerian leaders throw their doors open to every visiting foreign cub reporter even as they deny seasoned journalists back home, similar opportunities. During such interviews, such characters persistently expose themselves to ridicule, presenting themselves as inveterate idiots by their comportment and utterances which are tailored to glorify the disturbing plots and agenda of the foreign newshounds.

    The citizenry is guilty of the same inanity as indicated by the widely broadcast documentaries on Niger Delta militancy, the insidiously “professional” and manipulative “This is Lagos” and “Law and Disorder in Lagos” documentaries on Lagos which glorifies the city’s shanty and street urchin (area boys) culture and malaise. Such media fare reveals contemptible plots to fulfill derogatory news agendas to the delight and pitiful acquiescence of the news subjects.

    I am yet to see a Nigerian journalist travel to the United Kingdom or the US for instance, to enjoy similar courtesies and stupidity from the countries’ leadership and citizenry. It’s even more worrisome to note that the incumbent Nigerian leadership has never enjoyed and will never enjoy the kind of respect accorded the late Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo and their ilk at independence. It is impossible for the average Nigerian to enjoy such courtesies and honor given the inexplicable greed, complacence, degeneracy, shallowness of thought and character characteristic of majority of the Nigerian people.

    The kind of inferiority complex projected by the ruling class and passed down to generations of Nigerian youth affirms the western belief that we are not as mentally proficient as they are. Consequently, they see us as irredeemably ignorant, inept, corrupt and susceptible to inexplicable violence and inferiority complex. Unfortunately, the average Nigerian’s sociability and prodigal nature manifests to further serve as evidence of a collective idiocy and inferiority complex of a crude race that recognizes and accepts its intolerable limitations.

    That we are very accommodating and hospitable like Akin Akindele rightly noted shouldn’t make us “bend over backwards to impress any white or yellow man more than we would any other ordinary person.” But the import of such admonition is lost on us; mediocre and highly incompetent foreigners come to Nigeria and are immediately regarded as ‘expatriates.’ Yet many brainy and exceedingly talented Nigerians are treated with contempt and suspicion at home and abroad. Abroad, they are despised for being Nigerians based on bigoted generalizations about the average Nigerian’s fraudulence and deadliness. At home they are despised for being different and capable of evolving the process that would lead to that progressive and prosperous socio-economic system that we seek.

    If we are to be judged by indigenous mores of morality or what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, we shan’t fare excellently well, not by a smidgen. We have fared diffidently for too long; that is why local and international idiots as fragile as clay toys have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch. To the rest of the world, we are just a bunch of contemptible niggers; still.

    • To be continued…