My dad, Papalolo served the colonialists in the fifties’ Lagos and was fond of telling anyone who would listen that he loved the white man’s orderliness, governance, discipline, etc. My mother is similarly contemptuous of my generation of looters (her word). She says ruefully that in the previous life black folks were in charge but they screwed things up so badly, God said never again. My mother half-jokes that the white folks know where God is but they won’t tell us, so we don’t go and kill Him.
I understand my parents’ cynicism; they and many people live in our village under appalling conditions. I reflect on my parents’ feelings a lot these days. President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration must be the most reviled in the history of our nation. No one that I know of has anything good to say about him and his hapless sidekicks. However reading Nigerian writing and its anxieties through the decades, you cannot help but notice that the refrain is constant. Except for the changing dates, the story is the same; massive corruption and inept governance, no accountability. I half joke that the only civil servant that ever went to jail in Nigeria was Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and that was fiction.
It is sad. Nigeria’s intellectual and political elite have used democracy to demonstrate convincingly that they are devoid of credibility and incapable of governance. It is sad but again this is not new. Chinua Achebe has raged at colonialists, postcolonial leaders, VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and anyone that questions our humanity as black people. I identify with his anger; a pox on the mansions of all racists. But I wonder at what point we should take personal responsibility for the circumstances we find ourselves in. What passes for democracy in today’s Nigeria, for example is a perverse mimicry of the real thing and foreigners may be forgiven for being skeptical of our progress and expressing this in condescending patronizing ways. It is important to demand respect but it must also be earned.
To be fair, globally, many assumptions about democracy and governance are changing. Orthodox economic theories are falling by the wayside because they were crafted under assumptions of demographic homogeneity and fixed physical boundaries. The world is browning, walls are falling and old assumptions about how we should live are no longer as useful as they once were. In Nigeria however, not much is changing in terms of governance. The intellectual and political elite seem genetically wired to look out only for themselves and their immediate families, the people be damned. The distinction between Nigeria’s ruling Party, the PDP and the pretend-opposition, the APC is a distinction without a difference. They are both profoundly corrupt and incompetent, with the PDP only marginally better in the sense that it lays no dishonest claims to honesty. Nigerians are still howling with laughter at Mr. Atiku Abubakar’s declaration that he will stamp out corruption in Nigeria if elected. He is stupendously wealthy and he has given feeble defenses to robust and compelling accusations that virtually all of his wealth came from state-sanctioned looting of the treasury. Get this, he is the most credible of the APC front-runners, yet he has refused to quash credible rumors that he is wanted in the United States. At least one of his associates is in jail for fraud. This is what the New York Times piece says about this embarrassment:
As for the money in the freezer, agents found it in a raid at Mr. Jefferson’s home in August 2005. Prosecutors said it was from a Kentucky businessman and was supposed to be used to bribe a high official of Nigeria, later identified as the vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who denied being part of any scheme.
Mr. Abubakar might end up being the first Nigerian president to be arrested by the law enforcement authorities of another nation. We are in a very humiliating place as Nigerians. But then Nigerians’ expectations for even a half-decent government are pretty low. It won’t happen anytime soon, especially given the shady characters on social media, former thug-rulers, now writing lofty tweets and posts about the Nigeria of our dreams. They would dearly love to return to the scene of the crime; they left a lot of unresolved loot behind in Abuja and elsewhere. We may be stuck. Our only hope perhaps is a second colonization. I see the harbinger of this coming dispensation in our willingness to mimic, and be assimilated by Western values. The West is an asymptote that even the most Pan-African of us has bought into. Nothing is original and valued unless it is from the West. Our leaders’ children do not go to our schools because they are not good enough. I don’t blame them, have you been inside any of our schools lately? In Nigeria, the children of the dispossessed are being abused in the name of education.
So, what am I saying? There is hope. Yes, stop laughing. The lowly cellphone saved Nigerians from the tyranny of state-sanctioned incompetence and corruption (NITEL!). So will Wal-Mart save us from the hell that our intellectual and political elite have put us in. America needs new markets, she is saturated with consumer goods, you can only buy so much. Black Africa is the new frontier; there are a lot of unthinking consumers waiting for Western capitalist detritus. Wal-Mart needs to reach my waiting mother. In order to do get to her, Wal-Mart would need to fix the broken roads and hire armed robbers as toll booth attendants. Our elders would be people greeters, taught by professional development experts to say in perfect American accents, “Welcome to Wal-Mart!” Just like they did the chaat wallahs of Mumbai’s bazaars. Wal-Mart will sell do-it-yourself (DIY) municipal kits aka Gofment-in-a-box. If you have the money you can use Wal-Mart’s roads, water, police and schools, all in a safe environment. As long as you pay for it. Just like in America. There is hope my people, go to church today and pray for deliverance through my prediction. In Jesus Name! Insha Allah! Ise! What has all this got to do with my mother’s cellphone? You will need to ask her, I don’t know. Goodnight.
Pa Ikhide 