AfricaResource The Place for Africa on the Net

These are the preoccupations of the first two lectures. The third lecture and essay in this book deals with the present situation and the balance of the forces or as Achebe puts it the balance of stories. As usual Achebe speaks through stories. "Let us imagine a man who stumbles into an alien ritual in its closing stages when the devotees are winding down to a concluding chorus of amens, and who immediately and enthusiastically takes up the singing with such loudness and gusto that the owners of the ritual stop their singing and turn, one and all, to look in wonder at this postmodernist stranger. Their wonder increases tenfold when they ask the visitor later what kind of modernism his people had had, and it transpires that neither he nor his people have ever heard the word modernism." Here Achebe was making reference to a statement which Buchi Emecheta made to Adeola James some years ago.

A critic of Bala Usman's "The Misrepresentation of Nigeria: The Facts and the Figures." Bala Usman asserts that the facts surrounding elections in Nigeria have been misrepresented. I am glad that I did not respond to the CEDDERT article last year when it first appeared. This is because the necessary ammunitions to refute his assertions have since come to light. Given that we now know that a Northern Nigerian Clique imposed Obasanjo on Nigerians (Twice), would Usman still lambaste the opponents of the transition program who saw the shadow behind the man? Babangida has publicly stated that he bankrolled Obasanjo. Others have stated that he agreed to stay for one term and protect the interests of the north. Is this how a democracy works? That a handful of people would pick a candidate, fix his term of office in a deal, then sell this candidate to an unsuspecting public and the world? Is this the type of democracy that CEDDERT is foisting on Nigeria? Did Fela not characterize this type of democracy as "Demonstration of Crazy"?

Somehow, given that this postulation is coming when the author of the famous The Africans: The Triple Heritage is supposed to be here on a "visit", there is a great temptation to put it jovially that he is a "visiting physician" to the anaemic patient called Nigeria. He was actually in town to deliver a lecture under the auspices of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation.

True, Babangida did not invent corruption in Nigeria. But what he did was worse. He took corruption from the closet and installed it as the nation's patron deity, the god in whose name all public acts were done. He elevated corruption to the status of doctrine, an ideological blueprint. He invested public theft (the worst brand of 419) with the force of law; empowering both himself and his aides to treat the public purse as if it were their personal estates. He invited himself and people around him to reap where they had sowed nothing. In Karl Maier's book, this House Has Fallen, IBB boasts that he gave Mr. Abiola much of the money with which he ran the 1993 campaign. He forgets to say where a general, who was supposed to be on a fixed salary, found all that extra money.

The dangerous development in Nigeria is that government is no longer associated with the organization of this essential commodity of governance: protection. Nigerian governments have virtually told Nigerians to fend for their own protection. My hometown of Okpara with its environs has a population that is more than 20,000 people in Delta State. It has no police station. Indeed, there is no presence of government in the daily lives of its people. That is, the Nigerian state and its governmental agencies are absent from their daily lives. Crimes will be committed in any community and are being committed in my hometown. How are they resolved? Clearly, without the help of any governmental agencies. For as long as such problems of crime are internal to the community, they will be resolved according to respected norms of the community and its standards of fair sanctions.