Chinua Achebe

“Two men look out through the same bars;

One sees the mud, and one the stars.”

Fredrick Langbridge, 1849 – 1923

 The dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilize its assets.

 The last book published by Achebe will not be the one best remembered by the world. But that book reminds us that we have fought many battles, and it unearthed feelings and sentiments which remind us that we are today very much still in the past. That past had produced the Achebes and Soyinkas and Abubakar Imams and Zungurs, heroes of the literary world, activists who dared authorities and broke down walls, yet unable to  live entirely above their social contexts. The world will mourn him for his classics such as Things Fall Apart, but Nigerians will always argue over whether he is an icon which the nation should cherish and honour, or an ethnic champion whose last hurrah was to open up old wounds in a nation desperate to move on. The world will mourn a great African writer, and many Nigerians will miss a man who had stirred nests with his defiance and courage to ruffle feathers.

 Achebe would appear to have been born with a complimentary set of gifts: the gift of expression, and the gift of using the expressed word to assess his social and political environment and attempt to change it. From Things Fall Apart, which captured the effect of major social upheavals and changes engendered by colonialism, to other works which parody post-colonial efforts to build a nation out of many conflicting value systems, to his last novel which was a personal history of the Nigerian Civil War, Achebe was at once participant observer with a keen eye on social change, as well as a historian who took liberties with a personal perspective on such changes. There are not many equals of Achebe in the use of a foreign language to speak to his society, and the contemporary and peer such as Soyinka who were elevated above him by an international award have been pilloried for being better at addressing foreign audiences than their fellow Africans, or taking away an honour Achebe deserved. Fewer writers have shown a more consistent disdain for the decline in values and the failure to utilize potentials in their nations as Mr Achebe. Even when he was comfortably esconsed in foreign lands, his heart was always with his people and his country. Twice he rejected being honoured by Nigerian governments he felt were not good enough to honour him, having partaken in the demolition of what could have been a great edifice for all Nigerians and the black race.

 The controversy generated by his last book will sadly be the most lasting memory among Nigerian of this great writer, particularly those too young to know or remember the tragic civil war. His take on key aspects of the conflict, and his successful exorcism of old ghosts on alleged genocide and role the of Chief Obafemi Awolowo resurrected some dormant sentiments and bitter quarrels from the past. Achebe must have known that his book will generate massive controversy, and while this is good for books because they get sold in larger quantities, a rendition of a painful history in a manner guaranteed to deepen the nation's faultlines is difficult to defend in terms of patriotism. It will certainly tap into an existing residue of sentiments and resonate with contemporary realities and conjectures; but by no stretch of imagination can Achebe’s last work be described as a heroic contribution to healing past wounds.

 It is possible that Achebe’s last work was never intended to heal wounds and move the nation forward. The major wounds of the civil war had been healed a long time ago by an enlightened leadership which made reconciliation possible, desirable and quick. There were also organic elements at play in the quick healing process: a popular realization of the fact that many mistakes had been made by the military since the January 1966 coup, for which millions paid massive penalties, including the loss of more than a million lives; a thriving economy which created possibilities for economic reintegration; and the realization that every section of the country was vital to the other. Since then, periodic agonies are triggered when the horrendous suffering by the civilian population is revisisted; or when it appears that the nation is forgetting that one million lives had to be sacrificed to keep it united.

 In spite of dozens of books on the genesis and execution of the war, controversies were sustained by arguments over who was right, what went wrong, and what lessons the nation should draw from the war. This in itself is not a problem. It becomes a problem when comments on a sad chapter in our history tend to shed light on contemporary realities, and reveal a tragic failure to move on from that tragic period. This was, going by the reactions of many Nigerians to There Was a Country, what Achebe did. His last comment on his country played into the hands of people who thought the Igbo should never forgive Awolowo; people who thought Awo has always been maligned by Igbo people who will not accept to pay a just price for their follies; people who thought that Igbo people have never recovered from an orchestrated genocide, and are still paying a price in political terms; and even people who think the dream of Biafra is not dead, and can and should be vigorously reactivated.

 It will be interesting to know if Mr Achebe had been availed of even the tiniest peak into conversations among younger Nigerians on cyberspace which followed the release of his last book. It will be uncharitable to say he had triggered a major setback in the unity of the country, but it will be fair to say he lit up the dark and frightening chasms which separate  many younger Nigerians and equip them the horrible stereotypes with which they see each other.  If he did have a glimpse at this level of our national psyche, it is doubtful if he would not have felt some pain that his fellow citizens harbor such sentiments and feelings towards each other. He may even have asked if he and his generation are justified in enjoying their smug comfort in the belief that they had discharged their obligations to their nation. Chinua Achebe left this world pretty much as he found it: troubled and troubling. But history will say of him, here is one who couldn't live with it.

Heat of the kitchen

“Enemies are not those who hate us, but those whom we hate.”

 P. Ustinov

Last week the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) a coalition of opposition political parties asked Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur Chairman of the PDP to stop beating the drums of war. The CNPP is angry that Alhaji Bamanga Tukur said that 2015 represents a “heavy” war the PDP has to fight, “because a group has come up and wants to sweep the mat off our feet.” The PDP, he is reported to have told a meeting in the south west, cannot allow that to happen.

The CNPP is outraged, it says, because it has not recovered from the effects of earlier drums of war which the PDP beat. In particular, it cannot forget Obasanjo’s declaration that the 2007 elections were a do-or-die affair. The PDP did the affair, and violence took many lives and limbs and mandates, the CNPP complains. The CNPP wants security agencies to query Alhaji Bamanga for his “unpatriotic, undemocratic and inciting statement.” It said many other things as well, including its belief that Nigerians want, and will vote for regime change in 2015.

Of course the security agencies will not query Alhaji Bamanaga Tukur. Some of their personnel have followed him around as he jetted around the nation to knock back a party in crisis into life. They would know that the words that the CNPP finds so offensive are the staple diet of PDP rhetorics. Veterans of electoral battles in the ranks of the CNPP will in fact be amused by the indignation expressed by Mr Okechuku, but they will not fail to note that Alhaji Bamanga’s comments were made in a region in which the PDP is facing virtual extinction, the southwest. Nigerians will neither tremble nor panic. They know already that 2015 will be a battle of sorts, and quite possibly one which will either usher in genuine regime change, or trigger massive upheavals. It could also do both, if much sweat and blood have to be shed to achieve regime change. But Nigerians have seen it all before. The difference now is that many more are unwilling to sit idly by and watch leaders emerge through questionable or outrightly fraudulent means.

The opposition parties are right to worry over what appear as threats from Alhaji Bamanga. But they may not be the target of his words, at least for now. The drums of war were beaten in a part of the country where the PDP is literary drowning. It was a good pitch from the chairman as well, in a context in which many prominent PDP people from the southwest are feeling the effects of being out of power. They will understand the language of war, having seen the obliterating campaign of the ACN in action, and the weakening of their ranks from massive quarrels and having too many generals in a tiny army.

The PDP is indeed fighting a war, but for now it is a war against its own members. The orchestrated campaign to reconcile members of the party has exposed the enormity of its internal problems. In fact, some senior members of the party must be regretting the high profile and open mature of the campaign to heal rifts, because all it did is to deepen rifts. Many governors, the real powerhouses of the party, largely boycotted public relations events targeted at showing unity, and then sent in apologies and excuses for their absences. Key members of the party in most zones made louder statements by being absent than they would have if they had joined the junketing. The reconciliation train lost more passengers than it picked, and by the time it stopped in Abuja, the party’s leadership would have been in no doubt that the opposition is unlikely to be its biggest problem.

All over the country, the ruling party has problems. In the north, few people are willing to even display their party membership cards in public. The region has suffered unprecedented regression in its fortunes, and most people hold the party and its governors responsible. Many people think President Jonathan is indifferent to the problems of the North because he thinks it was hostile to his 2011 ambitions. They do not hold him responsible for Boko Haram; but they blame him for refusing to look at options to his present strategies for dealing with them. Northern governors, 15 of them from PDP, are blamed for engineering the Jonathan presidency, and then retreating into their fortified residences and leaving the people with poverty and Boko Haram. The few prominent PDP leaders who benefit from its rule do not advertize their good fortune. Many of the party’s members are waiting in the wings to join the merging opposition.

In the southwest, the party is virtually non-existent for all practical purposes. The ACN is closing in for the total kill by aggressively pursuing the merger, and building fortresses in competence and performance which can be used as electoral currency in 2015. In the southeast, the party is fighting for space with APGA, and legions of star-gazers want to know if it is time for Igbo politicians to chart an entirely new course. The south-south is holding on to the PDP as a raft, and will do anything to stop it from sinking. It realizes, however, that the rest of the nation is drifting away from it, and is unsure over what it will take to regain the ground lost. President Jonathan’s record is not likely to be so dramatically transformed by 2015 that it will serve as a rallying point. Too much of his small circle has been taken up by his own people that other Nigerians have long relocated without the south-south managers even noticing.

On the whole, you could say that the PDP chairman’s war drums are not being beaten without just cause. But PDP does not just beat war drums. It prepares for war in all aspects. It will, for instance, watch how the opposition intends to wriggle out of the booby trap over its proposed name with INEC. It must be congratulating itself for the small victory over the time and energy being wasted on the name affair. The merger process is being hurt by the quarrels over a name, and playing perfectly into PDP’s hand. Chances are that they wont get the merged party registered as APC by INEC, but the parties are behaving like a child whose lolly has been lost, and is rejecting another one in its place. Every day it huffs and puffs over APC, PDP gains a strategic advantage. You would have thought a movement towards merger with some veteran casualties of the PDP will know some of its tricks by now, and would therefore know which battles to fight and which to avoid.

The real war drums that should alarm Nigerians will be those that may signal such danger to the PDP that it will have no option but to attempt to rig the 2015 elections, at all cost. If it cannot heal its massive wounds, or radically engineer an improvement in the performance of its elected officials, or damage the merger irredeemably, it may be tempted to tamper dangerously with the electoral process. It should not. Many people in the PDP find it difficult to image life outside the comfort of the PDP. But life will be infinitely more difficult for everyone if the PDP attempts to rig the 2015 elections because it cannot win them freely and fairly.

One noose, many necks

You may either win your peace or buy it – win it, by resistance to evil; buy it by compromise with evil. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900

For observers of developments in the North, the report of a confident Emir of Kano asking a Federal Government delegation on a sympathy visit to Kano to convey his advise to President Jonathan to implement the report and recommendations of the Northern Elders Forum on security, economy and related matters in the northern states will be a significant development. The delegation itself could not have missed a slight change in the body language of the Emir, something many prominent people who had visited to welcome him back from the United Kingdom where he travelled after the assassination attempt on his life would also have noticed. Suddenly the Emir of Kano is in full public glare, daily receiving very prominent politicians who demonstrate the highest forms of reverence to a man who was literally left for dead a few weeks ago by assassins on a street in his city.

Perhaps politicians and many leaders now recognize how close the nation came to losing a rare symbol of genuine authority and a cultural icon. Or perhaps they recognize that distances which grow daily between them and the sources and symbols of power in a community being torn to shreds will hurt them in the long run. In any case, prominent leaders such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Governors, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a Presidential delegation made up of ministers and many others have all visited and bowed in reverence, contrived or real, before a man who barely a year ago shed tears in public at the mayhem visited on the ancient city of Kano by insurgents of Jamaatu Ahlil Sunnal Lid’daati Wal Jihad (JASLIWAJ).

And it appears the Emir himself now recognizes that his recent personal experience is an opportunity to reassert the full weight of his symbolic authority. Certainly, all these VIPs cannot line up to take full advantage of media coverage to visit the Emir without a strong political pull. Most of them would have had to pass numerous military and police checkpoints, or actually hear of blasts even as they visit the elderly Emir. So they also realize that Kano is an active frontline in an escalating war that has taken many of the northern communities as hostages.

The reference to the report of the Northern Elders Forum which its Secretary, Professor Ango Abdullahi says has been dumped by President Jonathan could not have been made casually by the Emir. Few people can request Ministers to remind the President to take up suggestions and observations made by a valuable segment of the political stock of the North today. That report, presented to the president amidst full publicity by people who had stepped forward in advanced ages, partly to atone for past sins, and partly to fill yawning gaps in the leadership assets of the North, had raised hopes that the presidency will be open to high quality inputs from people it will be foolhardy to ignore.

Well, apparently, the President appears to have ignored them and their report. Eight months since a blind and bowing Dammasanin Kano led a delegation of distinguished northern elders, not a word has been heard from the Villa. The northern governors have not received the elders to discuss their report either. And the elders are very, very angry. The Emir told the Presidential delegation that the Elders had complained that their report has not been acted upon, and they have not been communicated with. When the Emir of Kano lends his voice to the demand for a consideration of the Elders’ report which included, among others, a recommendation for a political, rather than a military solution to the insurgency destroying the North, the President can only ignore it at additional cost to his already poor standing and image in many parts of the North. Just about everyone else, from the Sultan, the JNI, ACF, Borno Elders and professional groups have joined in making demands for amnesty.

The noose which is the insurgency is closing in on many necks. It is a dangerous contraption on the neck of President Jonathan who is increasingly being perceived by a widening circle of northern opinion leaders as hostile to the idea that a political solution (or, as is more widely mentioned, amnesty for the insurgents) will make a genuine difference in its terms of cessation of hostilities and long-term resolution. More and more people in authority in the North (and people like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu) are now insisting that only the grant of amnesty will begin to roll back the widening and deepening conflicts with the many-headed insurgency.

This noose is being made tighter by the absence of a consensus around the value and justice of amnesty; as well as the utility and possibility of a political settlement with a group or groups that fundamentally repudiate the legality of the Nigerian state. Opinions which President Jonathan listens to also say amnesty will be worthless, and unjust to victims. It advises that the calls for amnesty from leaders and elders whose children kill them, their economy and society, as well as security agents of the state is an abdication of responsibility. It insists that elders or leaders must know who these killers are, and will, in the long run, either stand up to them or collaborate with the state to defeat them.

The noose is also around the neck of many northern elders. Basically, as Muslims, they recognize that their faith is hostile to concepts such as amnesty, if it is defined as unconditional pardon for mass murder and other atrocities and crimes. Yet they are comfortable with the concept of general pardon for these crimes, in part because they think it worked in the Niger Delta; and in part because they have no means of standing up to the insurgency. They are also worried that an intensification of this conflict and the possibility of its spreading will amount to a civil war in the north. So any solution is better than one which simply creates more of the enemy.

The amnesty noose hangs dangerously around more and more people who ask for it. The people on whose behalf it is pleaded have escalated the conflict. Since the President’s visit to Borno and Yobe State, the insurgency appears to be more active. Kano state in particular has witnessed one of the most violent series of attacks, with the motorpark bombing looking as if it was a plan to trigger anti-northern hostility in the south. Clearly, the current strategy of the government is not working. So the demands to grant amnesty are becoming louder, possibly because they are the easiest or only option presently available.

The President should not just ignore demands for a political resolution of this conflict, and leaders in the community must go beyond the shrill calls for amnesty for people who appear bent on fighting the Nigerian state. The indignation of Northern leaders and elders in various form should be channeled into more productive avenues. The North Elders Forum is already involved in engineering a wider and more cohesive and inclusive platform which should, among others, raise the quality of northern political leadership. The engagement of this insurgency at the political level is vital to the resolution of the issues it claims to fight for. There must be the political will and courage to engage the insurgency at all levels. This will require a political leadership with support, clout and vision to engage the foundations of this conflict, and chart a course for reconciliation and rehabilitation. Northern opinion leaders should recognize the reality that many other Nigerians sympathize with their positions, but are not northerners. They must build bridges to these important sympathies, and limit the damage from perceptions that this is basically a northern problem. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that there are also very strong views and interests against political solutions which involve matters such as amnesty, or even measures which involve huge expenditure to reverse the economic decline of the North.

Amnesty for insurgents represents only one possible element in a political solution to this problem. A lot needs to be done to give the political solution a shape and substance; which is why we need to more beyond the singular issue of amnesty. The most urgent need for now is to improve the political resource of the north so that it can engage both the insurgency and a reluctant presidency. At this stage all leaders do is beg. This wont work.

Beyond pardon

“It is the enemy who can truly teach us to practice the virtues of compassion and tolerance.” Dalai Lama

Something is seriously wrong at the highest decision-making levels of President Jonathan’s government. A number of elementary but expensive errors of judgment are being made which, cumulatively, will cost the nation very dearly. As for the President, as a politician, he should know that even with a faulty electoral process and a party sitting rather uncomfortably in his pocket, he will have to assure Nigerians that his best meets at least the lowest levels of their expectations and approvals. As things stand, the most friendly advise that could be given to the President is to look critically at the processes which inform the decisions he takes, and overhaul them. If he is at the heart of the weaknesses in the process, he needs to be hard with himself, and ask whether he really should give it another go in 2015.

Take the Borno-Yobe visit. Given the background of a damaging perception of a President who was indifferent to the plight of citizens (and voters) in the region, or, what is worse, afraid to visit, and having been badly upstaged by APC governors, the visit should have been preceded by the most elaborate preparations. These should have included analyses of security and political situation reports, very detailed discussions with the two state governors, scrutiny of all speeches and statements that will be made, and excellent intelligence on moods and dispositions of virtually everyone the President was to meet. All these would have prepared the President to realize that the request for amnesty for insurgents and dialogue will be singularly the most important issue he would confront during the visit.

A good intelligence brief would have hinted at a community that is a major victim of an insurgency and the JTF, but is unsure whether being left at the mercy of either is a good option. The clamour for clemency and dialogue with those elements of the insurgency that was willing to dialogue represent a plea from a desperate people to the only source they see as capable to stopping the destructive war. An informed background briefing should have raised the possibility that elders and politicians in Borno and Yobe feel helpless (and given their history, frankly embarrassed) over the insurgency, and this was not the first time they were making the case for dialogue and amnesty. A good security report would have included projected scenario of this conflict, and may have advised the president that preserving the status quo was the worst option for the state and the community. On the whole, the president would have been prepped to go to Borno and Yobe with a sympathetic mien, a range of options which he should table, and some reassuring words on curtailing some of the excesses of the JTF. He would have held closed – door meetings with elders, politicians and opinion leaders during which he would place all options on the table, and encourage them to be part of the search for peace. Some semblance of engagement with ordinary folks could have been engineered, to avoid the embarrassing image flashed across television screens of cities completely locked down, with citizens as far away from their president as was possible.

Perhaps some or all these were done, and perhaps not. But the president went to Borno and Yobe and left everyone with the worst option possible. He left behind a angry community that felt that he told them as victims to hunt for the criminals; a JTF abandoned to the insurgency; an insurgency emboldened by the seeming distance between the federal government and the community it is holding hostage, and a nation dangerously divided between those who thought he did well to let large parts of the country burn; and another which thinks that there is more to his attitude towards this insurgency than just an intolerance for people who throw bombs at the communities in which they live.

But the Borno – Yobe disaster was made worse by the decision to pardon A.S.P Alamieyeseigha and others. A decision such as this could have been better timed, if it had to be taken, that is. The unforgivable sloppiness in the process which produced it is an embarrassment with rare parallel. The summersaults to justify it showed that it was poorly conceived and executed. The impact of the decision has left the President fighting a whole nation and an international community that has thrown diplomatic niceties overboard in its indignation.

Of all the most damaging rationalizations which followed the pardon of Alamieyeseigha, none would alarm Nigerians and the world more than the excuse that it was informed by the pivotal role which the former felon plays in maintaining peace and security in the Niger Delta. People will ask what exactly the former governor does that is so vital that the president would risk all this odium. Is the region safe and secure, if it has to stabilized by Alams? What happens if, say, he becomes disgruntled with Jonathan’s administration, or any other administration for that matter? What does this pardon say about President Jonathan’s control over Niger Delta affairs if Alams has to be pardoned and released into mainstream politics to stabilize the region? Just what does stabilization mean in this context, and what does it cost?

Naturally, a few voices from the Niger Delta have been heard in support of the pardon. Hopefully, it will not escape the attention of the President and his circle that he is running an increasingly restrictive administration with the Niger Delta as focus and facilitator. In the midst of all the rumpus created by the pardon of Alamieyeseigha, the President went to his village and raised N6b for a church, the bulk of it coming from private sources and PDP-run states. All these will make sense if there is in place a strategy to isolate the President from the rest of the nation, and bond him more intimately with his “community.” But you have to ask, for what purpose?

This is a President who, for all intents and parposes is already in the race for 2015. His party is in serious disarray, facing massive hostility in the North, drying up in the south-west and standing precariously on one foot in the south-east. Even in the south-south, the aggressive nature of his supporters and his kith and kin is alienating many people. His record so far as President does not stand up to critical scrutiny. Between Boko Haram, kidnapping, oil theft, increasing communal conflicts all over the nation, and rampaging criminals, the capacity of the Nigerian state to provide security for life and property under his watch has been virtually eroded. A single civil servant has reportedly evaded arrest by the entire security paraphernalia of the nation, and the President is involved in a spat with western nations over Alamieyeseigha, a development he ought to avoid since he so desperately needs their support in the risky Malian adventure and other issues. His political future is by no means as secure as his party and small circle let him know. He is going to have fight every inch of the way with strong and ambitious members of his party from the north digging in. The opposition has smelt blood, and will attempt to evade all the tricks and subterfuge thrown at it to merge and take on the PDP. Above all, he risks going to the 2015 with a very poor record.

President Jonathan is being poorly served by the manner his decision-making processes operate. There is an obvious and damaging disconnect between him and the public service which should work to improve the quality of his administration and shield him from avoidable political gaffes. His political circle appears to be shrinking, and assuming a patently parochial coloration and outlook. This is not good for a President who tells the nation he is on a mission to transform it. If President Jonathan does not radically improve the manner he leads, Nigerians may tell him sooner than he thinks, that his flaws are beyond pardon.