The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olukorede Yishau

  • When everything is not enough

    When everything is not enough

    Some people, many a time, expect women to be perfect. They don’t leave room for them to make mistakes, and be vulnerable, and they stereotype them. But, the truth is that they need to make mistakes, learn from the mistakes and emerge better.

    Those are my takeaways from the newly-released ‘Everything Is Not Enough’, the sophomore novel of Lola Akinmade Åkerström. The American edition came first on October 22. The UK and Europe followed on October 26. The Nigerian edition is slated for February 2024.

    The author has held readings in Washington and Richmond, Virginia and New York. The novel is a sequel to Lola’s ‘In Every Mirror She is Black’, which is about Kemi Adeyemi, a marketing executive, who is lured from the U.S. to Sweden by Jonny von Lundin, the CEO of Sweden’s largest marketing firm. Kemi’s immediate task is to help fix a PR fiasco about a racially tone-deaf campaign. It is also about Brittany-Rae Johnson who meets Jonny on the plane on his way to the U.S. This chanced meeting ushers the former model-turned-flight-attendant into a life of wealth, luxury, and privilege. It is also about a Somali refugee named Muna Saheed, whose day job is cleaning the toilets at Jonny’s office.

    Their ordeals did not end in ‘In Every Mirror She Is Black’. ‘Everything Is Not Enough’ tells us more about them and Sweden’s discrimination against black women. It contains twice the drama of ‘In Every Mirror She Is Black’. 

    In this continuation of the stories of Brittany-Rae, Kemi and Yasmin, there is enough drama to keep the reader turning the pages.

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    By the time Yasmin and Brittany’s paths cross, the dramas in their lives are at their peak. Secrets are being unearthed, facts are surfacing and what used to be truths become barefaced lies. There are even suspicions that their men are mean fellows capable of violence of unimaginable proportion.

    At this moment, Kemi’s confusion has taken a leap so high it makes her fear about tomorrow, not just her tomorrow, but that of the significant other growing in her. 

    The men in the novel, like the women, are flawed but some of them are either outright racists or closet ones. Some of them objectify women, especially black women. One of them, despite all his wealth, shows traits of a mental health challenge. Or how else can you explain a man who keeps changing women like mothers change diapers for babies? His fetish for black women borders on the absurd. Simply ridiculous. He is so terrible that everything is not enough for him. 

    This novel also parades a number of memorable fringe characters such as Kehinde, Kemi’s twin sister and moral compass. Though predominantly set in Sweden, some key actions happen in London and Washington. Courtesy of those scenes, we see bits and pieces of these powerful cities. 

    The work also touches on the evil of conflicts, conflicts that displace people and force them to seek refuge in places where even when they spend decades, they will never fully be accepted but just tolerated. Through Ahmed and Afran, the author opens the sore that conflicts represent. Through Yasmin’s parents’ fate, we feel the senselessness in wars and conflicts of any kind.

    All in all, Lola Akinmade creates so much crises that one may worry about how she is going to resolve them. This is one of the aspects that a reader is likely to give her flowers because not only are all the seemingly scattered threads brought together, they are merged with panache and grace and the outcome is a fitting climax to an exhilarating ride!

  • Letter to Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo

    Letter to Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo

    The first time I took note of you was some years back when you were marking a birthday. I can’t remember what age you were celebrating, but I remember that friends and associates took slots in the media to fete you. Since then, I have been following you. And when your name appeared on the ministerial list, and you were first assigned to the Ministry of Blue Economy, and subsequently moved to the Ministry of Interior, I kept tab and looked forward to see what you will accomplish. I must say I was also interested in you because we belong to the same generation.

     Be assured that I write you today neither for death nor sickness. I write you because of our dear country and the role you can play in making it better as the man in charge of the all-important Ministry of Interior.

     First, I commend you for the efforts in easing the chaotic passport acquisition process. But, more should be done and urgently too. We should be able to get our new passports sent to us by courier or NIPOST or EMS Speedpost. They can either be posted through our letterboxes or handed to us if we’re home. In the alternative, a card can be left for us, or a letter can be posted to us about how we can get it. And we should be able to track our passport application using our application reference number.

     Sir, we need to get to a stage where Nigerians, say in the United States, do not have to travel all the way to Atlanta, Washington DC or New York to get their passport renewed. American citizens and British citizens have their passports mailed to them anywhere they are in the world, and they don’t have to go through the hell Nigerians overseas go through to renew their passports.

     We should be able to renew by mail if our most recent passport is not damaged, if we have never reported it lost or stolen, if it was issued within the last few years, if it was issued in our current names, and if we can provide evidence of name change. This is what obtains in the United States and the United Kingdom and we should benefit from this.

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     Our correctional centres are areas you also have your job cut out for you. I was glad when you announced the plan to settle the fines for some detainees as a way of decongesting the prisons. This is really commendable.

     Our prisons, I must point out, aren’t correctional in any way. The welfare is poor. Facilities are overstretched and a lot more are wrong. And most times, inmates come out worse than they were.

     Some years back, ex-President Muhammadu Buhari gave assent to the bill that altered the configuration of the country’s prisons’ structure. One of the changes is in its name from Nigerian Prisons Service to Nigerian Correctional Service. This implies reformation of prison inmates than the repressive and punishment outlook associated with Nigerian Prisons Service.

     The law laid a good foundation for modern prison operations in the country. Implementation is what is lacking, and this is where you should make a difference. Overcrowding has to end. The Act has spelt out how this can be achieved. Now is the time to get this done. As spelt out by the law, the correctional service officer must notify the authorities in the state or the Federal Capital Territory, the Attorney-General, the Chief Judge, when a facility attains its full capacity. The inmates must be in human conditions.

     An Amnesty International report notes that more than three in every five prison inmates in Nigeria have not been convicted of any offence. This should end and never be the case again. The awaiting trial population is alarming.

     My final take: Sir, years of infrastructure deficit, which is the bane of proper management of the sector, should be urgently addressed. The old order must give way fast. Our prisons should convert inmates to better citizens capable of contributing to the country’s economy. Now they are perceived as a place of death, horror, despair, diseases, abuses and wickedness reign. We need ultra-modern correctional centers in line with provisions of the Act.

     Several of our prisons were built by the colonial administration and are expectedly old and antiquated and prone to jail breaks. The reform should include the construction of befitting correctional centres.

     For now, I wish you well in your delicate assignment and pray posterity will have kind words to say about you.

    Bye for now!

  • This thing called accent

    This thing called accent

    It was funny then. It is still funny each time it comes to my mind. The fact that it happens over a decade ago hasn’t stopped it from being funny. This is what happened:

     At some point in my career, I was head-hunted to lead a group of journalists campaigning against tobacco use. This role saw me moving from New York to Singapore to Dar es Salaam and to Accra.

     On one of the trips to the Ghanaian capital, I was a facilitator at a training for some reporters. All through my presentation, I noticed that a lady kept laughing, not too loud but loud enough for me to notice. She cured my curiosity after the session. She said I was speaking in a funny way. By that she meant my accent. Over the years, Nigerians have found the Ghanaian accent funny so it was ‘insulting’ that she faulted my almighty accent. I thought Nigerians were the ones allowed to fault the Ghanaian accent.

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     In the a little less than two years that I have operated from the United States, African Americans have given me the Ghanaian lady’s treatment. Incidentally, I find their accent difficult to comprehend. They don’t speak Queen’s English. A lot of slangs are in their English. When I talk about their accent, they say they don’t have accent. They can tell that to the marines. We all have accents. The British do. The Americans do too. In fact, even within nations, there are more than one accents. In the real sense, within Nigeria, the different nationalities don’t speak English the same way. Americans speak English with different twists too. You need to listen to Scouse and others in the UK to know they also have diverse ways of speaking English.

  • The Bad Immigrant

    The Bad Immigrant

    Telling a little lie here and there to be part of the American dream, to some japa candidates, is a task that must be done. In Sefi Atta’s most recent novel, ‘The Bad Immigrant’, there is an author, Osaro, who was in the academia back in Nigeria. He has a memoir which is taking him to places within and outside the United States for book reading and signing. The memoir is well-received. But when a colleague of his, Lukmon, who just moves with his wife and two children to the US after winning a visa lottery, reads the memoir, he is unable to recognise the person his colleague’s book is about. The details of political persecution and maltreatment in the memoir read like fiction, almost no part of it fits what he knows about Osaro. It is simply meant to arouse pity and confers on him the right to live in America as a political assylee, a situation which makes him avoid the Nigerian community capable of picking holes in his book.

    Osaro’s story is just a subplot in Atta’s new book. The main plot is about the man who discovers Osaro’s fraud, Lukmon, and his wife Moriam, and their children, Taslim and Bashira.

    The Ahmed-Karims’ movement to America is made possible by winning a visa lottery before the American government kicked Nigeria out of the list of eligible nations.

    The novel begins in 1999 shortly after AbdulSalami Abubakar handed power over to Olusegun Obasanjo, and ends well after 2011.

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    As soon as the Ahmed-Karims settle in America, their lives begin to change. Lukmon is forced to take a job as a security officer in a store where shoplifters reign. Moriam studies to qualify to practise nursing and midwifery and their kids start to Americanise. The kids start acquiring American accent. They start speaking “gonna” and “wanna”. They start referring to their parents as “you guys”. They start so many things that are not in tune with the culture back home. Of all of them, Lukmon, who sees himself as “bad immigrant” because he is “not the kind who aspired to be honorary whites,” sticks to his old (Nigerian) ways. The changes breed crises and how the family navigates one crisis after the other is a major plot driving technique. We are treated to a dysfunctional family in which the father and mother argue a lot, and the children are being changed by their new realities.

    After Moriam starts working as a nurse, Lukmon is persuaded to become the househusband, a role strange to his Yoruba heritage. With time, he intensifies efforts to get a job as a Lecturer and when he first gets a temporary job and later a permanent one in Middlesex, tens of miles from their New Jersey base, the family has to confront the challenges of running without a father figure. He returns during a vacation and feels he doesn’t know his family enough. He discovers new things about them and he worries.

    Set in New York, New Jersey and Middlesex, The Bad Immigrant follows the Ahmed-Karims and America, through the eyes of Lukmon. It also follows Nigeria throwing it blows and blows once in a while for corruption, economic inequities and tribalism. The United Kingdom also receives some mentions, especially because the narrator had his Master’s degree there.

    Through Lukmon’s unfiltered voice, we hear acerbic views of male-female relations, race relations, American lifestyles and his fellow Nigerian immigrants. We see race between blacks and whites, between Africans and African Americans. He entertains us with his journey to accept necessary changes.

    We get so much insights into American lives, including how the people, at times, give so much personal information to strangers. We also see their ignorance, about things within their shores and about things outside their shores. We also see how students have freedom to anonymously rate their teachers with opportunity for a response near non-existent.

    Racism, we see, is a reality, which many an American still denies. Denial or not, it leaves the country divided. The craze for Ivy League colleges as though they result in automatic success is also x-rayed.

    The book brings to mind a number of major events in America’s history such as the Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, the 2008 recession caused by Wall Street, the emergence of Barack Obama as first black president, the 2009 Christmas Day underwear bomb attempt, and the killing of Amadou Diallo.

    The novel equally spotlights parenting. The parents fret over the choices of their children, but the children stick to their stands and luckily, as time shows, the fretting could have been done without.

    The book is also about literature. We come across so many books, especially American and African books. Thanks to the narrator’s profession and the university setting in the latter part of the book. The literary and cultural allusions are a delight to read.

    The novel also examines the conditions that predispose Nigerians to leaving home for greener pasture abroad, even when they are aware of the challenges of assimilation in America and other developed nations. Moriam was a nurse in the military hospital in Lagos, where her colleagues were ever disappearing abroad for better opportunities and Lukmon, after a stint as a Lecturer in the state university, became a public relations manager in a bank and soon got bored with the routine of issuing press releases and statements. Both of them were barely getting by and also feared the quality of the education their kids would have amid dwindling cash in government coffers and the corruption that kept universities’ workers on regular strikes.

    In clever and compassionate prose laced with doses of wit, Atta tears apart the American dream. She hides under humorous lines to deliver honest blows about the elusive American dream.

    My final take: Atta’s exposition paints these pictures of America in my mind: A bully, a self-appointed defender of the universe, a nation which looks for troubles overseas, a nation which runs away from race issues yet confronts it every day. Also, America comes across as a nation united and divided in equal measures, and a nation that will always have to watch its back because of the many an enemy it has created for itself.

  • Tomorrow will always come

    Tomorrow will always come

    In the last few weeks, one matter has dominated the attention of Nigerians home and abroad. The matter I refer to is not the fumbling naira; it is not the all-time high petrol price; and it is not the battle over the Office of President. The matter is the sudden death of music star Mohbad, which has seen Nigerians in Houston, Lagos, Abeokuta and many other cities holding rallies. The social media platforms have been on fire. Protests happen on these platforms every minute with videos, audios and printed matters seeking the truth about Mohbad’s death.

    Touts, academics, pastors, journalists, doctors, businessmen and women, artistes and more have one thing or the other to say about his death. His death is a topic that has deviated into talks about DNA, drug abuse, alcoholism and more. 

    His fame quadrupled, topping charts home and abroad, with the download of his songs on platforms such as Apple Music hitting all-time high. His glory boomed after his exit. After his end, a lot is happening. His end is the beginning of so many things. 

    In his last moments on earth, Mohbad left footprints suggesting his life was at risk. Lyrics of his songs pointed to a troubled life, a life being lived on the edge, a life capable of snapping, like a tiny rope, any moment. 

    Two names have been on the lips of Nigerians over his death: Naira Marley and Sam Larry. Naira Marley is a music star who also runs a record label, which at some point signed a deal with Mohbad. The deal went sour and efforts by Mohbad to free himself were resisted. He was beaten, he was slapped, he was molested. Many bad things were done to him. The attacks on him had not ceased by the time he died, and so Naira Marley became the first name that came to the mouths of Nigerians when Mohbad suddenly died. Very few bothered to find out how he died. Clearly he was not shot, he was not stabbed, and neither was he punched to death by Naira Marley or Sam Larry.

    The police have since filled the gaps. This is the story as told by the police: He sustained an injury while trying to punch a friend; he instead hit his hand on a hard stuff. He refused to go to the hospital. A nurse gave him injections. And he died. 

    Naira Marley and others are still being detained by the police and are facing some form of trial, not for killing Mohbad, but for the assaults on him. 

    The music industry has to learn a lesson from this incident. Record owners cheat talents. Talents eager for stardom do not scrutinise deals. They sign blindly and when the money starts coming, trouble starts. They all act as though tomorrow will never come, but it always does and when it does, clarity sets in and wahala comes. 

    It is instructive that SceneOne Entertainment’s mini-series titled ‘She Must Be Obeyed’ debuted on Amazon Prime in the middle of this brouhaha. The five-part mini-series delves into the intriguing world of stardom and secrets.

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    In the beginning, we meet Siyanbola Adewale, a music star who is in contention with another female musician for the Artiste of the Year, a crown the male singers had hitherto won. 

    Siyanbola, whose stage name is She, sees herself as the one that must be obeyed. She penetrates the judging panel and believes with her bribe, she will triumph. Her efforts, however, fail as Tito gets the crown. She becomes bitter but pretends to be happy for her. She reaches into her bag of mischief and her faceless blog, Trolls Kingdom, comes in handy in spreading rumours about Tito’s victory. She organises viral and physical protests to fault Tito’s victory but pleads for the respect of the decision of the judges in public. 

    The loss of the award exposes the beast in Siyanbola and she engages in back-biting and betrayal while maintaining a perfect persona and a near perfect media presence. Siyanbola does anything to trend, including deliberately provoking a rival to slap her and thus receive bad press. 

    Tito refuses to be broken by the rumours around her emergence as Artiste of the Year, thus compounding Siyanbola’s desperation. She digs more into her bags of evil and soon Tito is enmeshed in a sex scandal, and is almost broken before Ex-cite, another female artiste, convinces her to make music out of the scandal and spins it in her favour.

    Aside Siyanbola, it also provides a window into the lives of two other successful music stars, Ex-cite and Tito. Music star Waje plays Ex-cite and BBNaija star Veeiye is Tito.  

    We see the cut-throat routines they engage in to outshine one another and protect their top slots. Aside the main plot, there is a subplot of a family whose father is dead, the mother a drunk, the first son is useless, the daughter is the breadwinner, and the last born is almost losing his university admission because of his mother’s recklessness. 

    There is a very intriguing link between the breadwinner of this family and Siyanbola who runs from music collaboration with local artiste and also avoids doing acapela version of her songs. She also doesn’t go to the studio with any member of her team, and there are outings she drives herself to. The reason behind these is heart-rending and a source of tears to the breadwinner. 

    We see high drama, unyielding ambition, obsession, avarice, hubris, and scheming. 

    The series also deals with the issue of contracts in the entertainment industry where talents are exploited and the role talents’ desperation plays in their enslavement. 

    It also shows how musicians get scammed because of their desperation for international collaboration and other things. 

    There is also a good dose of comedy, good dialogue and sterling cinematography.

    This riveting series features Funke Akindele, Lateef Adedimeji, Nancy Isime, Akah Anani, Patience Ozokwo, Mike Ezuronye, and Rachael Okonkwo, among others.

    What is portrayed in the series is a fraction of the nonsense going on in the industry. I hope the Naira Marleys in the industry will learn one or two lessons after this and behave better. Many a youth see Naira Marley as their role model. He hasn’t been the kind of model I will recommend to any youth. Will this end the boss-servant relationship between artistes and their signees? Time will tell. 

    My final take: Tomorrow will always come. And when it does, the results of our acts of yesterday and today are released. Some will fail and some will pass. Some will have the opportunity to resit and get new results, and some will see that there is no room for redemption.

  • Despite the rough times

    Despite the rough times

    With one American dollar, we are now sure of at least a thousand naira. Forget the official rate. The fuel price is at all-time high because the subsidy that kept it cheap is almost gone. Almost because if some of it is not left, the price will be more than it is. 

    The floating of the dollar and the near absence of subsidy have far-reaching effects, which, one way or the other, have to abate soonest. 

    Also, in the last few years, our nation has been bedevilled with incidents capable of precipitating a civil war: In the Southeast, police stations are attacked and razed, private properties are set on fire and human beings are felled like fowls. In the Southwest, herdsmen and kidnappers are on the prowl, ethnic champions are singing Oduduwa instead of Hallelujah, and some elders are chorusing to your tent oh Israel. Terrorists-cum-bandits-cum-kidnappers have turned the North into their haven, their territory where they do and undo. 

    Those behind these acts are carrying on as though we want to finish what is left of ourselves. Yet, ours is a blessed nation with gold, oil and gas, tantalite and beauties such as Mambilla Plateau and Farin Ruwa Falls, friendly soils, and a people ready to give their best.

    We have brilliant souls scattered all over the world and doing wonders in their adopted nations. We have a young population that understands the ins and outs of technology and can manipulate it to our advantage. When our average brains go abroad for education, they turn out in flying colours.

    As blessed as we are with these brains, these beauties and these resources, we are also blessed with leaders who, at the sign of a headache, take the next available flight to London or New York for medical examination. We are also blessed with a political class that steal with their future generation in mind; we are fortunate enough to have men and women in positions of authorities all because they want to decorate their garages and wardrobes with the best in automobiles and jewelleries; and we are blessed with leaders who will tell us to pray over a problem or challenge we elect them to resolve.

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    We have in abundance people in positions of authority who still convert commonwealth to theirs and brazenly acquire estates. There are public office holders in Nigeria whose country homes are as big as some villages. Their garages brim with vehicles running into tens; and many are gathering dust. They own homes in Asokoro, Banana Island, Maitama, Ikoyi, GRA Port Harcourt, GRA Enugu and in cities across the world, especially London, New York and Paris — many of them empty and only occupied for a few days throughout the year.

    In our nation, hard work is not the only way of making money. Graduates cannot even get employed. Thousands of graduates roam the streets every day looking for jobs, man-know-man dictates the pace, and we are yet to rid our society of the bribery-to-receive-favour syndrome. Personal interests are sold as general interests. Politicians jump ship to retain their control of the public tills, yet sing at every given opportunity that they are in power to serve and are making sacrifices for the betterment of our nation.

    If God had wanted prayers to be the solution to pervasive poverty, it is not beyond Him. If He had wanted prayers to fix roads, make Nigeria number one on the sustainable development goal index, and stop being the country with the second-highest number of deaths of children under the age of five, He will do it. But He wants us to use our brains, and so no amount of prayers we say can do for us what He expects us to do with our brains!

    The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says no fewer than 250,000 children in Nigeria die on their first day of life. The figure is the second highest in the world, according to the 2017 multi-indicator cluster survey. A child born in Nigeria today, no thanks to this situation, is likely to live till the year 2074, while a child born in Denmark is likely to live until the 22nd century! The quality of life is a different kettle of fish. Most of these children regrettably die from preventable causes such as premature births, complications during delivery, infections like sepsis, malaria and pneumonia. You have shown us times without number that prayers cannot stop this, only policies and programmes can.

    We badly need more investments to grow our economy at a higher rate to be able to lift 100 million people out of poverty.

    The North/South dichotomy is still very real. We still look at the country from this prism. Till this day, the North still does not trust the South and the South does not trust the North. And in the North, the Middle Belt is dissociating itself from what is known as core North. In the South, the Yoruba, the Igbo and the Niger Delta are also doing their own battles. As it was in the beginning so it is now.

    Our oil reserves have made us unable to think. Oil has been a curse and a blessing. This curse began with the enactment of the Mineral Ordinance by Nigeria’s first Governor-General Sir Frederick Luggard in 1914. In 1937, the British colonial government gave the exclusive rights of exploration and exploitation to Shell D’Arcy, which could not actualise this mandate because of the Second World War, and a year later entered into collaboration with British Petroleum — formerly Anglo-Persian Oil Company— for oil prospection in Nigeria. Their early efforts yielded 450 barrels of crude oil in Akata I Well in 1951. Further successes were made in Oloibiri in 1956 and Bomu Oil Field in 1958, when oil was struck in commercial quantity.

    My final take: Despite the rough times, Nigeria remains ours and, with time, we will have the Nigeria we all will be proud of. We will. 

  • I still celebrate Ayobami Adebayo 

    I still celebrate Ayobami Adebayo 

    The shortlist of six novels for the Booker Prize was released some days ago without ‘A Spell of Good Things’, the sophomore novel of ‘Stay With Me’ author Ayobami Adebayo. The book made the longlist and I was looking forward to it making the shortlist, and possibly clinching the prize, and putting Adebayo on the chart with Ben Okri and Bernardine Evaristo. 

    But despite my wishes not coming through, I still celebrate Adebayo for this novel whose preoccupation is classism: the rich and the poor.

    This heavily political novel is built around Eniola and Wuraola. 

    In the novel, we meet Eniola first through Caro, and later while running errand for his father, and he makes us salivate to the taste of agbalumo, when all he is doing is wish away humiliation and imagining something positive in its place after a vendor spits on him for seeking a newspaper on credit for his job-seeking father. 

    Eniola and Wuraola first cross loosely, but their choices seal their fates. The convergence at the end is devastating. 

    Eniola is a secondary school boy, whose teacher father is out of job because the government of the day deems History and a number of subjects unimportant. So, Eniola’s father and several of his colleagues are shown the exit, a situation which leaves many of them dead ‘after a brief illness’. After losing his job, Eniola’s father apparently becomes depressed and stays most times on his bed and stares at the ceiling from where he one day dashes under the bed when the landlord comes asking for the rent.

    Sorting out school fees for Eniola and his brilliant sister, Busola, feeding them, clothing them and doing anything that requires money become herculean for Eniola’s father, and his mother is forced to resort to picking recyclables on refuse dump to get cash to support the family. It peaks when Eniola’s mother coerces her kids into street begging, a plan she might have thought of after discovering that a supposedly blind beggar isn’t blind after all.

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    Eniola pities his father so much that his “lips grew heavier and heavier whenever he wanted to discuss his school fees with his parents”. So ashamed was Eniolá’s father that he “often seemed slightly surprised and disappointed to have woken up”.

    We also meet Wuraola, a freshly-minted medical doctor, who, unlike Eniola, lives in affluence. Her father, Makinwa, is a successful business owner who indulges his wife’s, Yeye’s, obsession with gold jewelries. Wúràolá’s mother, Yèyé, experienced poverty growing up and sees life as “war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things”. This makes her think of a fallback plan for a rainy day. 

    Yeye also believes that in Nigeria “real wealth was intergenerational, and the way Nigeria was set up, your parentage would often matter more than your qualifications.”

    Wuraola becomes engaged to Lakunle, a newscaster, and son of two professors of Medicine. Kunle is controlling and intrusive. 

    Prof Coker, Lakunle’s father, is challenging a member of the House of Representatives for the governorship ticket of their party, a major driving force for the novel’s plot and structure. 

    During Yeye’s fiftieth birthday party, the House of Representatives’ member threatens Prof Coker to drop off the race. At that party too, Wuraola’s sister calls Kunle by his name and he feels Wuraola is defending her. Her statement about his not studying Medicine so that her sister could address him as Dr Kunle throws him off balance, and he slaps her with guests feeling the ripples.

    The novel of two parallel lives has one father who is able to support his family, and the other castrated by the society and rendered useless to his family. One mother needs not worry about money and the other mother is degraded to the point of begging. The book indicts a political class with little or no concern for our needs, but capitalises on a largely poverty-stricken population to achieve selfish goals. It also calls them out for aiding political factionalism and its resultant violence, which mostly affects the poor on our streets.

    The novel pays homage to some great African novels whose titles serve as the sub-titles for its parts. The first part is named after Sefi Ata’s ‘Everything Good Will Come’, the second part is named after Chika Unigwe’s ‘On Black Sister’s Street’ and the third part is titled ‘Waiting for An Angel’, Helon Habila’s first novel. The fourth part is named after Teju Cole’s ‘Everyday Is for The Thief’ and the last part is named after T.M Aluko’s ‘Foreman’. 

    The book is very tragic that a few tears may be shed because of its climax. The climax is so heart-rending but, as sad as it is, Adebayo’s language use is bound to make a reader feel there should still be more. 

    Its treatment of violence in relationships, especially excuses the victims give to continue staying with the abusive one, is really instructive! 

    The novel is a massive literary achievement and a worthy and more ambitious successor to ‘Stay With Me’. I once recommended it to our leaders and I am renewing my recommendation. They need to read this story of the modern Nigeria, where the rich keep getting richer, and the poor poorer; politicians play politics for pecuniary gains; the life of an average citizen isn’t worth much; infrastructure is at ground zero; values are debased, potentials aren’t fully utilised; leaders are dealers, and the political class sees nothing wrong in shedding some blood to attain political power. The book is a warning about the dangers of classism in our nation with deep economic fissures, underfunded health service and challenges numerous to recount. 

    In this novel, there is a politician in whose house food is always available for anyone who comes into his ever opened gates. But the food is only a tool to enslave people, to capitalise on the poverty of the people. No child of the rich need look for this kind of free food. 

    My final take: The political class has weaponised poverty over the years and they aren’t about to stop. It is left to the people to be discerning. 

    Lastly, Booker or not, I celebrate Ayobami Adebayo for ‘A Spell of Good Things’. 

  • Republic of broken people

    Republic of broken people

    Tessa Jones knows death is coming via end-stage lung cancer. Chemotherapy, she knows, can buy her a few more months but she rejects it because of the pains that come with it. She opts to plan her funeral with her husband. One of the things she hates is people saying nice things behind her back. So, she decides to witness her memorial and have people say all they want while she is here at a Shakespeare-themed going-away ceremony. There, guests dressed in different Shakespearen characters say their goodbyes through poetry, monologues and so on.

    Tessa’s story is the subplot in ‘Love At First Sight’, a movie which debuted on Netflix on September 15, about a British Mathematics nerd and an American babe who meet on the plane from New York to London. The nerd is Oliver, one of Tessa’s two sons. The lady is Hadley, who is attending her father’s second wedding and finds a love she feels doesn’t make sense but all- powerful.

    While seeing this movie, one book kept crowding my head: Chimeka Garricks’ ‘A Broken People’s Playlist’. After the movie, I sought the audio version on Scribd and listened to it all. The reason the book came to my mind while seeing the movie is that one of the twelve stories in this collection is the story of a man who knows he is dying and chooses to witness his own funeral service dressed in designer wear, sunglasses and matching shoes. He wants to have his estranged wife at the service but she ignores him and only comes after he has been cremated. She had wished to spit on his grave for all the domestic violence she experienced while married to him and the sexually transmitted diseases he gave her. But he has no grave because he was cremated.

    The book, first published in Nigeria some years back by Masobe Books, early this year got an international edition done by publishing giant Harper Collins.

    ‘A Broken People’s Playlist’ also has stories about extra-judicial killings, the literal and metaphorical darkness in Nigeria, the corruption, and other ills. It boasts of many unforgettable characters, whose flaws would have made us slap and almost beat to coma if only we could meet them; its prose has the power to make you savour it like palm wine fresh from the tree; and pacing and focus do not suffer from unnecessary swerving in this smooth-singing, hard-hitting collection.

    The collection shows that literature is a reflection of society. The major themes include domestic violence, extra-judicial killings, extra-marital affairs, love, hatred and family. There is a recurring motif of searching for meaning and redemption in this laudable collection.

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    The first story in the collection is about Sira and Kaodini. They had known each other since childhood. They played together, smiled together, cried together, and together they pitied people who assumed that they were lovers. Sira, a lawyer, moves to Lagos and becomes a partner in a law firm. Kaodini stays back in Port Harcourt and rebuilds his life by starting a farm after his father’s wealth runs dry like a cursed river. Each of them had relationships at different points but with time it occurs to them that they should be together, but there is a snag: One being in Lagos; the other in Port Harcourt. Kaodini offers to relocate to Lagos, where Sira has a thriving career. She kicks against him abandoning his farm, his dream. He eventually finds someone to run the farm and the countdown to his relocating to Lagos to join Sira begins. But what she hears from his mother shortly before he is to join her is: “Sira. My baby, our baby. He is dead.”

    The collection has another story set in Port Harcourt, a city battling the side effects of soot, where your shirts, shoes, televisions and other property are ever at the mercy of smoke from kpo-fire, the illegal petrol refiners. All Godson, a resident of this city’s waterside settlement, wants is a job to support himself and his mother. Corporal Enenche, on the other hand, is looking forward to quitting the police and joining a private firm. He has three weeks to go. On one of his last assignments, he and his team led by Shehu, who is always pronouncing ‘pay’ as ‘fay’, arrests Godson and minutes after arresting him, he fits into the description of an armed robber who struck earlier in the day. Before giving him jungle justice, Shehu steals his phone on the excuse that he has gay porn on it only to end up later that night masturbating to the porn. Enenche makes away with his white sneakers. But where will the one who stole the king’s trumpet play it?

    ‘In The City’, a crime thriller with puzzles you have to piece together, can get the heart racing and wonder: What are they going to do to him? It is a story rendered in moving language.

    Some of the stories are linked. Two of such are titled ‘I Put a Curse on You’ and ‘I’d Die Without You’. Dr. Tonse features in both tales. The narrator in ‘Music’ also features in another story where he is drunk-calling his ex-wife. ‘Love is Divine’ also has a link with ‘Hurt’.

    Garricks’ dexterous management of suspense makes it practically impossible for a reader to guess right. There are good twists to the tales of the characters who can as well be citizens of a nation known as Republic of Broken People.

    The author’s handling of his characters guarantees a damn good collection that will be remembered long after closing the last page.

    My final take: As shown in the book and the movie, life is a journey, a journey whose trajectories we aren’t in a position to fully decide. Despite this, we still need to be ready, to be prepared for where life is taking us.

  • Letter to Olakunle Olasanmi

    Letter to Olakunle Olasanmi

    In the last three years, California-based TV star Oprah Winfrey has had a blue blood neighbour. He is Prince Harry. Oprah and others have a special birthday shoutout to make to Harry who turns 39 today. Birthday wishes are also expected for our own ace writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, another famous person who was born some years after you, but on the same day. 

    The last few days have got me thinking a lot about you, and one word seems to define you: Humility, a virtue many aren’t wired to possess. Maybe I should try you with one billion naira to see if you will become full of yourself. 

    I can’t remember the exact day we met. But, I remember the year. I also remember the place. The year was 1997, and the place was the Ogba-Lagos campus of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ) named after Alhaji Lateef Jakande, a fantastic newspaper editor, politician and Lagos governor of note. I was 19. You were five years older. Because we were classmates, the age didn’t matter, and Kunle was how I addressed and still address you, and with smile (and often rancorous laughter) you have responded. Each time I jokingly called you egbon, you have always emphasised our friendship and shown no distress in me being naughty with you. 

    We were together in the thickness of the Gen. Sani Abacha madness, when deranged youths earnestly asked for him to lead us forever, when brilliant minds ran into exile to escape the junta’s bullets, when the prisons were filled with dissidents, when we weren’t sure of what tomorrow would bring and, at some point, rebelled against the Chief Dayo Duyile-led management to get our certificate accredited by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE). The protracted crisis led to the school being closed and both of us returning to our familial homes. 

    Today, September 15, you turn 50. Of these years, I have known you for 26 years. Despite moving to Abuja not long after our NIJ years and a stint with Star FM as a reporter, we’ve not lost touch. Even now that I’ve moved out of the country, we remain in touch.

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    If humility were a human being, you’re a true reflection of what it should look like. You know that you are smart but certainly not all-knowing, you

    recognise you have strengths and talents, but acknowledge you are one of many people with such strengths and talents. 

    In the over two decades since I have known you, I can’t remember ever seeing you mad at anyone. Not in NIJ, not when we met in Abuja from where you have reported the Judiciary for The Nation, The Comet, The Nigerian Compass and now Leadership, not when you visited Lagos, not in our one room apartment in John’s flat in Agbado Crossing, not when we were in Dar es Salaam. Not anywhere that I can think of. You always laugh away everything as if you are an apostle of laugh away your sorrow. If you are hiding that part from me, you deserve an Oscars for best actor. It doesn’t mean once in a while your patience has not been tested, but largely you have emerged with your humility unruffled. The elasticity of your patience is baffling. 

    You are also charitable and when I use that word, I’m not talking about giving out material things. Instead I talk of the joy you give with the calm manner you handle discussions with people. You’re a giver simply because you bring smiles to others. You argue with love. You disagree with care. You banter with affection. Malice is something I’m yet to be convinced has a room in the dictionary of your life.

    You turned fifty at a time millions of our people will give legs and arms to smile, a commodity so scarce now. The economy has been bastardised over the years, our industries have collapsed and halls, which ones held goods from these factories, have now become worship centres where we plead for the return of the good old days. 

    We are led by leaders who mouth our interests but lack the empathy to put this into action. Instead of smiles and laughter, they give us sorrow and tears. At times they even give us blood. We’ve protested a few times, and we’ve been met with violence. In the long run, it has become clear to us that these leaders are only humble when they come begging for our votes. Once they get power, humility, your greatest strength for which friends and colleagues applaud you, is chased away and replaced with arrogance, and the people on whose behalf they hold power peep from holes and cellars. 

    Calmness in the face of storm is a virtue leaders should have. You have this in abundance. But arrogance will not make these power drunks learn from a veteran judicial correspondent like you. 

    My final word: Humility pays. Arrogance, on the other hand, destroys like slow poison. Being humble adds to us and takes nothing away. So, continue to be humble and continue to reap its bounties. 

  • People fear what they don’t understand

    People fear what they don’t understand

    There is a new movie on Netflix. Titled “Can You See Us?” and set in a Tanzanian community, it is about a boy born with albinism and rejected by his biological father. Raised by his mother and a man she met after being thrown out, Joseph is taught to love despite the hate shown him. He is made to believe that people fear, and seek to destroy, what they don’t understand. He thus sees it as his responsibility to educate them, to make them know he is not dangerous, to make them know he is not a spirit, to make them know he is just like every other person. The only thing different about him is pigmentation, not his humanity. 

    The boy’s story is intertwined with that of a man who people in the community don’t understand, call a madman and also treat differently. 

    When Joseph and the man meet, he is afraid the man will throw him into a well. That was what he learnt about the man. The smart and inquisitive Joseph eventually understands the man and sees the similarity in the way the world reacts to things they can’t decipher. 

    The story can also be set in Nigeria. Some years back in Taraba State, a woman was delivered of a set of twins with albinism. The ignorant said it was a sign of witchcraft. The babies were permanently locked in a room as the family didn’t want people to see them. They were seen as embarrassment to the family. The father even doubted their paternity, just because of their pigmentation challenge. Looking like him meant nothing.

    Jake Epelle, who is perhaps Nigeria’s most popular albino, was rejected by his mother. His father filled the gap. 

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    His experience: “My classmates would gather round me, pin me down and turn my face towards the sun. They knew that it was wrong for people like me to be exposed to sunlight talk less of facing it without protection. But these boys would not bother, even when I begged them and promised to buy whatever they wanted; they would not let me go. Several days, they would take me to the field, pin me down and turn my eyes to the scorching sun. It was such a terrible experience.

    “I was the only albino in the family, but I had a father who was my hero and he was particular about me. Though some people abused me and mocked my complexion, he used to tell me that I would be a star and whenever he had meetings, he took me along.

     ”He exposed me and was proud to show me off. But my mother hardly related with me and was not close to me. We lived in the same house for three years and I hardly knew her. It was my stepmother who acted as my mother and she was a morale booster. In fact, everyone thought she was my real mother.

     ”I used to love going to parties and whenever I went to parties, there was no girl to dance with me. Any girl who mustered the courage to dance with me would run away after some minutes with the excuse that she had someone she was dancing with.

     ”If I asked any girl out, she would refuse and some agreed out of curiosity. They wanted to know what this guy possesses.”

    Albinism exists in all races. It is not a black race issue. Even mammals, reptiles, fishes and birds suffer from this challenge. Ocular albinism affects the eyes but means having a bit of more melanin content in the system but Oculocutaneous albinism makes the hair golden, the skin ivory and it also involves the skin and the eyes.

    Nigeria is believed to have over 6 million albinos, one of 17,000 is an Albino in America, one of 20,000 in Britain is an albino, and one of 15,000 in Australia is an albino. 

    The Yoruba call them Afin, in Igbo, they are Anyali, they are Zebia in Hausa, they are Eyaen in Bini, Ugobu in Idoma, and Mbakara Obot Ikot in Efik.

    There are so many things we demonise because we don’t understand them. Aside albinos, queer folks also receive the same treatment. Creatives who keep to themselves in order to create also receive unfair treatment. Like the man who Joseph met, they’re called madmen and stories made about them. 

    Ironically, even Joseph’s mother is guilty of fearing what she doesn’t understand. She can’t decipher the creative mind his son associates with and calls him a madman, and also suspects him of being responsible for an attack on Joseph by those who feel his red blood cell contains some form of antidote. He turns out to be a major factor in how his future is shaped. 

    My final take: What we don’t understand is not necessarily dangerous. We need to accept this truth and preach it. That way our world will be better and safer.