The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

The Census of Ghosts

(An Easter Combo)

Unholy ghosts!!! It is profoundly ironic that on the same day that Jesus Christ resurrected, Nigeria should be dealing with so many ghosts. Without any doubt, the Boko Haram sect has become the greatest threat to the corporate existence of Nigeria since the Civil War. The organization, as expected of all guerrilla outfits, is shadowy and shrouded in mystery. Whatever its provenance, whether secular or theocratic in inspiration, no insurgent group worth its salt goes about brandishing the names of its core leadership.

The government has repeatedly made it known that it does not negotiate with ghosts. Since ghosts are hardly visible entities, this is an eminently sensible position to take. You cannot sit down to talk or negotiate with an unperson, somebody who is simply not there. Yet at the last count, these ghosts have killed almost half a million Nigerians in the last three years and still counting.

The trauma of a ghost country is compounded by its inability to trace or account for its own ghosts. Something will have to be done to bring the government of ghosts and the ghost of government together before we all become ghosts.

The entire country is swamped by ghosts. Ghosts have laid a siege to the country. At the moment, four principal types of ghosts can be identified. There are arms-bearing ghosts, otherwise known as the Boko Haram insurgents. These are the ghosts that have been killing other people. They have struck fear and trepidation into the heart of the people. The entire land is flowing with blood and tears.

The second group of ghosts are the economic ghosts. These are the ghost workers who cost government billions every month. Among the ghost workers are the miracle workers of the temporal ministries who facilitate the ghost workers. There are also the ghost barons who help with phantom subsidies and of course the pension thieves who vanish into thin air like ghosts.

The third group are the political ghosts. These are the ghosts of pensioners who have died waiting for their pensions and politicians who have been killed in strange and suspicious circumstances. The particular group of ghosts are notorious for not resting in peace or allowing others to rest in peace. Then there are the holy ghosts and spiritual merchants who spiritually launder the loot.

The last group are the ghostwriters. These are the literary ghosts, writers, journalists, historians and columnists, who help others to prepare or settle accounts, particularly where and when disputes arise in the other groups over the allocation of resources, or the allocation of economic, military and political casualties. A columnist who chooses to wear the cloak of anonymity is for example a ghost writer

In view of this plethora of ghosts in the land, snooper brings to you this morning a short excerpt from the novel, Bulletin From the Land of Living Ghosts published eleven years ago in 2002. It shows once again how fiction can anticipate reality.

March 31, 2013
The land of ghosts

What was the beginning of the journey of the general, or to put it more accurately, the beginning of the journey of his coffin, to the Cemetery of Patriots. Certain journeys are reversible, and certain journeys are irreversible. Certain destinations are returnable, and certain destinations are irreturnable.

Whatever the nature of the general’s journey and destination, it was to be a harbinger of greater stress and crisis for the country. Whether there was any connection between the two events could not be ascertained as at the time this chronicle of the travails of the people of Muleria was put together. What could be ascertained was that shortly after the night of horror at the Cemetery of Patriots, that was a few months shy of twenty-one years after the great warlord disappeared, the entire nation became a ghost country.

It was not just the odd sighting of the old general, or the customary reports of some ghosts in the city and the country side. Things soon assumed an epidemic proportion. There was a plague of ghosts. Ghosts were sighted everywhere: in homes, schools, churches, mosques, buses, court-rooms, barracks, campuses, offices, banks, hospitals and everywhere two or three people were likely to gather.

The entire nation was bursting with wraiths and apparitions. The problem was that there was no hiding place. Unlike a war with well-defined zones and sectors, these were hostilities without bounds or boundaries. It was as if the dead had decided to return en masse. The stress and strain began to take its toll on a normally cheerful and ebullient people.

And it was not ghosts alone. There were other spirits, too: fairies, daemons, goblins, gremlins, gnomes, sprites, imps and all manner of supra-terrestrial terrorists. From being haunted by the ghost of mismanagement, the government found itself confronted by the mismanagement of ghosts. And it succumbed to both.

First it warned about rumour-mongering and threatened to deal ruthlessly with anybody peddling ghost stories. Then after its own deliberations about ghosts were reportedly abridged by ghosts, it confessed that there were indeed ghosts everywhere but that it had awarded contracts to ward off the invasion.

Certain national landmarks were designated as Places of Burnt Offerings from Offending Children of Muleria to Their Offended Gods. A million doves were buried alive. Spiritual contractors, merchants of mayhem and other profiteers and parasites of popular misfortune smiled to the bank. There was an astronomical rise in the sale of frankincense, olibanum, absinthe and other incenses from the middle-east, Arabia, Persia and India.

No household was complete without ethereal smoke wafting from the roof and the entire nation was soon engulfed in a cloud of fragrant vapour. Smart-alecs set up corner shops selling ghost charms, ghost amulets and, failing that, wands that could turn people into ghosts. It became customary to ask strangers: “Are you sure you are not a ghost?”Invariably, only the bravest of souls waited for the answer.

March 31, 2013
Now, the ghost of Chinua Achebe

It is the post-colonial condition, stupid. For the past one week, Africa, Nigeria and the Igbo people have been mourning the exit of one of their most illustrious sons ever. Chinua Achebe has joined the galaxy of illustrious and distinguished patriots haunting the nation from inner and outer space. These distinguished avatars, men and women alike, will not rest in peace until Nigeria gets it right, or until the old colonial Ajele returns to disband the costly charade and chicanery.

For a man who had a supreme and acute sense of beginnings, the great author also had a magnificent sense of an ending. It was a grand departure, exquisitely and exactingly timed to provoke maximum anguish and anxiety. When Achebe released his controversial war memoirs titled There Was A Country, snooper had a premonition that this was the old man’s parting shot at his crass compatriots.

It was a grand Philippic and Parthian all rolled into one, dripping with fire, venom and thunder. Achebe has repudiated the nation as it is for the nation as it was or as it ought to be. It was an epic rejection of form and content. Achebe, the former Biafran oligarch, almost came close to declaring himself a former Nigerian.

But if there was a country, there is also a country, despite its grave imperfections. There is no point in dwelling on the more unfortunate aspects of Achebe’s war memoirs. It was an angry and robust putdown, a savage indictment if you like. The adversarial posture ought to serve as a warning and timely reminder to intellectual and political elites who push and proxy their people into needless bloodbath. There are war criminals and there are war criminals.

For a person like snooper who grew up in a political household where the late Zik was adored, and where the great man once sat in the early fifties speaking perfect and flawless Yoruba, it was a moment of excruciating agony. In the end, it is clear that Chinua Achebe was haunted by a transcendental homelessness in which exile became a type of home and home became a place of exiles, strange otherworldly characters and their putrid posturing. The home of the homeless is homelessness. We might as well add hopelessness.

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.

Whenever Achebe’s name and memory are recalled, what will come to mind is his adamantine personal and professional integrity. It was an implacable integrity, remorseless and unyielding in its obsessions and towering moral rage and revulsion. Ultimately, it was a disruptive integrity, as disruptive of the status quo in pre and post-Biafran Nigeria as it was of delicate nation-building in a crippled country..

We cannot grudge such a great man his choices. There were a few great German writers and philosophers who did not deem it fit to explain to their compatriots what they were doing with NAZISM. They went to their grave in stony silence. Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian literary avatar, simply froze in arctic dumbness.

Neither did Ezra Pound deem it fit to divulge the reason behind his Anglo-American baiting. They were all Hitler’s willing literary executioners. Had he been apprehended during the civil war, Chinua Achebe would have maintained the same impassive silence if not an outburst of angry contempt.

There is a sense in which it can be argued that Chinua Achebe took his integrity from the cultural matrix of his Igbo people. Given what many see as the faithlessness and opportunistic chicanery of the dominant faction of contemporary Igbo elite in post-Biafran Nigeria, this might sound like a cruel joke. But there is no doubt that before colonial Nigeria, the Igbo society was arguably the most radical and revolutionary.

It was, and is, a society in which everybody is a monarch and a monad. The energies released by this fiercely republican ethos would have served as a durable building block for a novel and thoroughly revolutionary society in which man was the measure of all things. It takes considerable personal integrity and some strength of character to sustain this streak of volcanic independence.

But in a larger conglomeration of mutually contradictory nationalities, it can lead to a more severe ethical disorientation, particularly if it comes into conflict and collision with empire builders who rely more on communal strength rather than the valour of the exceptional individual. It is better to bond and bind together in an iron colonial cage where everybody is clawing at everybody to death. Even the solitary lion is vulnerable to a pack of adamant wolves.

Significantly, Arrow of God opens on a blood-splattered canvas. The normal thing is for gods to kill off humans, like flies to wanton boys, to echo Shakespeare. But here we find humans killing off gods when they could no longer pass muster and after they have outlived their usefulness. Viewing this revolutionary anthropomorphism with unease and considerable apprehension, Wole Soyinka described the novel as a “dogged secularization of the profoundly mystical.”

But it is obvious that Soyinka was viewing things from the cultural matrix of his Yoruba people, a people with a thousand virile gods who cannot and must not be disturbed in their lordly repose. After the Fulani jihadists overran their old empire, the Yoruba acquiesced in the formation of a new Oyo to replace the old Oyo.

They knew in their heart that the old empire was gone, but they also knew that they needed a new mystical rallying point to preserve the sacred notions of the nationality. If the new hegemon punches above his real weight, the maverick and royalty devouring Ibadan Army was there to put him in his real place. This was the brilliant political motif of an endangered people that Obafemi Awolowo brought to bear on the formation of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa..

The question to ask is whether people and nations need a dash and good dosage of mystery or a splash of political sorcery to preserve their sacred self-notion and to serve as a rallying symbol of unity. The British know that their royal rulers are of German extraction, but they have held on to this noble fable to serve as the ultimate national symbol and talisman. The only special request the Japanese demanded from their American conquerors was to allow them to retain their royalty.

Until the Nigerian political elite sit down to understand and appreciate the strengths and constraints of the diverse cultures that make up the nation and then find the way and will to turn these into resources of redemptive nation building, it will continue to be a dialogue of the deaf in a dying nation. The various pre-independent colonial conferences could not have done this. They were merely pre-tournament briefings before the gladiators were unleashed on themselves in a duel unto death. What a Homeric mayhem it has been!

On a personal note, snooper has very warm and fond memories of Chinua Achebe. He was the first person to publish an academic paper by the columnist. This was in Okike, way back in 1981. He was the very epitome of kindness and courtesy There was a touching correspondence which continued even after snooper relocated to the University of Sheffield in Britain. Thereafter, the post-colonial condition intervened. May the soul of the great man rest in peace.

March 31, 2013
Achebe: A non-romantic view

There is no doubt that Chinua Achebe, who died last week in the United States after a long residence there probably because it was better for him to live there than in Nigeria, was, by many accounts, an outstanding writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), received wide critical acclaim soon after its publication, which came in the wake of the great wave of decolonization. A year before the publication of the novel, Ghana became the first independent African country, in 1957. Things Fall Apart was published at a time when non-Western but Western educated intellectuals and cultural nationalists were looking around for indigenous cultural documents that could vindicate pre-colonial African cultures, in what the British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie once called, in memorable phrase, “writing back to the Centre” (the West).

It was arguably in that context, the urgent need, by the African literati, to produce an African narrative that would vindicate indigenous African cultures which were heavily denigrated by centuries of Western writers, priests, and colonial administrators, rather than the novel’s intrinsic literary merits, that brought Things Fall Apart to prominence, at least within the post-nationalistic African intelligentsia. The same may be said of Achebe’s other novels: their timing, 1960-1966, was fortunate because there was, then, a large literate international English-speaking reading public eager to get access to the new African writing, not to speak of publishers such as Heinemann which were looking to cash in on it all. Again, it was in that context that Achebe’s works were appropriated for all kinds of culture wars, especially within the ranks of militant post-colonial intellectuals.

Achebe’s collection of essays on literature, cultural politics, and colonial history, from the early Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) to the later Hopes and Impediments (1989) and Home and Exile (2000) sealed his reputation as an African or Black cultural critic, activist, and nationalist. His other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), Man of the People (1966), not to mention short stories and poems such as Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971) were widely admired by critics and literary historians for their “realistic” and, some would say, vivid, subtle, and complex portrait of the African, or, at least, “the Nigerian condition”, which, to this day, has persisted in more complicated forms.

Achebe was also the influential editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, between 1962 and 1972. Under his direction, the series published some of the most canonical of African writers such as Alex La Guma, Taha Hussein, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Doris Lessing, Ayi Kwei Armah, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Cheik Hamidou Kane, Okot p’Bitek, and nationalist intellectuals such as Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.

Chiefly because of his first novel, and his pioneering role as the editor of the African Writers Series, many have considered Achebe as the “father of African fiction” (or the founding father, even the grandfather, of modern African literature), a dubious claim that Achebe himself could not accept, since, as he knew in his lifetime, there were many African writers of fiction and non-fiction that wrote compelling accounts of African cultural and social life well before he was born. Claims for Achebe as being the “father of African fiction or literature” are based on a partial and reductive view of Africa’s literary history, or a diminution of African writing to a minor position within the Western literary tradition.

Yet there had been indigenous African writing in native languages. Consider, for example, the case of the Basotho (Lesotho) writer and novelist, Thomas Mopoku Mafolo (1876-1948), the celebrated author of Chaka the Zulu (1912-15?), which many literary historians have called a masterpiece, an epic tragedy, and, in the words of a reviewer, “the earliest major contribution of black Africa to the corpus of modern world literature”. One could cite the example of the celebrated Yoruba writer, D. O. Fagunwa, author of Odo Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1936), or the works of the Arab writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and countless other writers who wrote in Hausa, Tamashek, Amharic, Wolof, and so on. Indeed, no one author or person could have begun what we call today “African writing”. The African literary tradition is far older, more enduring, and more complex than the alleged effort of a single author, however gifted. In any case, the idea of Achebe being the “father of African fiction” is not a scholarly argument but a romantic and naïve one because it ignores the major contributions of pre-colonial African authors and a huge corpus of African writing in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

But whatever the artistic merit of Achebe’s work, which is considerable to say the least, it is in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1988), that his literary-story-telling skills began a terminal decline. Indeed the novel marks a notable decline in his liberal vision and creative acumen. The novel is, by any standard, a trivial thriller and is uneven in linguistic and literary quality. Arguably, large parts of Anthills read like pulp fiction, or a crudely crafted political thriller. The storyline is fragmented; the attempt at covert plotting is unsuccessful; the narrative exposition is slow and cumbrous; the style of representation is too thin and shallow; the plot is threadbare and thin, perhaps even superficial in many instances. The dialogue is unconvincing, heavy, and tedious, and the characterization is one-dimensional. For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the one hand nor Professor Okon, Sam, and Osodi on the other has any emotional and psychological depth. Indeed no character in that novel has convincing uniqueness of character, and none is admirably individuated. Moreover, the characterization and dialogue are stagey, as can be seen in the first person account of the First Witness, Christopher Oriko (Chapter 1) and the dialogue in the opening section of Chapter 2. Anthill is also marred by obliquities of narration and an undisciplined, un-integrated multiplicity of viewpoints: the novel’s attempt at an epic-scale representation of a dystopian land and its failure to offer an intensely imagined, superbly coordinated narrative irony are telling. Yet all this may be accounted for by the novel’s melodramatic structure and the poor quality of its speech representation.

Frankly, Anthills of the Savannah is a disappointing work; little wonder it failed to win the 1987 Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. For example, the novel combines melodrama with a political roman á clef, as can be seen in the closing section of the narrative, the journey on the “Great North Road” (Chapter 17). Indeed, this chapter presents a veiled dystopian narrativization of northern Nigeria, which is variously called “the scrub-land”, “the scorched landscape”, “another country”, “full of dusty fields [and] bottomed baobab tree[s] so strange in appearance”, etc. In this novel, the rainforest (“the rain country”) of the South is favourably contrasted with the “parkland of grass and stunted trees… of mud walls and reddish earth”, the North. One conclusion, which, of course, may be problematic from a strictly literary-critical perspective, is that unlike the Exceptional Southerners, the Northerners don’t know how to make the North “prosperous” (the roads are full of pot holes) so that all the talented, intelligent, hardworking, economically gifted, and industrially-savvy Southerners could migrate to the North (perhaps in the mode of mission civilatrice), which is, as of now, wallowing in economic and social desperation (see the opening pages of Chapter 17).

The novel has other defects as well: the author’s heavily moralized, didactic view of life repeatedly intrudes in the narrative, and, in particular, in the facile and tired representation of the Military Ruler, the Head of Sate. Ikem and Beatrice’s romanticism, their romantic view of social relations, is clearly the real author’s because the entire drift of the narrative is towards a heavily moralized view of life (Light versus Darkness; Enlightenment versus Ignorance; Diligence versus Parasitism).

Yet it is in Achebe’s essay, The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), that his romanticism comes full circle. In that book, Achebe argues that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership… the unwillingness and inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example” (p. 1). This postulation of Achebe’s ignores the deep structural constraints on human action and psychology. It is pre-critical to ignore the complex ways in which social structures mediate, modify, condition, and constrain human choices. Leadership works within institutional, historical, cultural, and economic contexts which place limits on what human agents can and cannot do. This notion of the structural determination of leadership means that a leader has inevitably to work within, and exist in, a system and a political logic whose proper system, laws, and operation his or her “leadership” cannot, by definition, dominate absolutely.

The leader, despite his having a certain measure of freedom, has inevitably to be governed by the system within which he or she exists. And although men and women make their own history, they clearly do not make it as an act of will, or in their own freely-chosen circumstances, but under the structural constraints of the accumulated past and inherited traditions. This is what The Trouble with Nigeria has missed: Nigerian leaders cannot be the miraculous changed men or women of their country but the changed men and women of their country’s changed circumstances. This is the truth of the time-honoured liberal credo that the educator herself needs educating and that if leaders are educators, who will educate the educators?

From this perspective, Achebe’s conception of leadership may properly be called “voluntarism”, even a form of messianic thinking: on Achebe’s flawed logic, all a leader need do is become, by the force of sheer will power, a morally good person, who has only to lead by example rather than by veritable political principles. Achebe’s is another way of saying that Nigeria needs a strong leader, one who has miraculously escaped all the cultural and historical pressures of his community or country; in effect, a messiah. This dubiously Christian view of leadership is a convenient way of avoiding the complex problem of institutional, cultural, and historical constitution of subjectivity and moral choice in a multi-ethic, multi-religious country, one with a large, primordialist, backward-looking civil society. Indeed one reason for the failure of Achebe’s little book to capture the scholarly or popular imagination was its threadbare romanticism and an un-modern (a feudal and mystical) vision of political leadership.

Perhaps Achebe’s most disappointing book, or to phrase matters differently, his most inferior work, is There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012).

As a personal testament, the book vindicates the time-honored dictum that “the personal is political”. Perhaps we need not be critical of Achebe’s passionate defence of his ethnic group, or of the short-lived Biafra, and his role in it. Yet there is something distasteful about open myopia of blind ethnic solidarity or communal jingoism. What is striking about the book is its complete lack of a keen political insight, its petty romantic vision of Nigeria’s political history. For example, consider the book’s astonishing claims, namely that the Igbos wholly deserved their entrenched positions in the military, economic, and bureaucratic structures of pre-civil war Nigeria (“… the Igbos led the nation in virtually every sector— politics, education, commerce, and the arts”, pp. 66-67); that all non-Igbo Nigerians are united by their hatred for the Igbo ethnic group; and that British rule in Nigeria and elsewhere was not, as popularly assumed, an unmitigated disaster. According to Achebe in There was a Country, the British government ruled the Nigerian colony “with considerable care… and competently… British colonies were more or less expertly run” (p. 43). In the same book, however, Achebe accuses British colonial officials of rigging the election and the population census in favour of conservative elements such as Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto from the “Islamic territories” (p. 46; Achebe does not say that the Igbo were from the “Christian territories”), people who “had played no real part in the struggle for independence” (p. 52). In addition, for Achebe it was the behaviour of the British that sowed the seeds of Nigeria’s eventual descent into civil war. If indeed Achebe has this rosy view of colonial rule, then his entire corpus of anti-colonial polemic and cultural nationalism has been in vain, or, in a way, a hypocritical effort at self-publicity.

Worse, Achebe argues, in an astonishing moment of historical revisionism, that the originators of the very idea of one-Nigeria were “leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region” (p. 52). This may explain why he credits Nnamdi Azikiwe with the enviable position of being “father of African independence” (“There was no question at all about that”, (p. 41). In sum, then, there are many instances of sloppy argument and poor judgment in the book, as, for example, Achebe’s claim that Nigeria failed to develop because the Igbo, despite their “competitive individualism” and a unique “adventurous spirit”, were excluded from Nigerian economic, social, and political life. Examples of Achebe’s unsophisticated political perception of things are, first, his lack of political sensitivity concerning non-Igbo political leaders such as Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The first two are seen by Achebe as ruled by inordinate ambition (“resuscitated ethnic pride”) and conservative traditionalism respectively. The latter Achebe almost casts into the role of a lackey of the Western world, which, he claims, turned (“built up”) Balewa through flattery into a great statesman (p. 51).

It is thus fair to say that, in There was a Country at least, Achebe is an overwhelmingly “ethnic nationalist”, an “Igbo-phile” (or a philo-Igbonis, to coin a new term), and a Biafra apologist to boot. He is, in this book at least, a homo duplex, the Double Man, in effect, both Biafran and Nigerian; Igbophile and Nationalist; Anti-colonial Writer and a Post-colonial Apologist of Expert British Rule. This should explain why the book has a schizoid thematic orchestration and its claims pressed within a phlegmatic stylistic mode, which, again and again, has proved incapable of sustained irony. Surely, then, There was a Country is a patchwork of Achebe’s deep, even unconscious, prejudices. In one moment after another, the book fails to offer a finely integrated presentation of a realistic historical, geographical, economic, and culturally diverse, though troubled, country.

So while I pay tribute to this important novelist and essayist, I should remark, at the same time, that we should not, in our romantic rush to venerate our little (culture) heroes, forget earlier illustrious and master English-speaking storytellers such Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) and Cyprian Odiatu Ekwensi (1921-2007). Their books, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town (written 1946 and published in 1952) and People of the City (1954), are two outstanding pieces of literature and narrative self-assertion that blazed the trail in modern, English-speaking African fiction writing. In the same manner, while we pay tribute to Achebe and his literary legacy, let us not also forget great post-colonial African storytellers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Sambene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiog’o, and, not least, the incomparable Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi, the author, in my opinion, of the finest African novel ever—Going Down River Road (1977).

As for Achebe, I say “goodbye”; for there was indeed a great novelist, but who, tragically, had to write the greatest anti-novel of his career—There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano

March 26, 2013.

March 31, 2013
Oteh vs the House: Bad laws and blackmail

The latest episode of the long-running Arunma Oteh versus House of Representatives soap opera ought to be subtitled: Episode 10 – Bad laws and Blackmail.

At this point the lady would be wishing she had devoted more time to studying the fine art of diplomacy and ego massage, before dumping her cushy job as Vice President for Corporate Development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) in order to become an Abuja powerhouse as Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Given that early in her tenure she set out an agenda for cleaning out the capital market and taking on entrenched interests, it was inevitable that she would get into pretty serious fights. Some of those slugfests have been brutal affairs – with little or no provision for civility.

Remember the clash of the amazons? In the red corner brimming with reformist zeal was Oteh; in the blue corner was the hulking presence of the longstanding boss of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke.

Despite the bruising nature of that engagement, it is not the reason that the SEC DG’s tumultuous reign now faces the very real threat of an abrupt and ignominious termination. Credit for that must go to the infamous clash last year at a public hearing on the collapse of the Nigerian capital market called by the House Committee on Capital Markets and other Financial Institutions.

Most readers will recall the heated exchanges between Oteh and committee chairman, Herman Hembe, and the lurid tales of bribes solicited and given on both sides. The grubby exchange led to the fall of the chairman and the dissolution of his committee.

Oteh only fared slightly better. She was asked to proceed on compulsory leave by the SEC board, pending an independent investigation into the management of Project 50, a programme put together by her to commemorate 50 years of the capital market in Nigeria. Although the board-ordered probe by PricewaterhouseCoopers will clear her of any financial impropriety – opening the way for her return to office, the definitive battle of her tenure was just beginning to take shape.

If Oteh’s interaction with the Hembe committee was prickly, it was not much better with the successor committee. Offended legislators bided their time – waiting to exact their pound of flesh.

In short order they came up with a report that was anything but laudatory for the SEC boss. One of the most contentious conclusions reached was that Oteh was not qualified to head the commission because she did not possess the requisite professional qualification prescribed in the Securities and Exchange Commission Act for appointment to the office of Director-General.

Flowing from this, the House issued the non-negotiable decree that President Goodluck Jonathan fired the lady. Aso Rock’s understanding of the position of the legislators was that their resolution was advisory and not binding on the president.

In order to make it clear that this was not friendly advice but an order, the legislators have turned the screws tighter by making no provision whatsoever for SEC in the 2013 budget. They have even gone a step further by warning the president not to think of funding commission – even from private sources.

Let’s explain this by saying that the commission has not been scrapped; but it will only receive funding again after the DG had been kicked out of office.

First, what we have here is a shameful instance of a law being tailor-made to target an individual. Secondly, we are confronted not by the regular saber-rattling of legislators, but an unapologetic attempt to blackmail the president to do their bidding. I wish there was a more elegant way to put it, but blackmail has an unmistakable smell to it.

If the House had stopped by publishing the report of its committee indicting Oteh, and left Jonathan to deal with the moral burden of leaving in office an individual whose reputation had been damaged by the legislators’ findings, most people would have backed them.

Unfortunately, in this case as in many others, we see lawmakers engaging in overreach. The legislators of the Fourth Republic are particularly guilty of this tendency. They are not the sort of lawmakers Nigerians knew in the First, Second or Third Republics, but a hybrid variety that see themselves straddling legislative and executive roles.

This crisis of identity, and confusion over what their true role should be, comes across even in the language of their engagement with agents of the executive branch. And so from day to day we’re regaled with reports of the “summons” issued to one minister, or the latest threat to arrest the head of some government parastatal for tardiness in responding to legislative invitations.

In 1999, the first class of Fourth Republic legislators prepared the foundation for the crisis we see today, by manipulating the budget to introduce what they called “community projects.”

These were not altruistic or well-thought out development projects, but rather showy, populist undertakings to create the impression that the lawmakers had “done something” for their people during their tenure. The injection of these extraneous items altered the shape of the federal budgets designed by the executive, and provided the ground for the earliest fights between then President Olusegun Obasanjo and the lawmakers.

Unfortunately for our democracy, the class of 1999 successfully blackmailed the executive, and every president ever since has had to live with the nightmare of legislators who do not know where their territory begins and ends.

Elsewhere what happens is that legislators lobby the executive branch to site choice projects in their constituencies in exchange for support for the administration’s legislative agenda. The lawmaker then gets credit for attracting such a project to his constituency. It is what the Americans refer to as “pork barrel” bills.

Returning to Oteh, the demands of the House actually put the National Assembly as an institution in an awkward position. Let’s not forget that the Senate cleared her in 2010 and declared she was fit for the role. So if anyone deserves flak for her appointment it is the senators who approved her appointment three years ago.

The lawmakers who are always quick to assert their independence, should accord that same right to the executive. Oteh is an appointee of the president and it is only fair and proper that he be allowed to determine whether she is up to the demands of her office. The sort of bald-faced pressure being put on Jonathan to sack the lady is an unseemly abuse of legislative power.

What they are doing may not be the best for separation of powers in our democracy, yet the legislators may just get their way. The president has displayed over time, a tendency to buckle in the face of the least pressure from ornery lawmakers.

He doesn’t have the bloody-mindedness of an Obasanjo who will sometimes dare his interlocutors to tip the whole democratic project into the ravine, rather than succumb to blatant blackmail. And that is bad news for Oteh.

At a time when she thinks its peace and safety, he will dump her to appease the gods of Apo, just as he did with Dr. Harold Demuren, the erstwhile Director General of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). Following the Dana Air crash last year, the legislators demanded his head on a platter. In due season, Jonathan duly obliged.

March 31, 2013
Sacrifice of love

The Easter period means different things to different people. For non-Christians, the Easter period is just another of our numerous holidays to rest and do some of the things they have not attended to due to their normal work day hectic schedule.

But for Bible-believing Christians, Easter is the core of Christianity. It is about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a reminder of when the only begotten son of God that had no sin was offered to die for the redemption of the sin of man.

It is a practical demonstration of unconditional love of God towards a sinful world when in his infinite mercies. He gave his son as a sacrifice. Jesus was crucified on what has come to be known as Good Friday and he rose from death like no other has on Easter Sunday. As we mark the Easter, the real reason for the season must not be lost on us all irrespective of whatever faith we profess.

Some churches usually reenact Jesus, journey to Golgoltha when he carried his cross and was subjected to all manner of beatings and humiliation. I hope those involved in the drama and others who watch don’t only enjoy the fun of the reenactment but are sobered by the sacrifice Jesus made for our sake .Watching Passion of the Christ film, which some argue is an overdramatisation of what Jesus experienced, for me really drives home the severity of the sacrifice. I fought back tears like many others who watched it experienced the same feeling.

However, and the question to ask is that if Jesus suffered that much to erase the sins of especially those of us who claim to be Christians why do we keep indulging in sins? Being a Christian is to be Christ-like but not many are. Not many Christians live as if they have ever read the ten commandments.

Although claiming to be a born again Christian has become fashionable and Churches are springing daily across the country, there is not enough evidence that Jesus, death means anything to many who say they are his followers.

If it does, and Easter is not just another holiday, as it is for others, many Christians will not indulge in sinful acts as they do nowadays. It used to be that when people claimed to be Christians that they could be trusted to be above board but that is no longer the case.

So many occupying top political and corporate positions who claim to be Christians have been found guilty of all kinds of corrupt practices that no one is impressed by such claims.

This Easter should be another opportunity for all followers of Christ to truly be like him not only in words but in deed.

I have been impressed by Pope Francis who has demonstrated what it is to really be a humble servant of God and hope that other Church leaders who live large at the expense of their followers will learn from his example.

Easter is a lesson in sacrifice of love through giving. Are you giving enough to the needy around you ? Do you love your neighbour as much as yourself?

March 31, 2013
The dem say, dem say governor

Bayelsa governor has added something new to media lexicon

Many students of Mass Communication, University of Lagos, taught by Prof Ralph Akinfeleye would remember the book, Essentials of Modern African Journalism: a Premier, authored by the lecturer. In it, Prof Akinfeleye talked about different kinds of journalism. Akinfeleye talked, for instance, of ‘Journalism of Next-of-Kin’, ‘Cocktail Journalism’, ‘Journalism of’ Gin and Lime’ and Journalism of the General Order’. All, I guess, are self-explanatory. To these four, however, Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State has added a fifth: dem say, dem say journalism. I must confess it is after this ‘invention’ that I am beginning to be convinced that the Bayelsa State governor is highly resourceful. Even Prof Akinfeleye must be wondering why in all his decades of teaching and talking mass communication, it never occurred to him that such journalism should be listed in his book, in spite of its prevalence in our clime. Your Excellency, I doff my hat!

As a matter of fact, doffing my hat can never be enough in this situation, because, as a Bayelsan, the governor himself has all kinds of hats and he must have seen many people doff all manner of hats for him. What, in my view should be adequate compensation for this erudition on the part of His Excellency is for Prof Akinfeleye to return, as a matter of urgency, to his publishers for a more recent edition of the book, to accommodate the all-important addition by the governor, while readers must be ready to grab their copies, NOW! Indeed, those of us who graduated based on only what Prof Akinfeleye wrote in his book should be recalled and made to ‘repeat’ the course, to see if we have taken note of Governor Dickson’s contribution. Journalism scholars and students alike worldwide owe His Excellency a world of gratitude for this creativity. Imagine what we have been missing until now that the governor woke us from our academic slumber to this ‘local content’, a thing we have been trying to achieve in all spheres of life without success. This is such a serious matter that I would have loved to prevail on the University of Lagos (my alma mater) to endow a chair in the great university on his behalf, if such an important discovery had come from Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State, so that it could at least benefit from the Akwa Ibom governor’s uncommon generosity.

But Bayelsa State is fast becoming a recurring decimal in the news of late, and particularly since President Jonathan assumed office. Things have been happening in that state at the speed of light that it is almost difficult to chronicle them in a single piece. Not to worry; we shall try to mention a few, of which dem say, dem say journalism is just the latest. There is also this unusual hospitality, at least by and to ‘their ogas at the very top’. They hardly repay good with evil. President Jonathan demonstrated this attribute in his recent pardon granted his former boss, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who was convicted for fraud. The President saw nothing wrong or unusual in that action; in fact, he was shocked that the rest of us were shocked by it when we should be praising him. He was not alone; indeed, many people in Bayelsa openly jubilated over the presidential pardon. Obviously, the people were not on the same page with the rest of us, or vice versa. I was sad over that pardon because the President forgot to admonish his former boss to ‘steal no more’. After all, Jesus Christ who pardoned the woman ‘charged’ with adultery (as if she could have done it all with herself) added that proviso: ‘go but sin no more’. Since there was no such condition or conditionality in the presidential pardon for Alamieyeseigha, the man appears to have a blanket cheque, meaning that he can do it again and again and expect to be pardoned all the time, at least for as long as ‘their son’ is in power!

Governor Seriake too did what many of us regarded as unthinkable when in July last year he appointed Patience Jonathan, the President’s wife, as permanent Secretary in the state civil service. Recall also that the other day, President Jonathan expressed surprise as regards how Channels Television ‘penetrated’ the police college to expose the rot there when he should have thanked the television station for a job well done. In like manner, Governor Dickson too did not appear concerned about what could be the fertiliser for dem say, dem say journalism. All that matters to him is the proscription of this aspect of journalism. It did not strike him that dem say, dem say journalism thrives when information is not readily available.

In spite of whatever misgivings we might have about some of these somewhat unsavoury developments, however, I am glad to announce that they still have a redeeming feature. At least they offer some comic relief that is good for our health as Nigerians who are daily being bombarded with news from high places that can only further reduce life expectancy in the country. The fact is that the polity has been too hard and dry, and we can only imagine what damage this can do to our health. People like Governors Rochas Okorocha of Imo State and Dickson may not know it; they are somewhat helping in their own little ways to reduce stress in the land.

Imagine how Okorocha’s two-weeklong holiday to the Igbo people in his state last December made many of us to roar with laughter not just for its novelty but more for its ‘creativeness’. And the other day when Dickson too laboured in vain to justify the appointment of Mrs Jonathan as permanent secretary, many of us nearly rolled on the floor over the absurdity of the excuse given. Yes, we may say that the kind of comic relief we are getting from our politicians these days is not as imaginative as the ones we got from, say Hon. Adegoke Adelabu, the inventor of the word ‘penkelemeesi’ (peculiar mess) in the First Republic; or the Late Barkin Zuwo, former Governor of Kano State in the Second Republic who asked soldiers that found millions of naira in his house what was funny in finding government money at the Government House.

The fact is, since the demise of Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu (remember him?)who said he was entitled to a liberal slice of Oyo State government largesse), we have missed some of these hilarious actions. But it appears all hope is not lost, with Governors Okorocha and Dickson struggling to fill the vacuum left by some of these comedians of old. If there is a decline in the level of their performance compared to the great ones that are now departed, it is just a reflection of the country where the only things on the rise are the parochial, the bad and the ugly. Standards in every good area have been on the decline. So, we can still make do with the substandard comic relief; after all, half comic relief is better than none.

From my email

Just read your column of Sunday March 24, Tunji. Metaphorically speaking, full deregulation of the oil industry is the President’s haughty but subtle way of telling Nigerians that after all the oil comes from Ijaw land, so he can decide what to do with it. But until he foolishly completes the deregulation, neither he nor his advisers can imagine how suffering Nigerians will react. Please hide my identity. Happy Sunday.

March 31, 2013
Generation of change: young and old people in culture 1

Continuity and change come from collaboration between old and young persons in any society.

In the last two weeks, one of Nigeria’s foremost literary and cultural critics, Biodun Jeyifo currently of Harvard University, drew the nation’s attention to the imperative of active intra-generational and inter-genera-tional dialogue. Almost unanticipated by Jeyifo, his call for constant sharing of ideas and values across age groups became two weeks after his essays in The Nation, the central theme in the festival of ideas that marked this year’s birthday anniversary of one of the country’s most daring politicians, Bola Tinubu, graphically titled: “Beyond Mergers: A National Movement for Change-A New Generation Speaks.

The purpose of today’s column is not to celebrate or critique either Jeyifo’s insights or the conceptual energy of the young people that tried to create paradigm shifts for Nigeria’s politics at the birthday colloquium in honour of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu last Thursday. The purpose of today’s essay is to move the discourse of the imperative of dialogue across generational divides to the popular medium, with the hope of mobilising senior and junior citizens to participate actively in how their lives are shaped by those who happen to win elections and thus have the chance to rule over the lives of our people across generational and ethnic spectrum.

Before I am accused of plagiarism, I acknowledge that my title is an adaptation of the 2008 Report of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) titled: Generation of Change: Young People and Culture. Unlike the focus of UNFPA’s report, the focus in my series is not on the interplay between culture and subculture. It is on the belief in several African communities from time immemorial that continuity and change come from unfettered collaboration between old and young persons in any society that sets out to survive. In other words, change is created by individuals who understand their culture and appreciate the need to modify or transform it, without necessarily having to lose it altogether.

In Yoruba society, there are sayings that repeat the importance of perpetual dialogue across generational lines. Omodegbon-agbagbon ni a fi da ile ife (It is through the wisdom of the old and the young that Ife civilization was created). Omodewo, agbawo, ohunti a bajijowogigunniigun (It is the integration of the perspectives of the old and the young that engenders excellence or balance).Owoomodeko to pepe, tiagbalagbakowoakengbe (the skills of the old and the young differ, for the reason that different problems can be solved by both groups for the sake of all.

Since we are in the season of celebrating the life of one of the world’s best minds, Chinua Achebe, let us borrow some elements of his discourse of change in this first piece. Achebe, before he left us, created many memorable characters and scenarios that illustrate the inevitability of change and the fact that both old and young people have to serve as instruments of change, in their own common interest. For every rigid character of the status-quo, Achebe created a literary foil that exudes flexibility and embodies the realization that reality is forever dynamic. It is the same Umuofia of Things Fall Apart that produced Okonkwo, the over masculine symbol of power that also produced Obierika, a critical thinker and an intellectual that is given to weighing the pros and cons of what is on the ground and what can be on the ground.Obierika was in Umuofia almost a proto-typical embodiment of what we call Futures study today. The same milieu also createdUchendu,Okonkwo’s maternal uncle in Mbanta, his mother’s village in which he was in punitive exile for seven years. When Okonkwo relished calling Nwoye effeminate for joining the new religious movement imported by the white man, Uchendu saved the boy from being choked by Okonkwo, and thus gave Nwoye the opportunity to move from a pre-literate to literate milieu, the beginning of a new world for people of an old world.It is instructive that the burden or trauma of change affected both Okonkwo and Nwoye, but in different ways as Achebe wanted his readers to experience.

Similarly, it is the same Umuaro of Arrow of God that produced Ezeulu, the man with monastic attachment to rituals and Akuebue, Ezeulu’s confidant that always reminded him of the need to acknowledge the inevitability of viewing life or the world as a masquerade dance, which irresistibly requires those that want to avoid becoming a dinosaur to be prepared at all times to move or change.It was Akuebue that counseled Ezeulu against being one-dimensional, especially in the latter’s assessment of his favourite son, Obika, whose death caused Ezeulu’s insanity at the end of the novel.

Furthermore, it is the same culture that created Chief Nanga that also createdMr. Odili in A Man of the People.Odili is privileged in this novel to witness the transitioning of Nanga, a former youthful school teacher of his into a corrupt politician without qualms. Odili tries in the world of this novel to see his youthfulness as the basis of the difference between him and Nanga ideologically. Regretfully, Odili is made to realise that the right vision and values for society has nothing to do with age, when he comes to learn of Josiah’s stealing of the walking stick of a blind man in the village in which Odili teaches, for the purpose of using the stick to turn his customers into blind buyers.

To be continued

March 31, 2013
‘Haha, Prof, Where Is Your Car?’ – A Lay, Secular Sermon In A Light Mood

A nrin nile, inu n b’elesin [We have nowhere else on which to walk, still the men on horseback resent our right to a little patch of the earth]

A Yoruba proverb whose origin lies in the emergence of mounted nobles as a distinct social group in West Africa.

A lay, secular sermon? Yes. After all, this column appears on Sundays, the day on which Christians normally expect either verbal or written sermons to be delivered. This is why, dear readers, this “sermon” comes to you today. As a matter of fact, I wish to seize the occasion of this first “sermon” to now inform readers of this column that from time to time, I shall devote the column to this special genre of the secular sermon that takes its name, its expressive identity from the fact that I am neither a priest nor a religionist in the conventional sense of the term. This in effect means that a secular sermon is addressed not to a select band of the faithful, but to the considerably wide and non-exclusionary community of the intellectually curious, the imaginatively adventurous and the truly democracy inclined. This is what today and from time to time I shall serve as a discursive “dish”, a “stew” for the imaginative palate of readers of this column.

On that note, let us move to the theme for this first ‘sermon’ which, quite simply, is this: Walk, compatriots, walk. Walk even if you belong to the tiny group of super-rich Nigerians and own more than three, four or five cars; walk as often as is practicable and convenient; walk whenever and wherever you can; it is good for your health and even better for your soul. Walk, compatriot, walk.

I admit it: this theme was prompted by the question that serves as the first part of the title of this essay: “Haha, Prof, where is your car?” I have now lost count of the number of times that my neighbours at Oke-Bola, Ibadan, have asked me that question when they have seen me in any part of the city walking. No matter how far from or conversely, how close I am to my house that is located at the “Seventh-Day” area of Oke-Bola, I am confronted by my neighbours, this question is always automatically posed to me: “Haha, Prof, where is your car?” Of course, the question is usually posed with far greater incredulity when I am as far from my house as Mokola or even Adamasingba as when I am seen walking closer to home, say at Dugbe or Gbagi. The presumption at the back of this question is of course unmistakable and it is this: As a “Prof”, as a member of the tiny elite in the neighborhood with a house of my own and a car, why am I without my car and out walking as ordinary, non-elite Nigerians do as a routine part of their daily life, their normal existence?

Now before I address the reasoning, the mesh of presuppositions and assumptions, behind this question as the main body of this “sermon”, let me first of all say that my injunction to the readers of this column to walk whenever and wherever practicable or convenient has little or nothing to do with the fact that in the rich countries of the world, walking has become a faddish thing that the wealthy, the powerful and the famous do as part of their daily or weekly social or interactional rituals. Jogging or “working-out” in the gym are related or ancillary practices, but walking is the primary or the most telling indication of the abandonment of cars in order to take up other means of either necessary or voluntary physical exercise. Beside this, walking is also the ultimate mark of being health-conscious and/or being motivated by the do-gooder high-mindedness of raising money for noble and charitable causes through the so-called “walkathons”.

Of course, I am not indifferent to the fact that this particular fad around walking in the rich countries of the world has very sound justification in the proven health benefits that come from or with walking as a daily exercise. And to be completely honest about this matter, I have myself sometimes participated in “walkathons” in which thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people walk tens or scores of kilometers to raise funds for charitable causes. No, compatriots, I am not opposed to these faddish or charitable reasons for walking as a worthwhile practice, mostly in the rich countries. But these are not the reasons why, in a poor-income country like Nigeria, I am in this “sermon” asking you, my dear readers, to walk, especially those of you with one, two, three or four cars. [Some economists and sociologists swear that ours is now a middle-income economy. I disagree. But that is another matter entirely]

Now, to get back to the question itself that prompted the theme of this “sermon”, “Haha, Prof, where is your car?”, we must of course recognize that the fundamental assumption behind the question is that walking in our cities is – or has become – so unappealing, so soul-wearying that those who can afford not to walk are considered downright crazy if they choose to walk, I mean actually walk. One sure proof of this assertion is that I am yet to meet any neighbour of mine who has seemed satisfied with the answer I give anytime the question is put to me: I walk because I like walking, because once a while and if the distance is not too great, I like to abandon my car and, yes, walk. I really and truly am yet to meet any neighbour who has accepted this answer, at least on face value.

Well, who can blame my neighbours for this skepticism? Is it not an open secret that the streets of virtually all our towns and cities belong almost exclusively to the masses of ordinary Nigerians for the simple reason that, by overwhelming numbers, our elites simply never walk unless they absolutely have to and even then for only very short distances? And is it not well-known that walking in the streets of our towns and cities is often a very unpleasant experience as there are virtually no pavements to walk on, and even no unpaved but cleared dirt patches for pedestrians to walk in safe margins from the paved swathes of asphalt meant exclusively for the cars and other vehicular machines? [Some optimistic activists say that the day is almost upon us when a “Pedestrians’ Freedom Charter” will be drafted and universally proclaimed to bring these matters to the forefront of prospects for progress in our country. I wish this were true, but I don’t think so. But that is another matter entirely]

It is hard not to draw the appropriate conclusions from realities and conditions that are as palpably Nigerian as these: Just as we do not have patient-friendly hospitals and clinics, so also do we not have walker- or pedestrian-friendly towns and cities. I give the personal testimony of my own experience here with regard to the many, many times in which I have just barely escaped being knocked down and badly injured or even killed by the cars and vehicular contraptions that are the kings of the streets of our towns and cities all of which are forever struggling amongst themselves for vastly cramped and inadequate spaces. One could say that the danfos, the okadas and the maruwas are the worst offenders, but if the truth and nothing but the whole truth must be told, then it must be admitted that the glitzy cars of the elites are as well highly culpable for making walking in our cities and towns so unsafe, so dire. At any rate, I believe this is the ultimate basis of my neighbours’ skepticism anytime I tell them that my passion for walking is the only reason why I leave my car at home and take to the streets on my own God-given “footwagen”, this hugely significant fact that our cities and towns are so dangerously and even destructively pedestrian-unfriendly that it seems to defy logic – and the simple laws of self-preservation – that anyone who does not have to, anyone who has a choice in the matter will actually abandon his or her car and – walk.

I swear that as far as I am aware of my own conscious acts and subconscious impulses and drives, I have neither a death-wish nor a masochistic streak. In other words, I leave my car at home and often walk the streets of the most traffic-congested parts of the city of Ibadan neither because I wish to make a virtue of self-mortification nor because I wish to make or prove a point. If there is any compulsive behaviour at all on my part in this matter, it is this: All my life I have passionately loved walking and find that I cannot or will not give it up now that I have a car and can afford to keep its fuel tank full as constantly as I wish. And there is a quite rational, quite calculated factor as well: over the years and decades, as the streets of Ibadan and other Nigerian cities have become more and more pedestrian-unfriendly, I have learnt to devise strategies and tactics of maximizing my safety on the road while walking. For instance, for the most part, I try to keep as clear of the edge of the paved part of the road as possible. This greatly reduces the number of errant okadas and danfos that could plow into me and knock me down. There is also this: Unless it is extremely arduous and really unhelpful, I generally walk against the flow of oncoming traffic so that I can quite clearly see what I am walking against and what is hurtling towards me. [Many vehicular contraptions plying our roads also engage in this defensive countermove of driving against the flow of traffic. I doubt that they do this for the same reason that I walk against the flow of traffic. But that also is another matter entirely]

In the same manner in which our elites in recent years have more and more taken to air travel and abandoned the country’s inter-city and inter-state roads and highways for the great danger that they pose to all travelers regardless of class, our elites also more and more do not walk in our towns and cities because it is arduous, unappealing and dangerous. However, this does not mean that those of us who belong to this class who still walk are heroes; we are just diehard romantics who will try to keep walking for as long as we live above the earth before are eventually buried in it. This is why the theme of this ‘sermon’ is walk, compatriot, walk. The right and the need to walk as much as one can and wishes is a right that has been lost, won back and lost again over the ages from the time when horses and horse-drawn carriages began to crowd out human feet from the streets and roads of the world. This is what is captured in the epigraph to this essay: “We have nowhere else on which to walk, still the men on horseback resent our right to a little patch of the earth”. Horses and horse-drawn carriages have been completely replaced by automobiles and still those who have or wish to walk, simply walk, have a hard time in our cities and towns.

Thus, the struggle continues. Walk, compatriot, walk. [This may open out to and connect with the great struggles for justice, equality and dignity for all in our country. I hope so, but do not know for sure. But that is another matter entirely]

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 31, 2013
And a happy Easter to you too…

Really! Can a people hate their own country so much?

I know, I know, you wish me a happy Easter, right? Believe me, I would wish you a happier one but for these very unhappy times we are living in. Before you can recover from one piece of bad news, another one has taken its place, and before you can recover from even that, a worse one is already unfolding so much so people’s heads are turning of their own accord in every direction preening for where next the fly will enter the ointment from: north, south, east or west. Seriously, what bothers me about these happenings is the fact that we Nigerians are getting more and more used to living with death or kidnapping or embezzling or bad governance all around the place so much so that life is beginning not to mean anything again. That means we are getting desensitised to what exactly we call badness because we are not given enough time to recover from the last one and raise up our defences. Too many bad things are happening too rapidly, and nearly all are man-made. This is why a notion is going around that badness belongs to the black man. Now, where on earth could that idea have come have from?

The other day, someone was telling me how he longed to have a conversation with God. He said if he got the chance, he would ask the almighty only one question: what does He have against the black race? Why cannot a black nation, any at all, manage its own affairs successfully? When I asked why, he looked at me and answered me with another question, you know, the way you do when you are asking your brain to think, and all it is doing is jiggling around on a spot like a key hooked in its lock. It won’t unlock the door as you want it to, and it won’t come out of the blessed lock. So, he asked me why I, of all people, was asking him that question. I asked him in return how many black nations he knew could not get their affairs right? I think the questions were going too frequently to and fro, so someone had to end it. None, he said. I informed him that there are many other nations in the world run by white people which had bad governments too. He challenged me to name one black country in the world running a good government right now, and don’t bother naming South Africa, he told me; we all know why there is some modicum of organisation there. Finally for answer, I did not answer.

Seriously, the question needs to be asked, is there something wrong with the brain of the black man that makes him so incapable of thinking things through? Why does it appear as if the black man has given over the efforts of thinking, and has thrown all his efforts behind taking as much money as possible out of any position he gets into, without bothering about the future of that place? Why, eh, why? Why can’t he, for instance, even think of maybe getting someone to sweep the room or clean the chair he sits on for a change? Worse still, much of what is stolen from our impoverished black countries end up in the pockets of white people’s banks which use them to develop their own countries so that black people can continue to hanker after the comforts provided by those white people’s countries so that they (the blacks, not the whites) can steal more of their countries’ funds and continue to pour them down the pockets of those (the white people’s) banks so that … and on and on and on. Wow, that was quite tiring.

Listen, I am at my wit’s end trying to understand this problem. Whenever I have heard that someone had, well, helped himself to a lot more than his salary allowed from the funds entrusted into his/her care and stowed it away somewhere in the Cayman Islands or Swiss banks or American banks where the supposed investigative moths of the government cannot reach, I have often wondered what it is all about. Soon, you see, that bad news would invariably be followed by another piece that says that the said stower or stowee has been struck down by one illness or gun or bomb or the other, which cannot be undone for all the money in the Cayman Islands. Worse, these monies have a nasty habit of never coming back home, meaning that those in the Cayman Islands and co. get to live the good life on our money while we the deprived get to bite our nails. Really! Can a people hate their own country so much?

This is where we can draw many lessons from this Easter celebration. First we should remember that our Lord Jesus Christ never ran any bank account, whether in Israel or in the Cayman Islands, and yet, he never lacked. Indeed, he is said to have lived the most fulfilled, successful and triumphant life known to man. His main focus was not acquiring wealth, but in living for others and doing the will of the one that sent him. Above all, rather than profit from the misfortunes of others, Christ is known to have sacrificed his life for mankind. In choosing to lose his life then, he gained much more. This is the person we are celebrating today.

We too can live very successful lives if we will just let our focus shift a little bit from contemplating ourselves in the mirror every morning and asking: mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest, greatest, sharpest highway man of all time, and concentrate rather on making the next person’s life a little bit more tolerable for him/her. Then we would have lifted our names from the Honour’s Roll of Common Brigands to the greater and more genuine roll: of those who have lived successfully, for others.

Right now, the guns and bombs and kidnappings are going off every which way in the country, people are being killed or widowed, homes are being wrecked, children are being orphaned … its chaos all the way, and no one is sorry. Yet, someone or some ones are behind these killings: sponsoring, procuring, planning, urging, recruiting, training, etc. And all for money or politics, cause I don’t believe for one moment that the Boko Haram for instance have any religious or altruistic reasons for their mayhem. I just keep wondering: what will these people do when they do get their wish or choice positions? Help themselves to more money? Talk of blood money!

This Easter season, let us contemplate on our deeds and misdeeds and align them with acceptable ideals that can help to lift not just the society but individuals around us to more altruistic heights of development. An individual who misuses the funds in his charge for his own personal use cannot be enriched but is really poor indeed. Someone once said that the man who seeks to make only him/herself rich cannot be, because those ones will soon pull him/her right down again. A truly happy and successful person is the altruistic one. From this Easter, aim to be.

March 31, 2013