Nigeria – Pa Ikhide

Nigeria is on my mind. We are living in interesting times. Many years from now, historians will agree that one of the best things to ever happen to Nigeria was the election of Muhammadu Buhari as president. It is hard to find a more corrupt and hypocritical government than Buhari’s in the history of Nigeria; indeed there is a collective national embarrassment at the thought that a malignant blight rules Nigeria.

This is not what Nigerians hoped for and asked for. They got duped by the APC and her PhD vuvuzelas. They in turn got duped by Buhari and now they are fighting mad. Interesting.

Let it be said that in Buhari Nigerians have learned a bitter lesson. Some would say that is wishful thinking given the lusty eagerness with which Nigerians are now cheering on the sweet words of the nouveau anti-Buharists, the loud-mouthed broken GPS vuvuzelas that landed our national lorry in the valley of despair and hopelessness.

So those that told us Buhari would be the best thing to happen to Nigeria since jollof rice are now up in arms and will not be consoled. Some are even on the ground in Nigeria begging to be mauled and arrested. Wonderful. These are the same people who worked overtime to blackmail, berate and shut up those of us who refused to drink the burukutu served up by the APC.

I salute these new social justice warriors for carrying my mantle of real change in Nigeria, especially my friends who dubbed me a broken record, for they are now the broken record, singing the same song I have been belting out every day for the past several years. There is a lesson there: If you stand up and speak the truth of your pain long enough, someone will come along to carry your burden. It still shakes me to my foundations that these new wailers, curators of Nigeria’s past bloody history truly believed that given our past, their judgment to hand over Nigeria to Buhari and his acolytes was appropriate.

To be fair, there have been some true warriors for justice, equity and transparency in Nigeria, many of them young folks. The couple of concessions Buhari’s inept and clueless government has made has been due to the hard work of a few studying what little data is out there and loudly sharing their objective critiques. However, true accountability remains a real problem. We have nothing but opinions, few people are being held accountable.

No nation can survive without accountability and robust structures of governance. Our broken, dying, moribund institutions are merely symptoms of the breakdown in structures and accountability. Who will bell the cat? I daresay, not these new wailers. We have heard their songs before. And the beat goes on.

We may end up ignoring history again and avoiding this lesson but know this: Buhari’s ascension to the throne of shame, his election has demystified him, all politicians, and all intellectuals (including writers) and exposed virtually all of us as self-serving rent-seekers. We are living in interesting times and one prays that our great country is greater than the machinations of the men that have held her hostage since Independence. Again, there is the hope that Nigerians have learned their lessons from this epic mistake that is the Buhari presidency; that they have carefully documented why, how and when we got to this mess. And more importantly who led us into this national quagmire.

Hope is fleeting though, perhaps a mirage. I cannot get over this tragicomedy: Those that led us into this mess, those that carefully drove our national truck into this mess, our PhD talking heads are now the ones gleefully pointing out all the potholes that they drove us into – to loud applause from the abused. Why are victims cheering their abductors? This dysfunction is what the PhDs call the Stockholm syndrome, a perverse love affair with one’s jailers and abusers.

Nigerians have been abused for too long, and I say to them: You must gain back your self-esteem. Forgive those who drove you into this hell but stay away from them. They will hurt you again. Not on purpose perhaps, but simply because they are clueless. Outside of their pretty and seductive words, they have never supervised even a dog in their lifetime, so they have no idea what it would take to run a complex country like Nigeria. You need new heroes. In fact, believe it or not, many of you cheering them on may be smarter and more experienced than their glib words may suggest. You may be the hero you seek.

Nigerians have gotten bad advice from many talking heads, the vast majority of whom live in the Diaspora and seem to have no other qualification for national service other than that they live abroad. Nigeria has suffered. It is not their fault but Nigerians seem to be suffering from a national inferiority complex. All it takes for anyone to be taken seriously these days is to write about Nigeria’s problems from abroad, abroad as in Europe and North America. Indeed it is easy to prove that virtually all the hare-brained ideas that Buhari’s hapless regime attempted to implement came from alleged thinkers who live abroad. People with PhDs abroad who would not qualify for a 3-minute slot in a community forum in their places of abode are experts on governance in Nigeria. They demand and obtain access to the highest places of the land and proceed to try to govern armed with nothing but shallow platitudes. It is easy. I have gotten access to strange and powerful places in Nigeria because someone simply said, “This is Ikhide, he is from America!” These talking heads have every right to their personal opinions but the time for bullshit is past tense.

We know now that slick pie charts and PowerPoint slides are inappropriate tools of governance. Talk is cheap. We are lazy, let’s just be honest, we are. Our laziness will kill off our country. Consider this a call to action, we must kill off our communal laziness in order to save Nigeria. The time is now for structural reform. It is hard work, but we have no choice. It is time to end this culture that has turned a once-great country into a space for sloth and graft.

At some point it will become obvious that we cannot continue to live like this. This is a national crisis. Nigeria as it is currently constituted is a failed project, a broken lorry that needs a new engine and a brand new set of wheels. The center is too powerful. It is time to negotiate the terms of Nigeria’s existence. It is counterintuitive but this needs to be said: Be wary of those who trot out the “One Nigeria” mantra and accuse you of “tribalism” once you begin to question the leaky, shaky, sketchy assumptions upon which Nigeria shivers. They are more than likely the real agents of nepotism using cute cloying words to protect the status quo. They feed fat from the status quo and any attempt to look at new ways of doing business threatens them and their agenda. All politics is local, Nigeria is a country of hundreds of nations; it stands to reason therefore that all power should devolve to the local. The federal government as is presently constituted is an ancient relic from ancient colonial times, it is in the wrong business and it needs to go.

Look around you. The people asking you to be patriots are hypocrites. They do not believe in your schools, your hospitals, your roads, your safety, security and welfare. That is why their families are abroad enjoying these things while they rule over you with the mere force of their empty words. Perhaps we need to admit that we are incapable of governing ourselves. My generation and older have failed the nation, no ifs, no buts about it, we have created lovely spaces for ourselves from which we pontificate and excite the disenfranchised. Worse, we are raising a generation of young leaders that threaten to be worse than us – they are narcissistic, self-serving and thoroughly dishonest – and poorly educated to boot. This army of locusts you will find on social media grabbing adoring followers like honey does flies. I despair that this cycle is vicious. I honestly do. But I am not there. At some point, those that are on the ground will de truth cide, enough is enough and rise up and do what they must do to secure their present and their future from rent-seekers. It is the only way out. Who will bell the cat?

Good night.

And yes, speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.

The world is now privy to the myriad lies and exaggerations of the acclaimed writer, Professor Christopher Abani regarding his imaginary ordeal in Nigeria’s prisons (mostly Kirikiri). The lies are compelling and give Africa a black eye: The death sentence imposed on him because of his involvement in military coups as a teenager and his alleged witness to the execution of at least one 14-year old through death by nailing of his penis to a chair until he bled to death. The shocking revelations of Abani’s “419” activities are detailed here on my blog.

There are many compelling reasons why Abani’s lies and exaggerations should not be ignored as mere fibs by someone intent on furthering his dream as a writer and intellectual. White folks need to understand the caste system in Nigeria. As the offspring of privilege, of a white mother and an upper middle class black father, Abani most likely luxuriated in the lap of adulation and luxury in Nigeria. Abani is biting the hands that fed him by lying about what did not happen to him in Nigeria. Shame on him. You must understand the impact of these lies on innocent Nigerians who are viewed at home and abroad from the tortured lens of what passes for African literature today. Abani’s lies are not mere lies; these are muscular distortions of the history of Nigeria, and by extension, Africa.

Let me repeat: Chris Abani was never detained in Nigeria’s Kirikiri prisons. Abani was never at Kirikiri as a prisoner awaiting death. That is just not true. And he was never implicated in a military coup, never. And the most galling of the lies; Abani never witnessed a 14-year old prisoner on death row die by his penis being nailed to a chair so he would bleed to death. That these lies have gone unchallenged for over a decade is a damning indictment of those in his literary circle who knew about this and chose to keep quiet for whatever reason. It is also an eloquent testimony to the racism in the literary circle of the West populated by patronizing condescending Western liberals who work themselves daily into unctuous avuncular foam, willing to think the worst of Africa and Africans and consign us to a beggarly subhuman condition with their cloying, devastating faux kindness. They should keep their money, their grants, and their fake wines. We may be poor but we are definitely not idiots.

In the name of fiction, a tiny cabal of “African writers” seems willing to wheedle, lie and steal their way into stardom on the tortured back of Africa. As a result, Africa and Africans are being doubly victimized. In the decaying classrooms of Nigeria, children born into a war schemed by thieving politicians and lying intellectuals are being taught that dead white men discovered places like River Niger. And abroad their sons and daughters are assuring their white counterparts that in Nigeria 14-year olds are routinely executed by means so brutal and primitive, they reinforce the truth that Africa is a land of darkness. That is what Chris Abani and his roaming band of Diaspora literature pimps are telling young impressionable Westerners every day in classrooms. We should be outraged. If you do not believe me, here is the official website of Professor Chris Abani who now teaches this kind of false odium every day at the University of California, Riverside.

“As a teenager in Nigeria, Chris Abani earned a little too much attention for the publication Masters of the Board, a thriller whose plotline about a military coup triggered paranoia in his country’s political dictatorship. Abani’s creativity combined with his college activism resulted in prison sentences from his government, sometimes in solitary confinement.”

“A collection of poems that grew out of that experience, Kalakuta Republic (2000), was described as “the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable,” by playwright Harold Pinter.”Reading them is like being singed with a red hot iron.””

This is outrageous. The distortion of our own history by our very own is beyond reprehensible, it is criminal and I intend to stop only when Abani stops. I am privy to private testimonials of Abani’s malfeasance, how it is near-impossible for honest hard working African authors to tell their story without some concerned Westerner in the audience asking about Abani’s ordeal and the penis nailing to death.

The University of California, Riverside must demonstrate to the world that it is not a racist organization by bringing down Abani’s website. What Abani is doing to Nigeria in the classrooms of America makes him an enemy of Africa and we must let the University of California know it in no uncertain terms. It is very simple: Abani is the accuser here. He has accused Nigeria of arresting him several times, putting him on death row, executing at least one teenager, seeking his extradition from Britain, lie, lie, lie. In the West where he peddles his lies, there is the presumption of innocence until you are proven guilty. The University of California at Riverside should at the very minimum ask Abani to take down the offensive lies about Nigeria on his website, failing which I would urge Nigeria to sue the university for defamation.

What should we do? Great question. If you are outraged enough email the responsible parties in the university and urge them to prevail upon Abani to remove the lies from the university’s website. Chris Abani may be reached at Chris.abani@ucr.edu. Andrew Winer, is Chair of Abani’s department; he may be reached at: andrew.winer@ucr.edu

Abani is trusted by the Western media; he gets rave reviews and attention wherever he goes to peddle his tales of African disease war and gloom. Sometimes children are the beneficiaries or shall we say victims of his lies as in this moving article in the Star Tribune about how he only charged $5,000 to attend an event thanks to the persistence of a little boy who wanted very much for Abani “the poet and activist” to come deliver a speech in his school. We are told Abani normally charges $50,000 to $100,000 per engagement. I can assure you that he did not earn those fees from simply being a professor; pretty much every dollar he has earned is from his tales as a teenage pain-in-the-butt-on-death-row-in-Africa. Why should we allow an adult to scheme children out of the money they made from bake sales? Here is how Abani is described in the article:

“Abani grew up under a military dictatorship and was imprisoned by the Nigerian government as a teenager for his writings. He speaks gently of his late mother, a 5-foot-2 woman with five children, “who stood up to soldiers who wanted to kill us.” He is the recipient of the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award and the Hemingway/PEN Prize for his bestselling novel, “Graceland.””

There are enough lies in there to sink the Titanic again.

If you feel outraged enough about the pimping of Africa for profit by the likes of Chris Abani, please send a nice polite email to the following at the Star Tribune and express your concerns about the misrepresentations in the article:

Gail Rosenblum, the columnist who wrote the piece: gail.rosenblum@startribune.com

Michael J. Klingensmith, Publisher and CEO: michael.klingensmith@startribune.com

Nancy Barnes: Editor and Senior Vice President, nancyb@startribune.com

Scott Gillespie: Editor, sgillespie@startribune.com

There is more. Abani’s lies have infected the hallowed halls of academia and institutions whose hallmark is excellence. Chris Abani is the 2001 recipient of the Netherlands’ Prince Claus Award for Literature & Culture. Write to the Prince Claus Foundation at info@princeclausfund.nl and ask them to explain how and when Chris Abani was “a political prisoner of war” as they state on their website.

Chris Abani is the 2001 recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award. The award was given to Abani based on lies and misrepresentations about his alleged life as a prodemocracy activist in Nigeria. Write to the leaders of PEN USA at pen@penusa.org, ftw@penusa.org, libby@penusa.org asking them to explain the lies on their websites about Abani’s exploits.

Chris Abani is the 2003 recipient of the Hellman/Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch, USA. Make your feelings known at http://www.hrw.org/contact-us.

Chris Abani says Africa is a land of savages that nail their children’s phalluses to chairs so they can bleed to death. Do you agree? If not, do something about it. Now. We are not savages.

Do something. Anything. Chris Abani knows he is lying through all his teeth; he has been in hiding since the revelations went viral on the internet. I shall not relent until the heat forces him to say something, anything. Please share the TED speech with friends in Amnesty and other institutions who can do something to tell the truth about what really happened. Ask them to investigate the penis nailing of a 14-year old, the death sentence on Abani, the stay in Kirikiri, etc, etc, etc. And more importantly show them the tales in his professional website, apparently the morbid basis for the lies he tells to American children everyday about the Africa of his nightmares. He also peddles his tales to school children for monstrous amounts of money, for example, here. This man’s actions are even more reprehensible than the stories fed to Nigerian children daily about Conrad’s heart of darkness and the discoveries of savage parts of Africa (the River Niger, etc) by dead white men. We must stop this man. Do this in the name of our children.

Tag: Nigeria

Nigeria on my mind: Who will bell this cat?

Chris Abani: Distorting Africa’s History