Month: May 2012

On May 29, 2012, I loudly posed this question to the icons and leaders of the prodemocracy movement, Professors Wole Soyinka, Olusola Adeyeye and Mobolaji Aluko, what do they think of UNILAG’s name change? Is this their idea of how Chief MKO Abiola should be immortalized? By the drunken force of fiat? Is this what they fought for? They should not be silent. They should please speak up and  assure us that this is the way to go, that this is how MKO Abiola would have wanted it. The silence of the prodemocracy movement is deafening and embarrassing. Animal Farm did not look this bad.

Professor Olusola Adeyeye’s  email response (today, May 30, 2012) is appended here for posterity. Professor Adeyeye is a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria:

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SG:

Because MKO was a sport enthusiast and an undeniable pillar of support for Nigerian sports, some of us had wished that our National Stadium in Abuja would be named in honor of the man. Of course, Obasanjo would do no such thing. The announcement to name Unilag for him came to me as a total surprise. I am Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education. Our Committee had no input on this. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that erstwhile members of the Prodemocracy movement were in no way consulted. In any case, since when has a Nigerian government sought the view of the PDM? As such, I struggle to find the basis for your boiling at those who in no way partook in the decision to which you so strongly objected.

I have on several occasions opined that what we currently have in Nigeria is a civilian regime that cannot be called a democracy. Indeed, I coined the word “corruptocracy” to describe our extant experience of Government of the corrupt, by the corrupt, for the corrupt.

I am fundamentally opposed to naming our universities for politicians. I prefer that these institutions be named by ownership or location. As great an advocate of education as Awolowo was, I would not have renamed the University of Ife for him. The way are going, Ibadan will end up as Olusegun Obasanjo University someday! In any case, if a university should be named for MKO, I would have wished it to be University of Abuja.

Governance in Nigeria has been reduced to a large farce. The renaming of public institutions, as odious as it may seem, only symptomizes deeper diseases within the polity. When a man’s body is on fire, should one devote energy asking about his beard?

In the days of old, the pension scam, oil subsidy scam, BPE scam, Transcorp scam, etc would have given the military enough ground to topple the civilians. But we must keep the military in their barracks and let a civilian revolt create an authentic people’s democracy. It shall come!

Sola Adeyeye

ps

ps.

In the heady days during the prodemocracy struggle, I would call Professor Adeyeye Awo, and he would call me [SG] Ikoku. Don’t ask why, long story from our days on Naijanet. Naijanet? The first ever Nigerian social network on the Internet started in 1991. And Professor Aluko refers to me as the “towncrier” because I was the towncrier on Naijanet. Of course. Those were the days. Of course.

It is now (bad) news unfortunately that the bungling regime of Nigeria’s President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, this week renamed with arrogant and ignorant fiat the revered University of Lagos after Chief MKO Abiola, the late icon of the prodemocracy movement. By taking this action, this regime of incompetents has erased the University of Lagos off the history of Nigeria, just like that. Many of us have no problem with according Chief Abiola all the respect and honor he deserves; we have a problem with the lack of due process and are appalled that the resulting controversy has had the effect of tarnishing the names of both the great institution of Unilag and the benefactor, Chief Abiola.  

I am loudly opposed of course to the process that brought about this ill-fated change. It makes a mockery ironically of what Chief Abiola fought for and assures the world that Nigeria’s experiment with democracy is a deadly farce. I was curious as to what the leaders of the now defunct prodemocracy movement thought of this bone-headed move. And so on May 29, 2012, I asked the following question:

This is the time to ask the icons and leaders of the prodemocracy movement, Professors Wole Soyinka, Olusola Adeyeye and Mobolaji Aluko, what do they think of UNILAG’s name change? Is this their idea of how Chief MKO Abiola should be immortalized? By the drunken force of fiat? Is this what they fought for? They should not be silent. They should please speak up and  assure us that this is the way to go, that this is how MKO Abiola would have wanted it. The silence of the prodemocracy movement is deafening and embarrassing. Animal Farm did not look this bad.

On the same day, I received a swift response from Professor Bolaji Aluko which I have appended here for posterity. Professor Aluko is the current vice chancellor of the Federal University at Utuoke in Bayelsa State.  The response speaks for itself and as always he has my respects:

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Ikhide “Towncrier” Ikheloa:

You dey find trouble as usual…..

Since you ask, this is/are my opinion/s as a June 12 pro-democrat of yore and present Vice-Chancellor of a federal Nigerian university (at Otuoke) with respect of the change of UniLag to MA(L)U:

1.  as a VC, I would have expected to be consulted by my Visitor at the very least, together with my Senate, student body, alumni, and especially Governing Council.  [The current VC of UniLag, having just died recently – and to be buried tomorrow, with burial rites throughout this week – I would have waited on ANY announcement relative to UniLag until the mourning period is over, and certainly acknowledged the passing in the same speech.]  See October 1, 2011 announcement of change of FUTY to MAUTECH below for example, one of eight (of the 37) federal universities currently named after “important personalities” (here) with ABU being the oldest (1962).  There are 9 out of 37 such-named state universities.

2. in the Democracy Day 2012 Speech, I would merely have ANNOUNCED the possibility of naming one of the federal universities (not necessarily UniLag, which has no unique relationship with MKO – not being an alum, or founder or major benefactor, etc. –  as a PROPOSAL to be considered more democratically.  Maybe the stakeholders of one of the universities – including maybe one of the new ones – would have enthusiastically raised their hands.  It appears that is what happened for FUTY to MAUTECH; again see below.

3. in addition to the above, in the time being, I would have named Abuja Stadium after MKO, and June 12 a Democracy Heroes national public holiday – although it is rather too close to May 29, in which case I might have boldly sacrificed May 29.  The long overdue honor due MKO, arguably a Sacrificial Father of Modern-Day Democracy in Nigeria – should not be made to contribute any further divisiveness in the already “heated Nigerian polity” – as the Nigerian saying goes.

Of course, I am not President GEJ, so those are my views, and yours are welcome.  There is still much time however, for presidential revision of priors

And there you have it….’Nuff said.  I hope that you are not  longer deaf from silence from me.

Bolaji Aluko

QUOTE

http://mautech.edu.ng/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1&Itemid=50

CHANGE OF NAME OF THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, YOLA TO
MODIBBO ADAMA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, YOLA

The Vice – Chancellor, Federal University of Technology, Yola Professor Bashir Haruna Usman, on behalf of the Council, Senate, Staff, Students and the University Community, wishes to bring to the notice of the general public, sister Federal, State and Privately
owned Institutions, Public Parastatals, Private Corporate bodies as well as all friends  and business partners of the University, that in the tradition of immortalising important personalities and historian of great repute, the President and commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Federal Republic of Nigerian Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, GCFR, has approved the change of name of the University from: FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, YOLA (FUTY) to MODIBBO ADAMA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, YOLA (MAUTECH, YOLA), supposedly named after Modibbo Adama Ibn Hassan, a great scholar, an erudite educationist, an outstanding leader and the founder of the Fombina Kingdom (Now Adamawa Emirate Council). As the first ruler and founder of the Emirate, Modibbo Adama Ibn Hassan (1809 -1847) was one of the disciples and flag bearers of Sheikh Usman Ibn Fodio of the Sokoto Caliphate. By this therefore, the general public is enjoined to note the new name of the University and
be informed that all former documents and correspondences bearing
Federal University of Technology, Yola remain valid, and the change of name takes effect from 1st October, 2011.

Signed

Alh. Ahmed Usman W/Chekke

Registrar

Reproduced here for archival purposes only. First published October 2009 on the Internet.

Given the opportunity to read Michael Peel’s new book about Nigeria A Swamp Full of Dollars I groaned inwardly. Oh no, not another condescending, smirking tome written by a white man about Nigeria, corruption, decay, injustice, crude oil, blah, blah, blah.  I remembered painfully reading Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen and that was the best of them. As I held the book, wondering whether to toss it into the heap of “I go read am” books, inside me, Esu-Elegbara, the god of my impish spirit roared, “Man Up! Read the book! If you don’t like it drop it like the dozens of other books littering your life!” I give thanks to Esu for making me read the book. I could not drop this book. It was written with respect, and it turned out to be a purposeful book written by a focused, purposeful journalist. Before you die, please read this book. A Swamp Full of Dollars is the definitive book about the ravages of the Niger Delta written by a man who actually prowled the delta with the best and the worst of us. Let me put it this way, I am still recovering from a harrowing 17 day mostly road trip through the ruins of Nigeria. This man spent years there. He deserves whatever prize they give to journalists that brave, or some would say, that reckless.

I love this book. In A Swamp Full of Dollars, Peel reexamines a familiar tale of the devastation of Nigeria’s Niger Delta by oil conglomerates and thieving Nigerian leaders. Fortunately, in Peel’s expert hands, it is reborn and told with fierce courage and gentle but damning conviction. The narrative is delivered in fresh, brilliant prose, shorn of clichés. This is not Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen. You do not suffer the exhaustion of listening to drumbeats of despair. It is a sermon, but not in a sententious way. I appreciate that Peel writes a really sad story with respect and compassion for those at the receiving end of multiple pipes of greed. If you don’t read anything else, please read the prologue, Trigger Point. It is easily one of the best essays I have read in decades. Focused, disciplined, lush and crisp, this is great, data-driven prose. Bereft of the narcissism of messianic African writers, it is at once instructive and entertaining. We need to read this. And the world needs to hear this. Someone is getting away with genocide in Nigeria’s Niger Delta.

This book is not merely a clinical rendering of the tale of a catastrophe. The rendering is impressive in its delivery. In the prologue, talking about an encounter with a peasant in the island of São Tomé and Príncípe, Peel makes this observation: “When I give her dobras worth about £1.50, she grips my hand with a strength unnerving in one apparently so frail. The intensity of her gratitude fills me with loathing, both for the economic gulf from which it springs and for the feeling of power it awakens in me.” (xiv) How many of us Nigerians have not felt the rush of power from giving our crumbs to our dispossessed? It is a great shame that such haunting, evocative words about the suffering of our own people come from an outsider looking in. Here is fresh prose neatly describing decay, despair, and dilapidation: “Around the corner, at the Royal Niger Company’s old headquarters, the corrugated metal walls of the ground floor were corroded beyond repair and the upper floor had disintegrated. A once sturdy safe in the corner was a mess of stone and mangled metal. The building’s only occupant was a bare-breasted old woman, made pitifully thin by age and deprivation. She sat eating from an orange plastic bowl and begging visitors for food and money.” (p 33)

A Swamp Full of Dollars is a neatly compiled, carefully documented history coated in appealing prose. It is chock full of current statistics about Nigeria. This one is a keeper. And some of the data is frightening. During Peel’s time living in Nigeria, “oil sales typically accounted for about three-quarters of government revenues and more than 95 percent of export earnings. In Britain, where production levels are similar, crude accounted until 2006 for less than one-tenth of exports.” (p 27) This book should be in every Nigerian classroom. Every Nigerian intellectual should own this book; the data between the covers is priceless. The book’s attention to detail seems fueled by Peel’s photographic memory. He captures every Nigerian drama as if it is a sad Vaudeville act. It is also an immensely readable tutorial on the oil and geo- politics of the region. He documents the grisly atrocities carried out on the people of the Delta in a “democracy” run by Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo. He outlines Shell’s role in the Nigerian Civil war and he argues that Shell’s and Western interests arose from the fact that the war was interrupting the flow of crude. He goes further to explain, with the help of really good data, why Nigerian oil is of strategic importance to the West especially the US. Peel’s analysis is refreshing on many levels. He constantly makes the connection between the suffering in the Delta and the material comfort in the West, In other words, our comfort in the West is paid for by the bloody suffering in the Niger Delta. Peel gets it.  “I could see the obscene asymmetry between the smoothness of my oil-fuelled life in Britain and the toxic impact of crude on one of its main source regions. Like other horrors that we tolerate in the West because they happen to people elsewhere, the disturbing story of Nigeria’s oil became harder to ignore once it was no longer abstract. What had been faraway and theoretical had now become up close and personal.” (p 14)

It is profound how Peel returns again and again to themes of connections between the West and Nigeria’s oil. He also attempts to make, in my view, unconvincing parallels between the oppression of the people of the Delta and the poor in the West: “Already I could see many common themes. The rich men’s houses in impoverished Oloibiri were no more obscene than their counterparts in London; their opulence was simply starker compared with the general standard of living. Nor were the Delta resource control disputes so different in essence from the campaign of the Scottish nationalists for dominion of the UK oil pumped off Scotland’s shores. That, too can be cast as a story of historical oppression and growing resistance to a nation state that some see as an unwanted fiction. In Nigeria, guns and deeper poverty have simply bolstered the polemic.”  (p31)  Nigeria’s poor would kill to be America’s destitute. Peel does offer a great point about the harmful effects of what he terms reverse racism – Westerners treating “progressive” but flawed African leaders like china that might shatter if subjected to the normal wear and tear of political debate. He points out for example that folks were dissuaded from asking hard questions about Obasanjo’s administration. Today, we are reeling in shock from the extent of that administration’s graft.

It is particularly telling that not one of the Nigerian leaders interviewed in the book had anything of substance to contribute to the discourse at hand. They sounded like hapless fools wondering what to do with the mantle in their hands. Indeed, Peel’s impressions of the Niger Delta activist Dokubo Asari reads like the making of a tragic-comedy. Asari comes across as a money grubbing opportunist whose “freedom fighters” have surreal, silly names like “KKK.”  Peel visits Asari’s military hide-out, and is witness to a theatre of the absurd: “A man dressed in an orange Shell jumpsuit, inseparable from his Kalashnikov caught my eye. He and some others started wrestling, sprawling in the mud. Some of the photos I took turned out to be hilarious: the scene looked more like a reality game show with guns than the training base of a militia movement.” (p 11) There is more of this farce: “A well-muscled young fighter, wearing nothing but tight black underpants, started to move around jerkily, like a Convent Garden mime artist. Water ran to the ground off his bare chest. The whole atmosphere, charged with testosterone and a certain homoerotic tension, seemed more camp militancy than militants’ camp. Whether I was watching spontaneous ecstasy or a performance for a foreign visitor was open to question, although I didn’t get the sense of being much noticed until I started taking photos.” (p 12) Peel sees in the military camp a strange, bizarre world “in which weapons, spiritual belief, ideology and mercantilism combined to such deadly effect.” (p13) Unfortunately, Peel provides no pictures in the book. I wonder what he is going to do with those pictures. Perhaps we should look forward to a coffee table book.

Peel points out this fact: “In 1886, the United Africa Company – by now a behemothic conglomeration of British manufacturing and trading interests – found a novel way of gaining extra competitive leverage. It won a royal charter from the British government, creating a trade protectorate reserved exclusively to the company.” (p 37) It is a little known but interesting form of governance by the private sector. Wal-Mart may end up ruling Africa.   Wal-Mart may need to govern Africa to keep commerce flowing. They may need to build the roads, power up the electricity plants and provide a functioning police force to protect their widgets. Sadly, it is not as far-fetched and silly as it sounds. There are some Nigerians who would welcome this re-colonization; I don’t blame them. Talking about governance, as an aside, Peel is a white witness to black days of election horrors under Olusegun Obasanjo: “In a day spent travelling in and around Port Harcourt, I did not see a single person cast their vote legitimately. Instead, I saw ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of electors by ruling-party agents, and heard accounts of voting materials being stolen by armed thugs. In one counting centre, I watched as returning officers leafed through a sheaf of results recording 100 percent turnouts and 100 percent votes for the president. In Port Harcourt, a group of young men identified by locals as ruling-party supporters tried to persuade me that a large street protest complaining about the non-distribution of ballot boxes was being staged by people who were mentally disturbed.” (p 17)

For an insightful look into Lagos, please read chapter 4, titled The Boys From the Bookshop. Precious little about Lagos escapes Peel in chapter 4; this is a delightful chapter. It is about Lagos in all of its glory and confusion. His is one of the most apt descriptions of Lagosian anarchy that has been penned in contemporary times. Peel dissects the anarchy of Lagos thus:, “Lagos life exemplifies how the modern state wrought by crude has become the kind of dysfunctional world depicted in Thomas Hobbes’ classic Leviathan written in the shadow of England’s Civil War. Hobbes argued that, in the absence of central autocratic control, societies were doomed to exist in a state of perpetual conflict pitting all against all… Hobbes described what he saw as the inevitable and frightening results of an absence of checks on people’s behaviour, when men live without other security, than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal.” (p 75) Lagos, aka Nigeria is ugly, as ceaseless materialism jostles for space with grinding poverty. It never ends, the quest for material wealth, this is a society gifting soulless materialism to its young: “Few of the structures, rich or poor, offer much to the aesthete. A British architect who has lived in Lagos for many years once gave me a sweeping assessment of the quality on offer.’ It’s all shite,’ he said.’ I know – I built some of it.’” (p 77) Peel does not waste any words in describing the systemic laying to waste of huge swaths of Nigeria, her potential and resources. For example he mines the food web of bottom feeders in a molue bus. Riveting is the relentless bottom feeding of preachers, motor touts, the police, etc, etc.

One is entertained and saddened by the endless cycle of ten-percenters and pay-offs. He documents with a telling eye Made-In-Nigeria farce, hiding incompetence behind a veil of pretend processes and titles: “A few yards away, behind a pile of wooden planks, a black-tiled monument commemorated the March 2001 visit of President Olusegun Obasanjo, The dedication announced the laying of the foundation stone of the Oloibiri Oil and gas Research Institute, ‘to the glory of God and service to the Niger Delta people of Nigeria’. The institute, like so many projects in this region of unfinished business, had been promised but not built. A local official who was with Obasanjo on the day of the dedication told me the president was much irritated when he found out he was to inaugurate a project for which no funds had been made available.” (p 24) Hello Graham Greene. V.S. Naipaul would love this.

Peel documents the complicity and duplicity of Shell and other multinational corporations. Sadder still, the alleged leaders of the aggrieved Delta subscribe to the Nigerian maxim “man wen dey cry dey see road!” It seems that some of the “community leaders” of the Delta are always walking around looking for an opportunity to line their own pockets. Peel recalls a conversation he once had with “a traditional chief from another Delta town, who after describing persuasively the damage oil had done to his community, grumbled that Shell had not even given him a mobile phone for Christmas.” As a result, Peel states understandably that he often found it hard to tell with local leaders “where their ambitions for their communities ended and where their personal desires began.” (p 26) The kleptomania of the governors of the oil producing state is distressing and described in heartbreaking detail. Shell seems happy to trot out the proverbial “token Nigerian” before Peel to play defense. That person is Basil Omiyi, Shell’s managing director for Nigeria. Peel’s interview of this civil servant is an exercise in obfuscation. Omiyi’s bureaucratic parsing of words and the cloying insincerity of his remarks do little to mask Shell’s shameful conduct in the Niger Delta.  All in all, Peel carefully maps out the food web or chain of relationships among the MNC’s, the “activists” and the government. Sadly, except for the people, it is perversely symbiotic. The suffering people of the Niger Delta are treated with the indifference reserved for the dispossessed protesting their humanity.

The saddest chapter by far is chapter 8, Things Are Looking Up. Hear Peel: “As the Nigerian government celebrated the debt relief in late 2005, I spent a depressing day in Rivers State, one of Shell’s biggest areas of operation. In Port Harcourt, I visited Community Primary School One on the Rumueme district, where head teacher M.C. Anwuri showed me her dilapidated empire. Many of the children didn’t have desks and had to defecate on waste ground because of the lack of a working toilet. In the centre of the courtyard, three girls of about 13 were using bricks to bash charcoal against a patch of concrete; the end product was to be smeared on the wall of the classroom, to serve as a makeshift blackboard. In Anwuri’s office, a calendar produced at no little expense by the state government told – or taunted – her that she had the good fortune to be living in the ‘Treasure base of the Nation’.”  (p 173) This chapter, if read aloud to the people would cause a bloody revolt.

Peel does tend to overly romanticize the under-dog. He seems taken by the aura of Odumegwu Ojukwu. This leads him to drop his guard and desist from plumbing the depth of a most complex and polarizing figure. As a result his image and depiction of Ojukwu comes across as inchoate. Ojukwu is no saint. The Ogoni and Saro Wiwa are a footnote to the story. I think that is an unfortunate omission; he could have explored the complex relationship between the Eastern minorities and the Igbo and their ambivalence about Biafra. Peel talks about the difficulty of buying an air ticket in Lagos. Maybe in 2003. Today you can go online in Nigeria and buy an airline ticket in minutes. My experience this year (2009) with Aero airlines was very pleasant. I wonder why he did not interview certain other major players: Yakubu Gowon, Shagari, Obasanjo, etc. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is interviewed but the source is not quoted (*Interview by Charlie Kimber, October 2006, in the Socialist Review) (p 44). Not to worry, Thank Google! The drink Ogogoro is not made from the leaves of the palm tree; rather it is distilled from the tree’s sap. And palm oil is not only a lubricant, it is an important source of cooking oil. These glitches do little to diminish what is in my opinion a great book.

Finally, as Peel is careful to point out, Nigeria is not without hope. Technology in the form of cell phones and the Internet is becoming a muscular force in restructuring relationships and transforming the dispossessed from helpless to self-dependent. The private sector is inspiring; what Nigerian entrepreneurs are able to do with the virtual absence of an infrastructure is miraculous.  The ebullient spirit of the people is a huge factor in the ability of the society to absorb bone-crushing dysfunction. Peel’s focus is on the miseries of the people of the Delta but this does not blind him to the sprouts of hope germinating in places. It is not all despair in Nigeria; there are hints of hope, but admittedly hardly visible. All in all a memorable tome-documentary of the hell-farce that Nigeria is fast becoming. Buy this book, shut off your generator and weep for the new Nigeria.

This is the third installment of my thoughts on the stories on the Caine Prize’s shortlist – an activity my readers are gamely enduring as part of a collaborative effort with the blogger Aaron Bady.  I have previously blogged my thoughts on Rotimi Babatunde’s Bombay’s Republic here and Billy Kahora’s Urban Zoning here. What do I think of Stanley Kenani’s story, Love on Trial? Well, I must start on a sincere and positive note:   I must thank the Caine Prize and Aaron Bady for fostering an exciting discussion of literature by African writers this year. It has been great fun so far; it has also forced me to think hard about why things are the way they are about the stories written by African writers. As for Kenani’s story, Stephen Derwent Partington, blogging his thoughts  here, speaks my mind down to the last full stop including all the gracious things he said about Stanley Kenani. You should read it and perhaps not read my post. What follows does not really improve upon the silence, but I am too opinionated not to burden the world with my obnoxious views. So here goes.

In this story a drunk stumbles upon two men making love in the latrines of a certain village in Malawi. One escapes, leaving the other (a young law student) to face the ridicule of the villagers and a homophobic press, and the wrath of the law.  Under cross –examination, the young man is defiant and haughtily lectures the bemused village and the press about sexuality and prejudice. His utterances are laced liberally with quotes from Plato and the bible to assure the peasants of his higher intellectual and moral ground. He is convicted and he goes to prison flashing the V-sign. The wrath of Karma is visited on his accuser, who is saved from his alcoholism by the ravages of AIDS. The West, enraged by the audacity of this uppity homophobic country declares it an economic no-fly zone by stopping all economic aid. It is a farce of course a variant of the same one playing in black Africa – all knowing African intellectual comfortable with his sexuality and taken by his superior intellect thanks to Western education, pitted against a community of ignorant savages.

It is a cringe-worthy tale; preachy social commentary roaring into town wearing the unctuous toga of a short story: Let’s call it Culture clash goes to Malawi. For those not following Africa’s new obsession with homophobia, here is the context for Kenani’s story: In 2010, a Malawian gay couple, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga were sentenced to 14 years in prison for being lovers. Thanks to an international outcry and threats of cuts to international aid, they were eventually pardoned.  The new president of Malawi has rightly and wisely agreed to repeal the obnoxious anti-gay laws enacted by her predecessor.

In Kenani’s re-telling of this mad saga, a drunken tale-bearer and witness to the deed (Mr. Lapani Kachingwe) extorts drinks from an eager audience to tell a story over and over again of what his eyes saw. With each telling and with increasing inebriation, stuff gets lost in the translation:

“Mr Kachingwe prefers to begin from the beginning. He does not remember what he must have eaten, he says, but he was coming from Mr Nashoni’s, naturally not very sober, when his stomach was terribly upset beyond what he could bear. He saw a line of toilets outside the Chipiri Primary School, those brick iron-sheet-roofed pit latrines, about ten or so of them, right at the beginning of the school compound if you were coming from the western side. It was a Saturday, so there were no pupils at school. He ran for the toilets, burst into the first he came to and had relieved his stomach of its burden in one monumental effort when he realised he had company. Charles and a boy Mr Kachingwe failed to recognise were so engrossed in their act it took some time for them to become aware somebody had entered the toilet, by which time Mr Kachingwe had seen ‘everything’.”

The “everything” is two men furtively loving themselves away from prying eyes. Kenani unwittingly brings all of my anxieties together in those lines, which happen to be my favorite lines in this story. Welcome to Africa. Everything stinks. Subtext: In the West gays come out of the closet, in Africa, they are outed screaming and kicking from stinking latrines. How an undergraduate law student ended up making love in a stinking latrine (never mind the voyeurism and the poor judgment) can only be explained by a need to contrive a plot ahead of a morality tale. The awkwardness of the position strikes me, pun intended.

There really is not much to this story that I like, there are many structural issues with the story starting with the strange assertion that it is not technically a story. For one thing, the medical research on AIDS was poorly done. The tale bearer suffers the debilitating effect of AIDS within a few pages, it’s a perverse miracle. The bad guy had to be killed off in a rush as the story canters off like a diseased horse galloping to an ungainly full stop. My pet peeve: Why italicize Malawian words? Let the reader google it. Nsima is a word. Google it! By the way, who writes love letters in 2010? How quaint, who remembers those? What happened to texts, chats, etc.? In 2010, how would two law students have communicated? Definitely not via love letters.

The story’s preachy, condescending tone got on my wrong side. It bears strong hints in style, tone, and proselytizing to Lauri Kubuitsile’s In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2011. There must be a formula out there somewhere for writing preachy tales; Kenani almost bursts with the excitement and overzealousness of a crusading evangelist, the story’s eyes twinkling gentle mischief, out to get unbelievers. The protagonist captures his derision for alternative views in lush patronizing condescending lectures to the amusement of lowly peasants. This is an engaging story for all the wrong reasons.

Kenani deploys  a predictable formula; demonize the opposition (make them simpletons, in this case Malawian villagers are simple savages cheering and jeering at what they don’t want to see) glorify the victim with a halo, and the resulting clarity in conflict becomes the burden of a short story. The story could have used more sophistication in the analysis. The hypocrisy, the curiosity and disbelief are shocking. But then this unsophisticated analysis fails to explore cultural aspects deeply. Kenani sets up a conflict and attempts sharp contrasts to make his points. The nexus with the new Christianity is touched upon but not robustly explored, by which I mean that this hatred is not in these people, what little is there is exaggerated by the Christian right and their odious laws.

It is predictable, there are no twists, we know where this story is going. It is written from a particular viewpoint, sympathetic to the protagonist’s circumstances. I would have loved more complex narrative that allows the reader to ponder the nature, consequences and implications of the culture clashes playing out in much of today’s Black Africa. It is also about the politics of advocacy and literature. Would this story have made the shortlist if it was written by someone with the opposite view point?

The unintended brilliance of Kenani’s story is to out the mediocrity and lack of vision of the African intellectual and political elite misruling much of today’s Black Africa. They are bungling change with spectacularly devastating results. It is their self-love, their narcissism that is on trial here. As with everything engaging the passions of many African intellectuals these days, the advocacy is pure mimicry – of the West. It is also an eloquent testimony to the skills of Africa’s intellectual and political elite in deploying the avuncular strength of the West to execute a no-fly zone over the poor of Africa just to get their needs met. The blatant looting going on today in Nigeria’s government circles for instance would be impossible, if it was not declared a “democracy.” The vagabonds in power and their intellectual friends are protected by the pretense of civil governance – sanctioned by an avuncular West. Meanwhile, in most of these societies the structures are not even robust enough to protect the thieving rich, not to talk of the poor, children and women and vulnerable minorities like gays and lesbians. That is where we should start from; you don’t build a house from the roof down when you lack the technology. In many parts of Africa, gay rights activists are now racing through broken communities armed with NGO dollars demanding same sex marriages, and other accommodations, because this is what obtains in the West. The result has been tragic in a few instances.

I am a passionate civil rights activist, one who believes that we are what we are; our sexuality is genetically determined and we should celebrate and nurture each other and reject the bigotry that we see in our communities and temples against those whose only crime is that they were born different from us The issue I am worried about lately is the increasingly reckless and uncritical militancy of many gay rights activists in Africa. The gay rights movement is moving its axis of battle to Africa and I am all for that because in many communities, the prejudice against homosexuals in Africa is beginning to rival the savagery we witness in the West. We should be careful however that we do not goad people into coming out in societies that do not have the structures and laws to protect the vulnerable. There is no week that passes when I don’t think about David Kato who was brutally murdered in Uganda. The struggle for rights must be strategic. We should fight for good laws, seek sanctions against evil leaders and priests who preach and legislate hate. The way we are going about the struggle needs a re-appraisal. For now, this comes across a middle-class battle for privilege, just like what passes for “democracy” in many African countries.

There is a curious parable at the end about what happens to mute witnesses too indifferent or cowardly to address an injustice:  A rat was caught in a trap; he asked various animals for help and they would not help because they did not see it as their business. Their indifference ends up having tragic consequences for each of them. I would be very interested in the origin of this parable. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the statement by German Pastor Martin Niemöller on the world’s indifference to the holocaust, First they came for the Jews

 First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

There is a good analysis of the origin of the statement here. I wonder if Niemöller was inspired by Kenani’s parable. Niemöller died in 1984.

Reproduced here for archival purposes. First published on Next and elsewhere, July 2011.

In my youth, my favourite cartoon character was a musician called appropriately, Cacofonix in the comic Asterix. Cacofonix was so awful, each time he threatened to play music, he was quickly tied to a tree and his mouth sealed to ensure no instrument met his lips. Most of today’s Nigerian musicians remind me of Cacofonix. From D’banj on down, they should all be tied to mango trees and their mouths plugged with fake Naira notes, never ever to play music again ever. Nigerian music is undergoing a major crisis and we should be concerned. Mimicry is the word; mimicry of the worst sort. Just like our jheri-curled accented pastors, Nigerian musicians seem to have figured out that mimicking anything Western pays. And so just as Nigerian pastors are climaxing to the beat of dollars in the pulpit, overdressed characters with contrived accents are shuffling about like drunks on stage, grabbing crotches and convincing the world that there is perhaps not a single musical talent in Nigeria. The lyrics appear to be repetitious odes to materialism, and more troubling, an open invitation to misogyny. The untalented should not profit from their mediocrity.

Nigeria has never been this afflicted by a horde of horrible musicians. One might as well be listening to the symphony of nails on the blackboard. All day. There are bright spots, like the goddess Asa, but today’s music is mostly united by a lack of originality, and a distinct lack of talent. It just seems like anyone with access to a laptop and the Internet can go to a “studio” in Ajegunle and “release” something. If art imitates life, then Nigeria must be on life support judging from what passes for our music these days. I do not understand why I would waste my time on these wretched offerings when I can simply gouge on the better produced, better written and infinitely more interesting Western originals that they are plagiarised from.

We are better than this. I am quite sure that in the crush of these crotch-grabbing trash-talking wannabe musicians, there is talent there. The first thing they need to acquire is some self-confidence. Fela Anikulapo Kuti came back from the West and started a group called the Koola Lobitos. He was mimicking all sorts of Western prattle. He probably would have been successful at it if he had stayed in white shadows; but he had the common sense to strike out in an original direction. Bad ideas don’t need visas to go to Nigeria; they are welcomed wholeheartedly and uncritically where our people toil daily to turn our beautiful nation into a cultural rubbish dump.

When I complained on Facebook, my concerns were met with howls of outrage by friends that I admire for their good taste. One urged me to look past the illiteracy, the faux swagger, the gaudy clothes, the buxom ladies, the misogyny, the trash talking, the off-key singing, and just listen to the messages in the lyrics. I was given a helpful list of musicians to go study: MiI, Sound Sultan, Modenine Terry G, D’Banj, Ill Bliss, Six-Foot Plus, RuleClean ObiWon, Rule Clean. Polymath, Terry tha Rapman Flavour, Whizkid, Mi, Seun Kuti, Duncan Mighty, etc. Besides Kuti, these contrived monikers read like cheap booze labels blighting urban America. One conscientious objector made my point excellently, something like this: Ikhide, here is a dinner of stones with a few rice seeds in it. Em, ignore the stones, look really hard, you will see some rice in it. Haba, the late Saro-Wiwa once said, dem slap you, take your shirt, give you back one button, you say tank you sah! Forgive me, if I am not impressed. To be fair to these alleged musicians, mimicry is a real problem in everything we do these days in Nigeria – democracy, the new Christianity, etc. So, what I am complaining about is not unique to the music industry. I actually started studying the music in earnest after being drawn in by the poetry of Vocal Slender of the BBC’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ fame. Let us be honest; the music is awful for the most part. And I don’t have to pine for the music of my generation, whatever that means. I am so glad I have an iPhone filled with Old School music. I would be depressed all day if I had to watch all these musicians mumbling into cheap microphones. Someone give them a real job, please.

On Facebook, a pained young man was so upset that I had sullied the reputation of an entire generation of musicians he expressed the fervent hope that I should be stoned to death. Actually, listening to today’s music feels like being stoned to death in instalments. Maybe I am an old man and this is all a generational thing. My father Papalolo and I both enjoyed music, period. Well he once chased me down the street for daring to wake him up to the blare of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get it On’. Papalolo was always prone to unnecessary drama.