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Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Dame Patience: The guessing game continues

The First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, has finally returned to Nigeria after a 54-day therapeutic trip to Germany. Her flight to Germany in late August, if that was where she went, was a closely guarded secret, with some of her aides eventually coaxed into suggesting that she went on vacation, and would return when she was fully rested. Like her abrupt departure, her stay abroad triggered speculations about the reason for the trip and the destination. Did she have food poisoning, appendicitis, or cosmetic surgery? No one was sure, no one is sure still, but all local newspapers offered diverse perspectives, and her husband and presidential aides lent no helping hand in shedding light on what newspapers came to dub the Dame Patience affair. It must be a reflection of the interesting standards of the Nigerian media that no medium had a realistic clue why she travelled, nor apparently where she went. Indeed, the way she spoke at the airport on her return mid last week, it would not be surprising if media establishments thought she never travelled at all.

Whether it is acknowledged or not, the Jonathan presidency has managed the Dame Patience story much more efficiently than the immediate past First Family managed theirs. Nigerians knew the hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Germany where the late President Umaru Yar’Adua received medical attention, and what ailed him. Moreover, they also knew the story became a tragicomedy. But in the case of Dame Patience, no one knows where she went or how to categorise her trip. According to her, she was not at any hospital we knew, let alone the hospital where Yar’Adua was attended to, the Horst Schmidt Klinic in Wiesbaden, Germany. So where did she go? Mum was the word. Secondly, she said she did not have any surgery, not to talk of tummy tuck, and had no terminal illness as her detractors speculated or hoped. So what ailed her? Again, mum was the word, except to add that her husband adored her shape. Magnificent. After all, it is pointless asking her husband what he thinks of her shape, or imagining what men think of the shapes and sizes of their women.

It was clear, as Dame Patience put it, that she experienced trying times, but due to God’s mercies could now have a second chance in life. So, she did not dispute the fact that she had certain unnamed difficulties, and except she spoke bad English, we got the impression those difficulties nearly took her life and attempted to destroy her first chance in life. Though she did not take Nigerians into confidence, and had spoken cynically and derisively about a few who wished her what God did not plan for her life, she gloated that Nigerians actually prayed for her in her time of trouble, and God answered the prayers. This column joins the prayer warriors to wish her well.

Of all the questions Nigerians were dying – oh, that morbid word again – to receive answers to, Dame Patience answered none. It seems even more likely that now and in the foreseeable future, with a considerably mute presidency and cheerfully scornful aides, there will be no answer provided to any question about the First Lady’s trip and her supposed illness. The best the presidency wanted to give anyone during her absence was the few minutes video clip broadcast by the government television station NTA showing a vibrant Dame Patience exulting about taking photographs with her visiting husband and announcing her eagerness to return home. And the best we will ever receive now that she has returned is her airport rebuke and sermon. There will be nothing else, not even if there should be a reoccurrence of the unknown trial she obliquely referred to, God forbid.

The airport sermon itself was nothing transcendental, and nothing like the exegeses we are used to when we read Martin Luther or John Calvin. But it was at least simple and touching, if a little exaggerated and affected, and perhaps even engaging and disarming. Hear her in her inimitably alluring grammar: “Thank God Almighty for bringing me back safely to Nigeria. Wherever there are good people, there are also bad ones. There are few Nigerians that were saying whatever they liked; not what God planned because God has a plan for all of us. And God has said it all that where two or three are gathered in His name that He will be with them. Nigerians gathered and prayed for me and God listened and heard their prayers, so I thank God for that. At the same time, I will use this opportunity to tell those few ones that are saying that anybody that goes to the Villa or Aso Rock will die. They mentioned Abacha; they mentioned Stella Obasanjo; they mentioned Yar’Adua and other people. But why did those people not mention those who went there with their families and succeeded and they still came out alive? We should remember that Aso Rock is the seat of power and that is where God has ordained for us Nigerians that our leaders should rule from and to rule us right. God is wonderful and His infinite mercy endures.” Clearly she has read her Bible, and she studiously quoted the right passages. But until she alluded to those who wished her dead, few Nigerians knew such talk was abuzz on the Internet, nor that during her therapy she was unnerved by the morbid online chitchats.

If the media would welcome Palladium’s counsel, instead of asking questions to which answers may never come, they should rather come down hard on the governors, ministers, wives of governors and other highly placed government and party officials who indulged their sycophantic bent by going to the airport to receive the First Lady. That was not a show of love. It was typical, insufferable Nigerian flattery. If the governors and ministers were so grovelingly idle, perhaps we should appeal to the officious and obtruding National Assembly to invite them to the legislative chambers – invitations that apparently irritate the likes of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi of the Central Bank – to ruffle their flimsy feathers.

According to some newspaper reports, at the airport to receive the returning and obviously refreshed First Lady were Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State, the increasingly technocratic and dashing Petroleum minister Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, the soft-spoken Environment minister Hadiza Mailafia, Education minister Ruqayyatu Rufai, Labour minister Emeka Nwogu, many ministers of state and wives of some governors – all fawning, wife of the Senate president, and many other government officials. Their excuse must never again be that invitations from the National Assembly weary them; for if they could shelve their work to receive the First Lady at the airport, they must be willing to go to the ends of the earth to honour National Assembly invitations, no matter how distracting or cumbersome. Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. It must, however, be deeply ironical and quintessentially Nigerian that Governor Dickson was also at the airport to receive one of his permanent secretaries. Is order of precedence no longer valid in Nigeria, that the senior finds it imperturbable to fawn at the feet of his subordinate in government?

As the second round of guessing game begins, this column welcomes Dame Patience back home to enjoy the second chance she says life is offering her. And by the way, she kisses far better and far more natural than her husband who, in the photographs published on the front pages of Thursday newspapers, made what should be an adorable spousal exercise look like, well, an ordeal. In her broad smiles there was not a hint of distress; but in her sermon there was a touch of the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo Christian conversion – the use and application of elementary theology to underscore the cumulative rejection of one’s detractors. As Dame Patience prepares to forgive her rumour mongering enemies, let her also be prepared to read more online speculations about her health and the recent German trip. She has put the testy trip behind her; but she will not be able to ignore the avalanche of speculations likely to lather her every cough, every wince and every sneeze.

October 21, 2012
Achebe: Some things are better left unsaid – A rejoinder

Any deep thinking person who had followed up on the reactions of some Nigerians to Chinua Achebe’s latest book, There was a Country, would easily come to a conclusion that ethnic bigotry has remained the fundamental problem this country is yet to sincerely engage. The unintellectual and jingoistic dismissal of Achebe’s book by many a Yoruba Nigerian was as disappointing as it was laughably sad. Prominent among these sentimentalist criticisms of Achebe’s book was the one written by Mr. Idowu Akinlotan.

Mr Akinlotan’s grouse with Achebe’s book is what he calls the “author’s unrepentant and undisguised partisanship.” He writes thus: “After reading the Guardian (London) excerpt of the book, I concluded this was a book he [Achebe] should not have written, for sometimes, the merit of a book is compromised by just one page, one paragraph, even one sentence. …Achebe should have left unsaid many of the things he wrote in the book. His reputation as a world-renowned writer was already secure, having written one of the 50 most influential books of all time. Why did he feel impelled to write this [fated] book, one which doubtless reinforces the suspicion many hold about his private and public animosities?”

Interestingly, Mr Akinlotan had earlier informed the reader of his column that he had not read the book and would refrain from doing a review of the book. What do we call what he has written above: a pre-review, the type that comes with presumptions, assumptions and illogical judgements perhaps? The sharp-witted columnist was quick to “conclude” that Achebe’s memoir will be of little “value” and perhaps should be disregarded. Achebe’s only crime in the excerpt is that he dared accuse Chief Obafemi Awolowo of genocidal intents against the Igbo through his blockade policies that led to the deaths of many Igbo civilians during the Civil War. Most Yoruba in Nigeria are often quick to throw reason and caution into the air to defend the person and deeds of Awolowo.

Mr. Akinlotan should have waited to read the book before jabbering. In this same book which Awolowo only got about two paragraphs of deserved criticisms that seem to have upset some Yoruba to frenzy, the likes of Ojukwu and Gowon have pages of criticisms on the egotistical roles they played during the Nigerian Civil War. But the typical “unreading” Nigerian who becomes an authority on hearsay would like Palladium shout abuses only to realise they have misjudged their target.

Ethnicity blinds us! I felt my sensibilities assaulted when I read Mr. Akinlotan’s rationalisations of war crimes. All wars have moral question marks on them and I am yet to see a just war. But in his defence of Awolowo, Mr. Akinlotan struggles in vain to rationalise the moral questions he himself found as problems in the excerpt from Achebe’s book. For one, he sees nothing wrong in having millions of Igbo civilians killed in a war the Federal forces claimed was a “police action” intended to keep the country together. Starvation for the columnist suddenly becomes a lofty weapon of war without any “diabolical” intent. Mr. Akinlotan sees nothing morally wicked in a rehabilitation and reconciliation process that saw the Federal Government give £20 to Igbos wanting to convert their Biafran currency back into the Nigerian pounds irrespective of whatever amount of money they had deposited into the banks. Nor did Akinlotan say anything about the policy of indigenisation which at the instigation of Chief Awolowo the Federal Government introduced after the war to further deplete the economic base of the Igbo who mostly relied on the commerce of imported second-hand wares to survive. For the columnist, to maintain the saintly and heroic qualities most Yoruba have constructed and attributed to Awolowo, the aggrieved Igbo and other minority groups in Nigeria must be hushed to silence. Awolowo’s villainous roles during the war, for him, are at best mere “guesswork” and cannot be validated by any form of historical reflection. Suddenly, Ojukwu and Azikiwe have become canonised for their villainies too, all to ensure that Awo’s false reputations are not stained. Not until we come together as a people to acknowledge the heroic as well as villainous deeds of our so-called past heroes, not until we come to terms with the fact that we are not happy with one another, that we are living a lie, we will remain in the doldrums.

For a columnist who is known for his deft analyses of socio-political and historical happenings in Nigeria and beyond to lose his sense of moderation and restraint in discrediting a book he knows nothing about simply because few lines supposedly put Awo (his tribal hero) in a bad light means that ethnicity should be the first of the problems we must engage should we want to be a country. For Akinlotan, the few lines Achebe penned, justified and historically valid indictments on Awolowo’s roles during the war, necessarily mar his book. And since, for him, Achebe lacks the intellectual acumen to interpret human motives and actions, not minding the fact that he (Achebe) has written one of the “50 most influential books of all times,” we should dismiss the old writer as “paranoid”. But let’s humour Mr. Akinlotan a bit since he is a master of human motives: How does one explain that a federal troop that mostly consisted of Northerners, who had earlier carried out a genocidal butchery of the Igbo, would now engage the Igbo in a brotherly and humane war? Or that the great Awolowo whose undisguised ethnic politics and sentiments would be so humane in prosecuting a war against a people whose political representatives proved to stand between him and his ambitions of ruling the country? Why is it so difficult for many Yoruba to accept faults in Awo? Does Palladium expect Achebe to praise Awo for initiating a harsh policy that led to the deaths of his tribesmen?

If after 40 years Achebe still manifests “a disturbing streak of extreme traumatisation” as Mr. Akinlotan would have us believe, it only means that the scars of the war are anything but healed. It means that many more Achebes and other vicarious victims of the war are still pining in the injustices done to them by their fellow compatriots. It means that we are yet to become a country. Palladium believes Achebe has written the book for fame. He writes: “[Achebe’s] reputation as a world-renowned writer was already secure, having written one of the 50 most influential books of all time. Why did he feel impelled to write this [fated] book, one which doubtless reinforces the suspicion many hold about his private and public animosities?” It is only people of little minds and meagre ambitions that will think that a man in the twilight of his life, a man who has won all the fames deserving of his name, would release a book at 81 for fame and reputation. Achebe must remain silent in the face of historical injustice simply because he wants to keep his reputation intact. If Achebe had only blamed Ojukwu or Gowon, the Yoruba critics may not have been enraged this much. But now, his genius is challenged for daring to accuse Awo of genocide.

Mr. Akinlotan must understand that Achebe was only trying to call the attention of the country to the massive injustice it has done to some of its citizens. It is a cautionary book which in my own opinion seeks to draw our attention to the fact that a man who chooses to forget where the rain has begun to beat him will never know when and where it stops. Why do we shy away from our history and yet hope to progress? For Palladium to dismiss Achebe’s call for the Civil War to be included in the teaching curriculum of schools in Nigeria is sad. For us to grow as a nation, we have to be more cautious and tolerant of others’ feelings and opinions. We have to be fair and courageous enough to see faults and strengths alike in the people we uphold as heroes and villains. Nothing should be “left unsaid” if truly we desire reconciliation and progress.

• Anyaduba is a graduate student of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

October 14, 2012
Better still leave many things unsaid

I do not agree with most of the things Mr Arthur Anyaduba said or implied in his rejoinder to last week’s Palladium, and particularly the ferocity and emotionality of his arguments; but he couched his unpersuasive intervention in brilliant prose deserving publication. I also recognise that the Achebe book has evoked critical and even bitter reviews, excerpt of which book I took up here last week. It would, therefore, be unfair if I debarred others from having their say. I think it is proper to discharge my obligation to my readers by publishing the rejoinder above.

Anyaduba is free to interpret my “pre-review” as he deems sensible, but he exaggeratedly rebutted positions I did not take and inferences I did not make. He thought me a reader of motives, and he used that as licence to ascribe motives to things I did not, and probably will never, say. Mind reading, I am sure he knows, is a perilous exercise the best of us sometimes miscarry very badly. I am not sure by describing Achebe as traumatised by the war I said anything extraordinarily unobvious. Importantly, Anyaduba felt I was also an ethnic jingoist by appearing to defend Awolowo, a problem he thought afflicted many in the Southwest, but which the nation must honestly grapple with for progress and reconciliation to occur. He said so many other things that were clearly either wrongly inferred from my essay or wrongly attributed. I regret I do not have the space to go into all these.

Perhaps we should first review the book before consenting to a meaningful exchange on what Achebe said, thought or implied. But I thought I made it clear Achebe could not mean the book to be taken as a historical work in the sense of historiography. When the book is finally reviewed, that unsettling objective should come out in bold relief, just as it should also be indisputable that it is unlikely to fall below the literary standards we are used to. If at all I betrayed ethnic jingoism, as Anyaduba claimed, I think he did much worse. But I believe it is always helpful to first focus on the integrity, or lack of it, of a writer’s logic than to fish for his backgrounds, be it religious, cultural or ideological. The danger in not drawing the line in the right place is to fall into the error of controversially charging a critic with influences that are inapplicable to his work.

Let me restate once again the two reasons that informed my contribution to the Achebe excerpt. After observing the Rwandan genocide, I appreciated better the fearsome capacity writers, musicians, media professionals and other sundry artists have to instigate either genuine change or genocide. I do not think that even in the name of candour or of coming to terms with our infamous past we should fail to summon the circumspection required for peaceful co-existence. History by all means; literature by all means; but peace without doubt. Otherwise, we would, after the damage is done and depending on whether we are on the winning or losing side, begin to nonsensically romanticise war and suggest that one form of killing – by sword or by hunger, or whether the dead are soldiers or children – is preferable.

The second reason I commented on the excerpt is valid for all ages – the virtue of sometimes maintaining dignified taciturnity, not silence, as Anyaduba wrongly interpreted, especially decades after an event. I do not know whether Anyaduba is married. If he is, does he tell his wife everything about herself – maybe her plain looks, her awkward gait, her repulsively broad smile, etc. – especially when there is disagreement between the two of them? Yes, I love candour with all my heart, but if I want peace, I had better leave some things, indeed nearly all things, unsaid. If Anyaduba has not learnt this lesson, it is probably because he is not yet married.

• Palladium

October 14, 2012
Jonathan can do it alone, so to speak

In less than a week, President Goodluck Jonathan managed both by his blandness and by his irrepressible extemporaneousness to stoke three fierce storms. On Thursday, he announced the appointment of new service chiefs, and as if justifying the suspicion in the Southwest that he was indifferent to the sensibilities of the zone, no one from the zone was appointed to that exalted hierarchy. The implication, say analysts from that zone, is that when the president takes top level security decisions, he will have to assume he knows what the zone thinks. The second storm was the declaration in his Independence Day speech that Nigeria’s rating in the anti-graft war had improved to number three in terms of real efforts to combat corruption. He ascribed the improvement to a study said to have been carried out by Transparency International (TI). But the global corruption watchdog said it carried out no such study, while presidential aides glumly explained they took the information from a newspaper.

Before Independence Day celebration, the president, at a church service, argued that no one person could save a nation. Comparing himself to the biblical Nehemiah, the president suggested that only the cooperation of the people could make a leader achieve feats. Not so, said analysts. The president must first show the way, offer brilliant and principled leadership, and then persuade the people and mobilise them to achieve the impossible. The president is unlikely to be persuaded by such analysis, for he summarily jettisons anything that does not fit into his worldview. He wants cooperation first; he wants critics, whom he sighed always abused him, to sheathe their swords first; and he wants the snobbish Southwest to drop its political and media opposition to his government first. That, to him, is the only way the virtues of Nehemiah can be brought out.

It is certainly not the fault of Jonathan that the quality of leadership in Nigeria has fallen. It has been falling since independence, not only in Nigeria but elsewhere in Africa, and indeed all over the world. In the turbulent decades of the mid-20th Century, it was rare to hear the president of a great nation plaintively declare he could not do great things alone. Great leaders have the capacity to walk alone, look only to their inside even if they take advice on the outside, judge right, take bold decisions, and swaddle their policies, which are often prescient, with messianic conviction. Somebody must persuade the Nigerian president to talk right, speak more persuasively and inspiringly about his visions, and believe implacably in himself. Somebody must tell him that by his endless waffle he communicates his hesitations to the whole country.

Last Sunday, the president told the church congregation in Abuja he alone could not do the job of taking Nigeria to great heights. He is absolutely wrong. He alone can do it if he puts his mind to it. The rest of us are available to be mobilised and led, since we must, for the sake of democracy, endure the remaining years of his first term as best as we can.

October 7, 2012
Achebe: Some things are better left unsaid

Professor Chinua Achebe’s latest book, There Was A Country, A Personal History of Biafra, is bound to engender stormy controversies all over the country and perhaps beyond, for its candour, its controversial allotment of motives to the principal actors of the Nigerian civil war, and the author’s unrepentant and undisguised partisanship. The book is yet to be released to the Nigerian market, but the Guardian of London last week excerpted a short but very poignant part of the book to whet readers’ appetite and for analysts to have an idea of the book’s potency. This piece will look at that excerpt and attempt a brief foray into the eminent writer’s mind. No review of the book will be attempted until it is available.

First, here is what the publishers have to say of the book: “The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe’s people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.

“Achebe masterfully relates his experience, both as he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria’s birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country’s promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers—they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people.

Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe’s place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age.”

It is unlikely anyone will question Achebe’s literary astuteness, especially knowing that he is a towering literary personality of the 20th Century. No one will also question his freedom to say the things he has just said in the book, for he felt the torment of the civil war as keenly as the worst victim, just as the publishers indicated. What with his young family that needed his protection during the war, and his involvement as a roving cultural ambassador of the short-lived Biafra Republic. In general too, Achebe was impeccable in counselling writers to take a stand on the great moral issues of the day, as he apparently did during the war, and has now done again more than four decades after. What remains to be seen, however, is to what extent he could take liberty with his understanding of the issues surrounding the war, his interpretations, his conclusions, and the underlying emotions that obviously coloured both his own worldview and his paranoid perception of the country vis-à-vis the Igbo people.

After reading the Guardian (London) excerpt of the book, I concluded this was a book he should not have written, for sometimes, the merit of a book is compromised by just one page, one paragraph, even one sentence. Because of the sentiments contained in the excerpt, which sentiments I think vitiate the force of his lofty intellect, Achebe should have left unsaid many of the things he wrote in the book. His reputation as a world-renowned writer was already secure, having written one of the 50 most influential books of all time. Why did he feel impelled to write this fateful book, one which doubtless reinforces the suspicion many hold about his private and public animosities? Achebe is a courageous writer and a principled Nigerian who felt no qualms twice spurning the honours bestowed on him by the Nigerian government. A disreputable government could not give honour to one so morally superior, he snorted. Yet, the book contains sentiments that appear unworthy of both the fame he has acquired by dint of his unequalled genius and the high pedestal upon which Nigeria, nay, the world has thrust him.

Most of the criticisms levelled against Achebe come from the Southwest. The critics seek to defend Chief Obafemi Awolowo against the motives ascribed to him by the author. I do not intend to join forces with those critics. It is enough to say that writing interpretative historical works and psychoanalysing historical personalities are not Achebe’s forte. Perhaps if he were detached from the Biafran debacle he would have been able to do a greater work. For now I am uncomfortable with a few issues raised in the excerpt. First is the fact that the eminent author showed a disturbing streak of extreme traumatisation. Forty-two years after the civil war, the bitterness Achebe nursed against both the federal side and a few of the dramatis personae in the war are still very fresh and potent. He has allowed that bitterness to endure, to retain its potency, and to colour his perception of Nigerian (ethnic) politics. I doubt whether the great Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was ambivalent towards Biafra, nor the man who led Biafra itself, Dim Emeka Ojukwu, retained such vitriol against the rest of Nigeria as Achebe.

Second, it is hard to know where Achebe got the statistics upon which he built his insupportable conclusions. He claims the principal targets of the war, a war he insinuates was genocidal, were two million mothers, children, babies – all civilians, apparently in contradistinction to military casualties. He inexplicably ignores the losses suffered by World War II combatants. The former Soviet Union alone lost over 16 million civilians and about eight million troops. China lost more than 10 million civilians and just over one million armed men. Poland lost about six million civilians and over 800,000 armed men. Germany, where the final battles of the war were fought, lost seven million people, about half of whom were civilians. In all, WWII cost between 60 to 70 million lives of which some 40 to 50 million were civilians. Civilians often bear the brunt of wars.

The Nigerian civil war was fought mostly in the Southeast, yet the author queries the preponderance of war dead on the Biafran side. Where does Achebe expect most of the casualties to come from? He also said the small arms deployed in the constricted Southeast region during the less than three years the civil war lasted were more than the quantity deployed in the entire WWII, which lasted over six years and was fought across vast territories. Even without counting, and looking at the scale and scope of WWII losses, it would be far-fetched to come to Achebe’s conclusions. Except the author could convince us that the more than 40 million soldiers who fought in WWII shared weapons or fought barehanded, and the soldiers who fought in the Nigerian civil war used more than 40 guns each, he could never persuade anyone that more small arms were used in the Southeast during the war. After all, Nigerian Army strength rose to only 120,000 by the end of that war. It is doubtful that Biafran troops exceeded federal troops in number.

Achebe’s latest book is unlikely to be of much value. It will be regarded as a bitter account by a traumatised man who has found it difficult to overcome the effects of the civil war. He considers as diabolical the use of starvation as a weapon of war, as if he never read any history of warfare, where sieges were designed to starve the enemy into submission. He glosses over the fact that Igbo people lived in the Southwest during the war; yet he yielded to paranoia by concluding that the purpose and methods of the war were designed to exterminate the Igbo. He connects those execrable methods, such as starvation, to Awolowo’s ambitious design for power and northern jihadist inclinations. This is guesswork.

The Guardian (London) newspaper excerpt illustrates how difficult it is for many Nigerian intellectuals to overcome the stereotypes that hamstring objective discussions of national affairs. So, who will write the history of that period, let alone teach it, when even Achebe could not overcome stereotypes nor bury the bitterness of four decades past? The great roles played by many Igbo personalities during the war are being highlighted, and many of them, including the great Zik and the charismatic Ojukwu, are being canonised. We must hope that Achebe does not take us back to our ignoble past where heroic deeds are acknowledged through ethnic prism.

October 7, 2012
Forging a national identity

Tomorrow, Nigeria will be 52. It will be time to ask who she is and what she stands for. Except those who rule the country, who think that by simply declaring that she has an identity and cannot therefore fragment, most of us know she is afflicted by midlife crisis. British colonialists superintended the marriage between Northern and Southern Nigeria. But they were unable to give her an identity before she became independent in 1960. For reasons we will not go into here today, it is not surprising that France was more successful than Britain in imbuing her former colonies with a more tangible sense of national identity. If Nigeria appears to be undone today, wracked by religious, ethnic and social conflicts, the problem is more likely located in the absence of an identity than simply because it experiences economic difficulties, hypocritical attachment to religion, selfish and unintelligent leadership, and uninspiring and short-sighted constitution.

I was fortunate to grow up under a father whose mind was often made up, and made up in the right direction. He never really sat me down to teach me in the fashion Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle, but both through his writings – he was an editor and columnist – and his progressive worldview, I learnt the virtues of altruism, patriotism and strength of character. He had a strong moral sense that was not attenuated by worldly pleasures. He was not averse to philandering, and had even tried more than once to inculcate in me a healthy suspicion of the opposite sex bordering on the misogynistic, which pearl he said he polished in his years of turbulent relationship with women. He also drank, perhaps a little more than could be described as the social drinker, but he was seldom so far gone as not to recall what he did or said. He ruefully did away with the bottle only when his creaking pancreas, which never stopped working, protested vigorously.

But this piece today is neither about my dad nor about me. I only offer myself as a practical example to illustrate how and why it is crucial for a nation to acquire an identity necessary to abjure the hedonism that weakens national resolve. I distilled my worldview eclectically from my dad’s lifestyle and unsystematic philosophy, and honed this worldview after introducing myself to the lives of great statesmen. It enabled me to discover myself when I was barely out of my teens. That self-discovery has not only helped me to keep my head in the Kiplingian sense, it also helped me to endure life’s vicissitudes, shape my reluctance to be beholden to unprincipled interests while sometimes being a supporter of enlightened absolutism, and give me a strength of character that makes me ready to sacrifice anything, anybody, including my life, for the principles and values that I have dedicated my life to.

A few weeks ago, I tried to communicate to my readers the herculean task I took upon myself to inculcate in my children the noble principles I thought anyone able to call his soul his own should embrace. I could not initiate that effort if I did not believe in something or if my principles were so fluid they could be bought or influenced by degrading considerations. I think the same thing goes for a nation. Nigeria could never hope to make something of its children if it does not believe in or stand for anything. Nigeria is passing through middle age and transiting to old age without the redeeming benefit of standing up for anything truly noble. Worse, it is making that transition without having had a leader who could personify that noble longing for greatness.

Forgive my pessimism, but I often look at Nigeria and wonder whether it will ever amount to anything. What does it stand for? What great thing does it hope to bequeath the world? Without a national ambition which comes out of knowing who we are, what great things could we hope to accomplish? It took approximately 10 years for Alexander the Great to forge a great name for Greece and for himself, names that have endured and still stupefy the world both for the accomplishment of the young Alexander himself and the inability of the rump empire to live up to the glories of its incandescent past. We are familiar with the popular British patriotic song “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves,” and its stirring refrain “Britons never shall be slaves.” No historian would underestimate the inspiration and fillip which this patriotic song gave to Britain’s naval strength, its colonial adventures, and its prosecution of World War I and II. Who could also belittle the nationalistic passion Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck imbued Germany (Prussia) in the 18th and 19th centuries? Who could ignore the sense of national pride brought to France by both St Joan of Arc, through her independence wars, and Napoleon Bonaparte, through his ground-breaking war tactics and the Napoleonic Code? And who could imagine the Roman Empire, its character, justice system and administrative legacy, without the two Caesars, Julius and Augustus?

Nigerian rulers may denounce the pessimism of their countrymen and even live in denial of the looming apocalypse. They may continue to affirm the indissolubility of the country and whoop that the country’s unity is non-negotiable. They may even hold out plenty of hope in institutions as ramparts upon which to build a “strong and virile” nation, whatever that means. And they may believe that by and by, the constitution, if tinkered with, may deliver the utopia we crave, in spite of the indiscipline we are noted for. The fact, however, is that the fabric that holds the country together is straining badly, and will sooner or later give way, for it cannot be held together by words but by action, action which we have refused to summon.

What actions are required to weld the country together and make it flourish? Two options present themselves: either the people join hands together to lift the country; or a leader emerges to lead the charge. Most people have given up on the possibility of a visionary leader emerging, and have therefore reposed faith in the ability of followers to do the job. I entertain no such nonsense. Followers are never capable of creating and sustaining a vision for national identity and greatness. They could never summon the consensus that would bring it about. In the late 1930s, for instance, Britain was amenable to appeasing Hitler’s irredentism. It took Winston Churchill’s bitter challenge to galvanise his country in the opposite direction. France was, after defeat in that same war, resigned to fate; it took the single-mindedness of Charles de Gaulle to convince them otherwise.

Anywhere, anytime, change is delivered only by the few for the many. Most analysts and south-westerners, for instance, cannot see why it is necessary to fight and defeat Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State in the October governorship polls. They cannot understand why the region must place premium on leadership character and principles; they cannot understand the urgency of forging a regional identity as a tool for social, political and economic mobilisation in a country lacking a sense of purpose; and they cannot understand the highly intricate and elevated visioning necessary to engender a mini utopia in a national sea of mediocrity. It is given to only a few to understand these issues; they must not fail to try fight the electoral battle because they fear to fail.

I do not know a great nation with a discernible national identity which did not have visionary leaders at one point or the other in its history. Imagine if the United States had had Chief Olusegun Obasanjo or Robert Mugabe instead of George Washington to lead the war of independence. Could it sustain the tradition of two terms? Would the two African leaders not act as if the country owed them its very life? Imagine also Turkey without Mustafa Kemal Ataturk at the end of World War I. Could the secularism that has underpinned its stability and projected its influence in world and Eurasian/Southeastern European politics have been devised, let alone nurtured for so long? How could the Soviet Union and China have played significantly in the 20th century without Lenin/Stalin and Mao Zedong respectively? What would 20th Century Egypt be without Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israel without David, son of Jesse, and Ghana without Kwame Nkrumah?

For 52 years, and after about 12 heads of state/presidents, we still don’t know who we are, what we want, and where we should be. The leaders themselves never had a sense of mission or a sense of history. But we won’t know who we are, no matter the hundreds of brilliant individuals we produce annually, until a leader comes along, a deus ex machina to help us forge a common identity either by force of his character, force of arms, or force of ideas. Western Nigeria continues to embrace the progressivism fostered by Chief Obafemi Awolowo; Northern Nigeria still makes the conservatism moulded by Sir Ahmadu Bello its reference point; and Eastern Nigeria oscillates between the liberalism of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and the radicalism of Dim Emeka Ojukwu. If no one builds a foundation for Nigeria, the country will not have an identity because it cannot stand on nothing.

September 30, 2012
Between the right of readers and the freedom of writers

As far as rejoinders go, yesterday’s right of reply (This Day back page) to Dele Momodu’s piece of September 22 on the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, was as unsparing as any I have read in a long time. Momodu’s original piece was equally vigorous. I enjoyed both gentlemen, even if I disagree with some of their conclusions. I have myself been at the receiving end of merciless lampoon from angry readers – from extremists masquerading as academicians and administrators at the University of Ilorin, to pro-Jonathan analysts, lobbyists and theorists, and from freelance critics in search of a cause celebre, to critics who simply love to excoriate pontificators, whatever the issue and not minding the logic.

If I know columnists well, especially considering their outsized egos, they usually don’t appreciate readers having the last word. Momodu may take the opportunity of his column to give his traducer a parting shot, and then brusquely close the debate. If he does, he will be exercising his freedom as gutsily as his critic had exercised his right. Columnists, like authors, are not unaffected by the trenchancy of their critics. It therefore takes an indomitable spirit to keep writing from day to day, and from year to year. There are critics who look out for spelling errors, grammatical blunders, and factual inaccuracies. When they hit upon one, they drive the knife in so deeply into the back of the writer he would need special remedies to recover. And there are critics who, with measured grace and logic, tear the writer’s assumptions to pieces, and delight in doing so. To them it is a blood sport.

For as long as a writer exercises his freedom to tyrannise his readers with weekly pontificates, he should expect his critics to also skewer him in venomous language. It goes with the territory. I illustrate with the case of John Keats, the 18th/19th century Romantic poet whose poem Endymion was severely criticised by a certain Mr Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review in 1818. Here is an example from Croker: “It is not that Mr Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his sense would put his real name to such a rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius – he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language….

[Mr Keats] is a copyist of Mr Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr Keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples: his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr Leigh Hunt’s insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry….”

Keats died at 25, and his friends attributed his passing to the unpleasant reviews he received when Endymion was published in 1818, a line of thought also canvassed by Lord Byron. Keats of course died of tuberculosis, and not of adverse criticisms. Contemporary writers may not be as endowed as those of the classical era, but either because they are not as gifted in appreciating lampoon or because they are made of sturdier stuff, they tend to shrug off all criticisms. But why is Palladium not scalded by vitriolic reviews? Why, ask his editor who has refused to publish the rejoinders. Surely, this columnist couldn’t be expected to brood over what he does not know.

September 30, 2012
Jonathan’s extemporaneous speeches

To everyone who follows his speeches, President Goodluck Jonathan comes across as someone who loves to speak extemporaneously. It helps him to communicate and channel his anger and frustrations in ways prepared speeches do not permit. Except you are a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton, prepared speeches are often impure crystallisations of the disparate thoughts and sometimes sham reasoning of speech artists. Few leaders have the ability to be coherent outside their prepared speeches; they often stick to the text and hope the audience would be fascinated. Extempore remarks, the sort which mystifyingly enthrals the rather ineloquent Jonathan, must be handled with care even by gifted orators. As Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle showed, diligent preparations must accompany extempore speeches, up to the point of honing even the accompanying gestures.

On Tuesday, Jonathan once again threw caution to the wind with one of his lengthy unrehearsed speeches, complete with unfathomable logic, misrepresentation of history, university freshman’s reading of Marxism, and a poor laparotomy of the election that brought him into office. The occasion was the 52nd Independence Anniversary lecture held in Abuja, for which former Ghanaian president John Kuffour was invited to speak on the topic, Nigeria: Security Development and National Transformation. Jonathan’s remarks came after the main lecture, and it responded to Kuffour’s presentation but veered off in a different, controversial and uninspiring tangent. Quite apart from the fact that the topic was inappropriate for Kuffour, who would have done much better with a regional issue, the occasion helped give us another unflattering peep into the complicated and seething mind of our president.

Proceeding from a class analysis not borne out by history, the president argues that ordinary people find it extremely difficult to survive in times of crisis where big players often survive. Beyond his examination of class survivability in times of crisis, he drives home the point that peace is a critical ingredient of economic development. But it is in fact when he discourses upon the factors that promote peace that the president yields to his well-known nostalgic passion for monarchism. “Peace is one of the cardinal marks of a leader,” the president begins magisterially. “In the monarchy in the olden days, the king had maximum power, but for your kingdom to be stable you must have the military strength. So without stability of any state it cannot develop.” In case he has lost you in the vastness of his private historical imprecision, the president is merely saying monarchies show greater tendency to guarantee peace. He does not, however, say whether ineluctably they also guarantee greater development.

Jonathan’s pained reference to the virtue of monarchism of course shows his difficult relationship with democracy and what he sees as its insufferable insistence on checks and balances. This is not the first time he has embraced ancient forms of government and repudiated sophisticated and modern systems. Indeed, we must expect that he will continue to embrace or repudiate systems and values according to his well-known proclivities. These proclivities – his distaste for modernism, especially – will continue with him to the end of his presidency, whether that presidency terminates in one term or two.

The president also attempted a dichotomous explanation of physical and political insecurity. The first, he says, indicates the use of guns and bombs and involves the security of the individual. The second, he fails to define, but indicates its consequence to be a lack of development. You will have to read between the lines to understand why the president felt justified to draw a puzzling line between what he categorises as two types of insecurity. After all, neither conduces to development, and both are often attended by shootings and killings. In fact, however, the president was leading to the highly suspect notion that the media is guiltier than any other institution in predisposing the country to insecurity. The press is his bête noire. When he does not hate it, he distrusts it.

After ruminating on the axiom that says the pen is mightier than the sword, the president goes ahead to suggest that by reflecting “these unending political conflicts in the media, whether print, electronic or social media, it brings a lot of insecurity to the system and sometimes people begin to doubt your government.” He places at the doorstep of the media the blame for the people’s lack of confidence in his government and leadership style. In essence, he would have preferred the media to shut out political conflicts and live in denial as the government often does.

It seems all but evident that Jonathan wishes to court the media but doesn’t know how. Indeed, he naively believes that once the media embraced him, all would be well. Hear the president: “The media environment that should have helped our transformation agenda is being used negatively… The way Nigerians challenge and abuse me… yes, the president has enormous power, but if you use that enormous power to some extent you will look like a dictator.” If we disentangle his fustian on press freedom, which freedom he shockingly believes to be a privilege, from the other parts of the speech we would reach an even more disturbing false bottom in his logic about the powers of the president in a democracy. He erroneously thinks the president has enough powers vouchsafed to him by the constitution to be a dictator if he likes, but he plaintively regrets his inability to use that facility. The truth is that he does not have the powers he thinks he has, and worse, cannot even indulge himself as he wants.

In his apportionment of blame for insecurity, he refers to the problem the flawed 2007 election gave him and his predecessor, and then compares that poll with that of 2011 and concludes, with unrestrained self-glorification, that the latter was more credible. But he appears baffled that so soon after an election he gave top marks he had become deeply unpopular. According to him, “Immediately after that election, not quite six months, the kind of media hype that started hitting us made us to stop and ask where is this coming from? I said I did not just come out from the blues to contest the election, I was deputy governor for six and half years, I was a governor for one and half years, I was a vice president, and before election, I was the president up to April when the elections were conducted, people knew me. So within this period, including when I even acted, if I was that bad would people have voted for me?… But the media condemned me.”

Jonathan says the criticism he was subjected to so soon after the elections made him stop and ask where it was coming from. There is absolutely no truth in that statement. Neither he nor his aides stopped to ask where the problem was coming from. He simply concluded that some people were manipulating the situation to make his government seem incompetent, for which he now blames the ‘political’ (not the ‘professional’) media. In his opinion, the fault has to lie elsewhere, not in his lackluster style, not in his goofs and gaffes, not in his retrogressive ideas of government and governance, not in his improper grasp of economic and political issues, and not in his ordinary and uninspiring vision of a modern and progressive society. He cannot grasp the fact that between the two main candidates in the 2011 presidential poll, the electorate voted for him because he appeared safer, not better nor more cerebral nor more principled, and that barely a few months after the election the people recognised they were sold a pig in a poke, for which they have reacted very vigorously in the fashion that now confounds him.

Jonathan gives a brief of his political career, wondering whether the people did not consider these before they voted for him. The truth is that they neither knew him nor, even more mortifyingly, knew that he had apparently reached the end of his tether as governor, and that both the office of president and the virtues of democracy, not to talk of the concepts of freedom of speech, rule of law and federalism, were above his ken. The six months he speaks about is the period it took the people to discover their folly in opting for the safer rather than the better.

Jonathan exceeds himself in his extempore speech by reiterating his discredited views on the subsidy protests of January. As he put it: “Look at the demonstrations on fuel subsidy; look at the areas these demonstrations are coming from, and you begin to ask, are these the ordinary citizens that are demonstrating? Or are people pushing them to demonstrate? Take the case of Lagos, Lagos is the critical state in the nation’s economy, it controls about 53 per cent of the economy and all tribes are there. During the demonstration in Lagos, people were given bottled water that people in my village don’t have access to, and people were given expensive food that the ordinary people in Lagos cannot eat… They go and hire the best musician to come and play and the best comedian to come and entertain. Is that demonstration?”

It is no use trying to convince a deeply resentful president that he is wrong. The more you try to persuade him, the more implacable he gets. This columnist covered the January subsidy protest from beginning to the end and saw no coordinated attempt to feed the protesters or assuage their thirst. A few good Samaritans gave out tokens, but they were so insignificant that it would be sheer exaggeration to consider these orchestrated. Food hawkers were there to make money, and musicians and comedians, whom some presidency officials deprecated as clowns, jostled to get attention, and would have paid to have their moment in history. Meanwhile, the president sat paranoid in Abuja and relied on misleading reports. And because he does not read his country’s newspapers, which he believes to be manipulated by politicians, he failed to educate himself on the true position of the protests.

But much more than believing falsehood, Jonathan once again proves his long-running resentment towards Lagos, a city he sees as snobbish but which has done nothing to assist in spite of acknowledging its centrality to the Nigerian economy. How is it the fault of Lagos if the president’s village does not have access to bottled water, and why on earth must he compare the city to his village? Does he know the kind of food ordinary Lagosian eats? Shortly after he sent troops to quell the protests, he denounced Lagos elite as pampered and their children, whom he claimed rode five cars, as spoilt rotten. Who can forget also that while campaigning for votes in 2011, he attempted to instigate other ethnic groups against Lagosians using false statistics? Yet, he is surprised that he is challenged and abused, and regrets not having the powers of a monarch to do as he pleases and the ability of a propagandist to manipulate the media in his favour. He is shocked that barely six months into his presidency, his romance with the people came to an end, even though he did nothing to sustain that romance and has repaid the votes he garnered with scorn and ill will. It is no credit to his learning and office that every time he encounters challenges and repudiation, his instinctive defence mechanism is to take refuge in the values and systems of the feudal past of his longings.

Finally, and as a fitting summary of his worldview, Jonathan lets us into the secret of his fortitude and indifference. Hear him: “For me, if I see somebody is manipulating anything, I don’t listen to you; but when I see people genuinely talking about issues, I listen. I am hardly intimidated by anybody who wants to push any issue he has. I believe that that protest in Lagos was manipulated by a class in Lagos and was not from the ordinary people.” With this syllogism, the president rounds up his philosophy of governance in the most unspeakable fashion. It does not matter whether the critic is right, as long as the president thinks the troublemaker is instigated, he will not listen. How can he tell who is instigated and who is not? Again, it hardly matters; the president gets intelligence report, or perhaps he simply makes up his mind anyhow he fancies. And if the critic is wrong, as long as he is not instigated, then the president will listen. If this is not recipe for both autocracy and misrule, nothing else is.

The much we know about the president comes from his extemporaneous nuggets. There will be many more of such gems before his term ends. Every time he orates, we imagine we have reached the nadir that no human can possibly plumb. But every such time, we have been mistaken. In the months ahead that chasm will be dug deeper than we think him capable, for it is now clear that though Jonathan is gifted in many areas and speaks with the candour that is unusual in these climes, his talents are altogether suited only to ages past. Lagos had better take heart, and all critics, whom the president dismisses as calumnious, must reconcile themselves to contending with a man whose values and philosophy are hewn from the granite of a completely different era.

September 23, 2012
Poll 2015 campaigns began yesterday (part 2)

Whose who say it is too early to talk of and plan towards 2015 obviously do not understand what politics is all about, or of the crushing burden of clearing the filth and stagnation years of misrule have brought upon the country. Nothing, not even universally accepted convention, excuses leaving things undone till the last moment. If Nigeria is to be liberated from the clutches of visionless rulers, the plans and permutations must begin early, whether President Goodluck Jonathan fears distractions or not. The next polls are a little over 30 months away, but the opposition is still struggling to design a vehicle for that great task of liberation ahead, while the ruling party itself, shorn of vision and the doggedness and commitment needed for societal re-engineering and transformation, sits complicit in ruminative indifference to the country’s destiny.

I have not encountered anyone not beholden to the ruling party who thinks the PDP has a concise vision for the country. If the party had a vision for the country in the excitable days of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and in the considerably sedate days of the late Umar Yar’Adua, it would have been fairly obvious, even if implemented shoddily. We would have blamed Jonathan for poor implementation of the vision, not condemn him for lack of one. But there really was none, and there still isn’t any. As I have indicated here so many times before, and even shortly before the last elections, we must, without necessarily being members of opposition parties, begin to look beyond the ruling party. The PDP has held the reins of power for more than 13 years since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, and in all that period, the party was never able to articulate a vision for the country beyond the routine and cavalier adumbration of five-point, six-point, seven-point or x-point programme.

I think it is time once again to reiterate the point that it is not projects, roads, education and health, etc. that drive a country’s greatness. The first grand task is to find either a party or a leader with an inspiring vision capable of freeing the country from the mediocre orbit in which it is locked. It is ideas that beget projects that beget greatness. Ask American how they got to the moon. There is no other order of precedence. We must find a leader who has been to the mountaintop and has conceived in his mind the heights he wishes to take the country. He must be clear in his mind what the dimensions of the Promised Land would be, and must also be able to articulate how to get there. He must understand the kind of democracy required to midwife a great country and be a convinced democrat himself, not a democrat as an afterthought. He must understand how comparably high the shoulders of his countrymen must be in relation to the other peoples of the world.

What gives concreteness to vision, however, is ambition. The leader (I use leader interchangeably with party) must himself be highly ambitious to imbue his country with great ambition. If he does not think Nigerian democracy should be better than Britain’s, for instance, or our roads better than those of Canada, we will never put the structures in place to achieve those goals. And even if the constitution provides viable structures to underpin democracy and guarantee certain inalienable rights, as indeed the 1999 constitution has imperfectly done, the unambitious leader would undermine or exploit the document, as in fact Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan have done. The ambition described here is, of course, not personal ambition, for both Obasanjo and Jonathan, in particular, have displayed personal and humungous ambitions that war against their modest talents.

But while it is fairly easy for a leader to generate ambition, it is not quite as easy to generate vision, for vision, much more than ambition, comes from much studying, exposure to other civilisations, private character development, and an indefinable intuition and canniness that propel him into doing the right thing and making the right judgements. As the sectarian troubles in North Africa, Middle East and northern Nigeria are showing, the quality of leadership is declining precipitously virtually everywhere to the point where the so-called leaders in many places have become captives of the prejudice, hate and populism of the rabble. It was not until I read Chief Obafemi Awolowo copiously that I fully appreciated the depth of his knowledge and ambition, the breadth of his vision, his courage both in the face of adversity and opposition, and his solid and cosmopolitan endowments in democracy, administration and planning. It was not until I read books on Sir Ahmadu Bello, the eponymous Sardauna of Sokoto, and perused his files in the days of the Northern Region, that I was struck also by the grand scale of the society he envisioned, his Spartan discipline, his administrative acumen, and the remarkable balance he maintained between his private piety and the liberalism the regional politics of the day required.

It was also not until I read books by and on Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe that I began to understand how impossible it is for a leader to generate vision without reading about others, and without having one’s own heroes. Zik dreamt big, perhaps far bigger than his region of birth could accommodate, and probably much bigger than his country could fathom. This perhaps accounted in part for why he was in some ways the least successful of the three great leaders in terms of regional idolisation, and maybe, too, why he seemed to have been overshadowed by the more charismatic and enigmatic Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the East. It is indisputable that all three or four gentlemen displayed leadership and visionary qualities incomparable to the mediocrity Nigeria has been inundated with since the collapse of the First Republic. All of them were at least deeper, braver, and more imaginative than today’s leaders, and would probably have attempted to respond boldly and innovatively to the sectarian menace and small-mindedness undermining the stability and future of Nigeria. Even if they failed, it would not be because of indolence, cowardice or lack of determination.

I also recall how imperative the visions and dreams of some of the world’s great leaders were to their societies. Recall Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army (imagine the inspired name), his Continental System, and his military achievements. These followed his dream of recreating a new (Roman) Empire, equal or superior to that of Charlemagne or even the Caesars. There could also never have been the Soviet Union had Lenin not first envisioned it. And there could not have been a modern and liberal Turkey rising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire had Mustafa Kemal Ataturk not recognised that that was the only way to secure the rump of the empire and drag it into the modern era.

Nigeria is enfeebled and humiliated by lack of dreamers and visionaries. Much more despairingly, for the past 50 or so years, primordial and even primitive considerations have been at the bottom of leadership selection in Nigeria. The PDP under Obasanjo was supposed to lay a solid foundation for Fourth Republic democracy, but due to the limitations of his vision, his temperamental unsuitability, and the constriction of his unpresidential heart, he was incapable of laying a foundation for a modern society he could not conceive. He worsened the problem by foisting the wrong kind of leadership on equally prejudiced, fearful and passive electorate.

You do not have to belong to the opposition to know it was a tragedy enduring eight years of Obasanjo, three or so chequered years of Yar’Adua, and now halting, half-hearted opening years of Jonathan. It would be a disaster, however, to wait till 2014 to begin planning for the country’s liberation, or to succumb spinelessly once again to zoning, tribal or sectarian considerations in selecting a liberator capable of dreaming big for Nigeria. By all means, let 2015 begin now. The task ahead is too serious to be delayed for one or two more years.

September 20, 2012