The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Between

  • Anambra: Between gods and godfathers

    Anambra: Between gods and godfathers

    Atahiru Jega is a typical Nigerian in the game of deceit. His face does not show it. His voice does not tell it. His manners do not demonstrate it. But his results devastate us. Like his boss Gooduck Jonathan, he carries a mien of deceptive gentility.

    This image made many acclaim Jonathan for appointing a former don as our electoral umpire. He introduced himself with a cherubic face, a fragile pair of eyes and a voice immune to the vulgarities of the age.

    He cut that cartoon figure last week as he tried to explain away his incompetence over the Anambra governorship elections. In one breath, he told us he did a shoddy job. In another breath, he asked us to abide with it. The election, he confessed, was inconclusive. But there was nothing he could do about it. His hands were tied. We are supposed to accept the violation like a raped nubile. The experience was awful. Blood abounded. But the deed was already done. The rapist told us it was a pity we did not enjoy the performance. But we could go to the bathroom and wash up and hope the next experience would be worth the moans and screams.

    He gave us the result as a fait accompli. Hear him: “we regret shattering the expectations of Nigerians but we did our best under very difficult circumstances to have a free, fair and credible election.” In one word, the results that made the Fidelity Bank candidate, Obiano of Governor Obi’s APGA, were not credible. He now says the aggrieved should go to court. Yet he wants to pour more sand in the garri of the other parties by setting the supplementary elections for another date. The foundation, by his own confession, was frail. How do you want to build on it?

    Those who were supposed to register did not see their names on the list. Those who were supposed to vote did not have voting materials in the booths. In a case, a candidate could not vote, as well as his family. A family is the basic unit of a society. That shows basic failure. While adults could not vote, minors were allowed to vote. Underage girls smothered their heads with Brazilian and Venezuelan hair in tune with the fashion of the day. So, a girl that should be 16 is portrayed as 31 at the polls.

    We understand the power of incumbency in an election. Governor Obi of the feminine voice wanted to show that having ruled the roost for eight years he should be able to anoint his successor and hand over to him. He claims to have deserved that honour from the Anambra people for his doings in eight years. Obi has not done such groundbreaking work for his people. His performance as governor can at best be described as modest. Such performances do not enthuse a crowd or stir the blood of loyalty. Rather they rake up lukewarm zeal.

    Lukewarm zeal does not give a governor that automatic honour of anointing a successor. That was Ngige’s strength. The APC candidate is the most important personality to have emerged in this generation from that state. We cannot forget so easily the theatrics of gods and godfathers when he was governor. He allegedly swore to a god at Okija that he would bow to his godfathers. When he became governor, he bowed neither to the gods nor to his godfathers. Rather he kneeled to the people and the constitution. He swapped the oath to gods with those to his citizens, the secret oath fell to the public one.

    The politicians inaugurated the theatre of kidnapping by first nabbing an elected governor. He would not yield to them. He would rather pay the money to the people in terms of infrastructure, education and healthcare than ply the pockets of peacocks. He was held hostage by Anambra and Abuja, but he never chafed. He would rather fail his godfathers and their gods, rather than the people. He left office on those terms.

    A few years after he left office, I visited Anambra State when Obi was governor, and I travelled to some of the towns. The motif of my conversations with the ordinary people was a nostalgia for the days of Ngige. A driver taking me from Awka to a neighbouring town exhaled that his car was guaranteed some longevity because Ngige had opened up quite a few roads and tarred them. The bumps and potholes would not flog his car to premature death.

    That billed the Anambra State election as an election between nostalgia and now, between Obi of the feminine voice and Ngige of the legend. It was a surprise that Nwoye, who never campaigned much, and whose candidacy threw a storm within the PDP, could have even come off second.

    It all shows that the results followed a clandestine script. President Jonathan entered a pact with Obi of the feminine voice who has been one of Jonathan’s ardent supporters. Remember the NGF elections and all he did? They fear Ngige the most. To deny Ngige any prayer, he had to come third. It was the same script in Ondo State, when Jonathan entered a pact with the whitlow of the west against his own party. The dreaded candidate came third.

    So the cry by Jega that the Anambra election was unfortunate and we should just abide it is part of a system that imposes mediocrity on all. Being afraid of Ngige’s return, they are engaged in a battle against memory. So we can say the Anambra election is an example of what Tatalo Alamu called the politics of memory. They are also cringing from the memory of politics and that is Ngige’s soldiery against the mainstays of decrepit system. Stephanie Meyer once wrote in her New Moon of a person “forbidden to remember; terrified to forget…”

    Anambrarians who were terrified to forget voted for Ngige. Those who hated Ngige’s guts are forbidding the people to remember. Conscience has accused them. They cannot have a clear conscience now, because Mark Twain said “a clear conscience is a sign of a bad memory.” They remember the days of Ngige and it sends shivers.

    Ironically, this column fought for Obi to remain and be governor in those heady days. He knows what it means to deny a person of his due. Why is he accepting an election that even the umpire decries as inconclusive? He has become a godfather himself, a status bred in Fidelity Bank and anointed with money.

    Jega should resign if he has honour. He knew early enough that things did not work and he could have canceled the polls like he did in 2011. But he allowed the rotten egg to release its odour before he uttered his lachrymose regret.

    Rather we have an election as a failure of mathematics. The number of invalid votes is more than the valid ones and only 27 per cent of valid votes counted with more than that percentage invalidated. Ngige’s place had to be the area that elections did not happen. And the winner was declared when the number of votes not counted surpassed the difference between the winner and the contestants.

    It is also a failure of English language. How can you say something is inconclusive and the result is announced, and you want a supplementary election because you want to avoid the word rerun? It is also the failure of logic when the party in the state cries foul and the PDP in the centre says halleluiah. Who does not see the Jonathan-Obi pact here? It is a failure of law when the law produces injustice. When values fail us, the law cannot rescue us. In a sane society, our sense of right and wrong will force all parties to withdraw and ask for a rerun. Values save laws. But the gods of greed and godfathers of fraud will accept a cesspit of an election, no matter the cries for justice.

  • There was a country: Biafra was ego fight between Ojukwu and Gowon

    There was a country: Biafra was ego fight between Ojukwu and Gowon

    As leadership failed Nigeria at the most critical time, just before Biafra was declared, Chinua Achebe suggests that the gruesome conflict would have been avoided, were it not for the seeming clash of egos between the two protagonists – Colonels Emeka Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon. The one was 33-years old while the other was 32. While Ojukwu rose from an aristocratic background, attended the best schools in Nigeria and the United Kingdom (University of Oxford) before enlisting in the Nigerian Army at the officer cadre, Gowon’s trajectory was almost the reverse, though he also trained at the best British military schools.

    From this background, there was, therefore, a suspicion that an unspoken rivalry brewed between the twain, which came to the fore when they gained commanding positions and faced each other down across opposing divides.

    After General Aguiyi-Ironsi was killed in the reprisal coup of July 1966, Col. Gowon emerged as Head of State. He was, of course, a favourite of the British colonial establishment which still had strong influence in Nigeria’s politics. And being a northern Christian, he was the perfect gambit of the Hausa–Fulani oligarchy, which used him to assuage the fears of the other tribes already grumbling about domination.

    Ojukwu rejected Gowon’s ascendancy on the grounds that he was not the most senior in the Nigeria Army’s hierarchy to lead the country. He said he would not subordinate himself to Gowon. This was one of the points of disagreement at the summit in Aburi, Ghana.

    On the part of the new Head of State, his headship was not negotiable; not with Ojukwu, for that matter. At the least opportunity they both had, they took hard stands, writes Achebe. It is instructive that Ojukwu and Gowon only met once (at Aburi) from the time Gowon became head of state till the end of the war. Achebe captures their rivalry thus: “There are a number who believe that neither Gowon nor Ojukwu was the right leader for that desperate time, because they were blinded by ego, hindered by a lack of administrative experience, and obsessed with interpersonal competitions and petty rivalries. As a consequence, according to this school of thought, these two men failed to make appropriate and wise decisions throughout the conflict and missed several opportunities when compromise could have saved the day.”

    Achebe says there was an obsessive tendency by both belligerents – Gowon and Ojukwu – to seek positions of strength and avoid looking weak throughout the conflict.

    Ojukwu’s Mid-West misadventure and folly

    To correct what has remained a contentious record, the Nigerian side, according to Achebe, fired the first shot in the war when Gowon decided to use the federal Army’s First Command in what he termed “police action,” in an attempt to “restore Federal Government authority in Lagos and the breakaway Eastern Region.” That move to capture the Biafran border towns of Ogoja and Nsukka proved to be a declaration of war, says Achebe. Thereafter, in July 1967, Nigerian troops attempted to cross the Niger Bridge into Biafra. According to Madiebo’s account, quoted by Achebe, the Biafran army was able to halt this advance and disperse the federal troops.

    Now that minor Biafran victory became “an advance, leading to the taking of a large swath of the Mid-Western Region in a surprise manoeuver that the Nigerian federal troops had not anticipated.” Of course, Ojukwu got euphoric by this small victory and was quoted in a speech at the time as saying: “Our motive was not territorial ambition or the desire of conquest. We went into the Midwest (later declared the Republic of Benin) purely in an effort to seize the serpent by the head; every other activity in that Republic was subordinated to that single aim. We were going to Lagos to seize the villain Gowon, and we took necessary military precaution.” Those who accuse Ojukwu and the Igbo leaders of not applying wisdom in proclaiming a Republic of Biafra may well base their arguments on this singular Ojukwu misadventure and folly in the Midwest.

    As it turned out, Ojukwu’s incursion into the Midwest territory, en route Lagos and delegating the then ‘fugitive’ South westerner, Col. Victor Banjo, was not only an exercise in extreme youthful exuberance, it also turned out a costly, if not mortal error. Here was a leader who had neither army nor ammunition; not even a war strategy. The Observer reporter, John de St. Jorre captured Ojukwu’s folly thus: “The Biafrans ‘stormed’ through the Mid-West, not in the usual massive impedimenta of modern warfare but in bizarre collection of private cars, “mammy” wagons, cattle and vegetable trucks. The command vehicle was a Peugeot 404 estate car. The whole operation was not carried out by an “army” or even a “brigade”… but by at most 1,000 men, the majority poorly trained and armed, and many wearing civilian clothes because they had not been issued with uniforms.”

    Of course, this rag-tag “army” got nowhere near Lagos. In fact, it turned out a suicide, mission having pricked the ire of the federal side by their action, pushing them to unleash what may be described as blind horror on Biafra subsequently.

    The four murderous generals

    Following from what was considered the Mid-West humiliation, Gowon regrouped his troops and they plotted a three-pronged onslaught that was meant to “crush the Biafrans” in a few weeks. Mohammed Shuwa who was in charge of the First Division of the federal army was to advance against Biafra from the north to take the Biafran towns of Nsukka and Ogoja. Col. Murtala Muhammed who was in charge of Division Two was charged with retaking Benin and other parts of the Mid-West occupied by the Biafran army, as well as storm Onitsha crossing the Niger Bridge. Lastly, Benjamin Adekunle, known as the ‘black scorpion’, leading Division Three of the Nigeria Army, led the southern offensive.

    In just three months, the federal troops, armed to the teeth now with British weapons, had staged a successful counter-offensive and the Biafran troops were in full flight. Since resistance by the Biafran soldiers was almost non-existent on all fronts, it would have been enough for the federal troops to have captured the entire Biafra with minimum casualties on all sides. But that was not to be. Most of the federal officers were unrestrained and unprofessional; they were blood-thirsty and murderous in their operation.

    Thus in Asaba, Onitsha, Nsukka, Enugu, Owerri, Aba and Calabar, they killed Igbo civilians in cold blood, according to Achebe. The example of the Asaba massacre will suffice: Murtala Muhammed and his lieutenants, including Col. IBM Haruna, apparently smarting from Biafra’s Mid-West humiliation, had rounded up no fewer than 500 Igbo men of Mid-West stock, young and old, and executed them summarily in cold blood. This particular atrocity which attracted worldwide attention, prompting Pope Paul VI to send an emissary has remained unaddressed and unquestioned till today.

    It was 35 years later, in 2002 precisely during the Oputa Panel (the ill-fated Truth and Reconciliation Commission) that the matter came up again. While Gowon claimed ignorance of the massacre and apologised profusely, here is the response of IBM Haruna, then retired as a Major-General: “As the commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred 500 men in Asaba, I have no apology for those massacred in Asaba, Owerri, Ameke-Item. I acted as a soldier maintaining the peace and unity of Nigeria… If Yakubu Gowon apologized, he did it in his own capacity. As for me, I have no apology.”

    Tuesday: Ogbunigwe, Abagana Ambush; Achebe, Okigbo and Ifeajuna

  • Achebe: Between A Man of the People and There was a Country

    Achebe: Between A Man of the People and There was a Country

    Does Chinua Achebe’s new offering portend the augury of his 1966 book, A Man of the People? This must be the silent question niggling the mind of the more perceptive reader of the mint fresh “There was a Country.” The book could well have been eerily titled, There was a Nigeria. Is this the central message of this 82 year-old sage and national icon who has lived through it all? Unlike in 1966 when the publication of his A man of the People almost heralded the first coup in Nigeria which he had predicted in the book, will Nigeria’s grim history repeat itself?

    The book which has unfortunately welled up an ocean of controversy, having come to the world legs-first like an abnormal childbirth because of a mischievous excerpt published in a British newspaper, may have its vital message lost to a bickering that has degenerated to the age-old Igbo-Yoruba supremacy tussle. There is no doubt that had that particular portion of the book not been highlighted by The Guardian of London, not many Nigerians would have found, or for that matter, noticed that contentious characterisation of Chief Obafemi Awolowo which is tucked away near the end of the book.

    But in There was a Country, Achebe has written a strange little book that is at once his life story, his history of the Biafra War and Nigeria’s crises; a work of prose and a dash of poetry all skillfully meshed together. Shall we say that this is Achebe’s catharsis, a distillation of all that was good and all that was baleful for a man who was 30 years old, an established author and a senior civil servant under a colonial entity before the birth of Nigeria in 1960? By this tale, he has bequeathed to Nigeria a sprawling canvass of her once beautiful era, a political independence placed delicately on faulty pedestal like an accident designed to occur, the regression, the war and the eerie danger of an impending violent end.

    In a four-part book, he tells his story from the beginning: his early Christian convert father who embraced the Whiteman’s faith so very religiously and immersing his family unquestioningly into it. The seed of Achebe’s epic novel, Things Fall Apart was probably sown in these early days when in spite of early indoctrination inexorably found an undying fascination in the Igbo traditional religion practiced by many kinsmen of that era.

    Achebe also gives us a glimpse of his precocious childhood, his appetite for study and books; his plucky school days, especially at Government College, Umuahia, and the University College, Ibadan. From his St. Philips Primary School in his rural Ogidi, now in Anambra State, and a stint in Central School, Nekede, Owerri, Achebe (aka Dictionary as he was nicknamed then) had come out tops in the national common entrance to Government College, Umuahia, GCU, and earning a scholarship to boot. In like manner, he came out top graduating student at GCU too and again, winning what was called a “major” national scholarship to study medicine at the University College, Ibadan, in 1948.

    Hear him: “I grew up at a time when the colonial educational infrastructure celebrated hard work and high achievement and so did our families and communities. Government College, Umuahia, was so proud of my work that they put up a big sign announcing my performance in the national entrance examination. That notice stayed on the wall for years.”

    Achebe had great company in the pioneer set at the University College, Ibadan; the very best of young Nigerians from every corner of the country. A most remarkable group made up of the likes of Chike Momah, Flora Nwapa, Mabel Segun, Ben Obumselu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Kelsey Harrison, Gamaliel Onosode, Wande Abimbola, Iya Abubakar, Adiele Afigbo, Igwe Aja Nwachukwu, Theophilus Adeleke Akinyele, Grace Alele-Williams, Mohammed Bello, Elechi Amadi. This group was joined later by Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Oluwakayo Oshuntokun, M.J.C. Echeruo, Christopher Okigbo, Ayo Bamgbose, Christine Okoli (his future wife), Chukwuemeka Ike, Abiola Irele, Zulu Sofola, and several others.

    With such an array of home grown intellectuals of Nigeria’s pre-independence era and a horde of foreign trained ones, how could the new country have gone awry and disintegrated almost soon as it was ‘founded’? Achebe asserts that the British compromised the country right from day one. Describing Nigeria’s immediate post-independence era, Achebe says: “Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged, the subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

    “The social malaise in the Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power…”

    If this was the situation in the 1950s and 1960s as Achebe observed, the situation has reached its nadir today, 52 years after, taking the country to a tipping point whence there may cease to be a country. To this chronic and nation-threatening condition, Achebe proffers solution thus: “Africa’s post-colonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves. We have also had difficulty running the new systems foisted upon us at the dawn of independence by our “colonial masters”. Because the West has had a long but uneven engagement with the continent, it is imperative that it understand what happened to Africa. It must also play a part in the solution. A meaningful solution will require the goodwill and concerted efforts on the part of all those who share the weight of Africa’s historical burden.

    There was a Country is a quaintly nice book which, had Achebe not written it, he would have done grave harm to the history of Nigeria, being a learned, enlightened witness and a participant to this peculiar history. Obviously tortured by his own story, he must have found some relieve in disgorging it. TOMORROW: THE POGROMS, THE ABURI ACCORD AND THE WAR BEGINS.

  • Love affair between books and controversies

    Love affair between books and controversies

    There is perhaps no fate worse for a book than when it is ignored. If it is savaged by critics, some may even argue it is precisely the adrenaline it needs to thrive in the market. But when it is truly and sensationally controversial, well, the author’s dream will appear fulfilled. Ultimately, however, whether controversial or at first ignored, it is always difficult to tell how a book would fare in the market in the long run. For there is usually no proof the long run would not come well after the demise of the author. It may be too early to tell what will become of the new Chinua Achebe book, There Was A Country, but at least for now, no matter how bilious some literary critics think its content is, the controversial book will not be ignored. In Nigeria itself, it has raised a storm, with real and imitation critics polarised essentially along ethnic lines. But polarisation notwithstanding, both classes of critics will certainly not ignore the book, and to that extent, it is likely to receive some moderate to good amount of commercial attention.

    Except where an author sets out deliberately to be a woeful failure, the first principle to publishing success is for the author to shock the public with either too much logic and fair amount of truth or too little logic and outright fatuousness. The jury is still out on the Achebe book. But connoisseurs of great literature will recall instances of controversial books that became popular, thereby establishing the link between controversy and popularity. Take John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a social commentary on the economic plight of poor farmers in the United States in the 1930s, for instance. The Times of London had this to say of the book published in 1939: “It is one of the most arresting [novels] of its time.” Newsweek magazine described it as a “mess of silly propaganda, superficial observation, careless infidelity to the proper use of idiom, tasteless pornographic and scatological talk.” On the other hand, a New York Times reviewer suggested that “Steinbeck has written a novel from the depths of his heart with a sincerity seldom equalled. It may be an exaggeration, but it is the exaggeration of an honest and splendid writer.” But the Associated Farmers of California, displeased with the book’s depiction of California farmers, denounced it mercilessly as a “pack of lies…and communist propaganda.”

    The result was that in some places the book was burnt, and it even led to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) putting surveillance on Steinbeck who was considered a communist agent on account of the book. The Grapes of Wrath later won the Pulitzer Prize, sold 4.5 million in the US alone, and about 14 million worldwide. Consider also D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers, two novels either censored or banned because of their explicit sexual content. And who could ignore James Joyce’s Ulysses that drove many into fury because of its egregious reference to masturbation? It suffered an obscenity prosecution, was banned in some places, and was for a long time not even available in Ireland, where Joyce hailed from.

    Achebe’s latest work is unlikely to witness more than the controversy that has greeted it so far. There will be no burning, banning or censoring. But for him, it will be a controversy that warms the cockles of the heart. There are millions of books either ignored or completely forgotten today. Whether There Was A Country will be forgotten on a distant tomorrow cannot now be determined, especially considering its contribution to Nigeria’s civil war literature. In view of the fame of the author, even if the book’s accuracy is repeatedly and brutally called to question, as it is now, it is certain there will always be references made to it now and in the distant future. Achebe’s name guarantees that; as he becomes the latest quintessential example of the troubling love affair between books and controversies.

  • Between Dapo Olumide and Jimoh Ibrahim

    THAT Dapo Olumide, the erstwhile managing director of Virgin Nigeria Airways came to the scene with a lot of energy, zeal and ideas, and that he had an unambiguous idea of how to turn around the fortunes of the airline, is stating the obvious.

    But no sooner had billionaire businessman Jimoh Ibrahim acquired the airline that people went to town predicting that the alliance of Olumide and Jimoh was one union waiting to fall flat on its face as both of them are too independent-minded. Not a few people believed that the handsome aeronautical engineer would not jell well with the group managing director of the NICON Group and Global Fleet, who is fond of buying debt-ridden businesses with a view to turning them into profitable conglomerates.

    Two years after, the fair-skinned dude disappeared into thin air, he has lend credence to the prediction that his resignation is not unconnected with the shrewd businessman’s acquisition of the airline. Especially with the crisis that is engulfing the airline now.

    Ever since he threw in the towel without even informing the tycoon of his exit, nothing has been heard of or from him. The gist making the rounds is that he is re-strategising to make a big come back.