Not A Country! —Wale Adebanwi

It is not unlikely that you have heard the story before. The Queen of England, President Bush and President Obasanjo all died and at the Gate of Heaven they were all refused entry and were sent to Hell. After a few months in Hell, they requested to check how their subjects – in the case of the Queen – or their fellow citizens – in case of Bush and Obasanjo – were doing back on earth. The Devil granted their wish. The Queen was asked to pay £25,000 for her call. She thought that was rather expensive. The Devil shot back: ‘It’s a long way from here to the UK.’ She paid promptly and made the call, speaking, as you will imagine, the accent. President Bush was asked to pay $50,000 for a similar call. By this time, the miser from Ota was already converting the rate in pound sterling and dollars to the battered currency of his old earthly space. For a while, he decided against paying so much for a single call. But he was desperate to check what had become of his ‘Umoru’. When President Obasanjo eventually stepped forward to say, ‘I also want to call my people’, the Devil told him that his own call to Nigeria would be toll-free. The other two protested what they assumed - in typical Nigerian street lingo - was the Devil’s ‘partiality’ towards Obasanjo. But the Devil explained, ‘His is a local call’!

It is not a laughing matter. Or, perhaps I should say, this readable and enjoyable book under review again reminds us that it is not a laughing matter, at all. It is also not merely about Obasanjo, this story - even though the man is emblematic of the tragic story of Nigeria - it is about Ajibade’s ‘country’. When you think about this apocryphal story in the context of the global survey that was conducted a few years ago which affirmed Nigerians as the happiest people on earth, you will be forgiven to think that they meant the happiest people in Hell! The hellish conditions, in different ramifications, under which an otherwise blessed people have been forced to survive, constitute the material for Kunle Ajibade’s What A Country!

Anyone who has seen a copy of the book, or read my comment on the blurb of the book which was published in the advertisement of this book-launch, would know already that I have argued that the book should have been called, Not A Country! Or as they used to say in the Congo - when it was still called Zaire - Mboka ekufi! (The country has died!). Since the book is not called that, I intend to engage briefly in this review on why I thought and still think so – especially since I am yet to seize the opportunity to go and write my own book about Nigeria and call it anything that pleases me!

Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, could as well have been writing about Nigeria, when he argued, in relation to Indonesia that: ‘Rather than the mere fact of internal diversity, it has been the refusal, at all levels of the society, to come to terms with it that has impeded [Nigeria’s] search for effective political form. The diversity has been denied as a colonial slander, deplored as a feudal remnant, clouded over with [fake] syncretism, tendentious history, and utopian fantasies, while all the time the bitter combat of groups who see in one another rivals not merely for political and economic power, but for the right to define truth, justice, beauty, and morality, the very nature of reality, rages on virtually unguided by formal political institutions.’ Continues the scholar: ‘Unable to find a political form appropriate to the temper of its people [Nigeria] stumbles on apprehensively from one institutional contrivance to the next.’ This description sums up the central argument in this book that is written in flowing prose, disciplined by the integrity of its conclusions.

No country on earth in recent human history - and this has been asserted by both local and international observers of the contrived tragedy that is Nigeria – has outmatched its potentials, human and material, in reverse (that is, negative) terms like Nigeria has done. For her stupendous human resources and the intellectual energy of all forms possessed by her citizens, Nigeria has produced the most scandalous leadership imaginable, even the type that bordered on lunacy; for its diversity of riches in material and human terms, Nigeria has constructed a national poverty in super-criminal dimensions in which millions of her citizens wallow; for her civic energy and regular civic ferment and citizen confrontations with the state, Nigeria has cemented the most grotesque form of official indifference imaginable. What a country! you will say. Indeed, in some sections of this book, Ajibade chooses the musicality of prose to convey the disillusionment of social life.

Some would argue that if the duplicitous British Empire builders wished for a worse post-colonial contraption which they could continue to milk, they were not going to get it; Nigeria remains the summit of colonial-induced national quagmire. If Lord Frederick Lugard burns in effigy in these parts, it would be insufficient as a symbolic gesture of punishment; if the British and their American collaborators were to help in seizing Nigeria from the coalition of the chronically-incompetent, fundamentalists, bigots and semi-criminal martial agents to which they handed it long ago, it would be a penitence too late. The Niger Delta has advertised the criminal underbelly of this racially embarrassing contraption called Nigeria, and implosion or explosion remain, ordinarily, the logical consequences of a ‘country’ rigged against even rudimentary reason. But that is precisely the challenge that Nigeria constitutes and represents. And Ajibade poignantly presents this to us in this book.

Why is the Delta central to the accounts in this book, even though it is present more in visual representations than in the actual written narratives in What a Country? The Delta is the underbelly of Ajibade’s ‘country’ which presents us with the juncture of criminality, blood and violence in which the whole and its critical part meet. But let us journey away from Delta for a while, even though it subsumes and underwrites the condensed crisis that is Nigeria.

A country, it can be argued, is a ‘workable institutional expression’ and not ‘a mere chaos [or as the late Eruobodo, Busari Adelakun, would say, ‘shauuus’] of zeal and prejudice’. A country is not evidenced in the perilous patriotism of, say, an Olusegun Obasanjo, who announced that ‘I can die for Nigeria’ – for if you ask the late Sheikh Gumi, Obasanjo would be accused of attempting to ‘die for nothing’. For, let us face it, the nothingness that Gumi described and placed at the heart of Christianity, is actually a fitting description of Nigeria. And the fact that we have failed repeatedly to move Nigeria from nothing to something, makes Ajibade to describe Nigeria as ‘this land of nightmares and plain madness’ in which, in Günter Grass’s words, ‘madness impersonates reason’, even though at critical junctures, “freedom and madness [have] wrestled’. Indeed, the madness captured in this book, particularly official madness at the highest level of government, would make any reader to think that when Albert Einstein said of his children that there was something ‘indefinably four-footed about ‘em’, he could have been speaking about Nigerian leaders. When you encounter, in this book, the Nigerian soldiers in power who the author describes as ‘thugs in uniform’, you will understand why a colony of thugs, described by one of their departing chiefs as an ‘Army of anything goes’, produced the likes of the recently canonised General Sani Abacha - who the author correctly accuses of attempting to reduce Nigeria to ‘a primitive arena of absolute terror’. Abacha also came to Ajibade’s mind in jail when he read one of the essays by Martha Gellhorn where she notes that, ‘It is shaming to be citizens of a state ruled by a squalid crook from the gutter’. That was the man who recently was posthumously absolved of any wrong doing by his colleagues who also emerged from the same squalid puddle as the late rogue.

Ajibade attends in different ways and in different cadences in What a Country! to the social conditions that produced and nourishes these crooks and the challenges posed by their likes to, and the overall social conditions for change reproduced by, the good and great representations of our collective humanity such as Beko Ransome-Kuti, Wole Soyinka, Dele Giwa, John Kufuor, Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie. The issues and controversies with which these men and their social and political adversaries have grappled with, and I must say, the tragedies and follies evident in their different social formations and in the global context, are taken up in the essays and interviews in this book. For a man who himself has suffered immensely and needlessly as a result of that tragic order rigged against reason and rhyme called Nigeria - which allowed a candidate for the zoological garden at Ibadan to seize power - Ajibade should have no less than a deep understanding of the ‘country’. The words that produced the title for this book were uttered by one of the greatest self-sacrificing humanists that our society has produced, Beko Ransome-Kuti - who in one moment of national malady and martial madness, was arrested, detained, chained, and jailed on trumped-up charges: “What a Country!” noted Beko. What a country, indeed, you would say. But how can it be called a country, one should ask?

One of the greatest thinkers that have lived in these parts once described Nigeria as ‘a mere geographical expression’. [On the side, we can quickly note that, indeed, Nigeria is no longer capable of expressing anything intelligible] This man outlined with the passion of a state-builder, the brilliance of a visionary and the cold dissection that only an intellectual mind was capable of, how to make that ‘expression’ express something tangible not only geographically, but more importantly, politically. It is when a geographical expression becomes a political expression, Obafemi Awolowo analysed, explained and showed, that is when it becomes a proper country, that such an expression, such as Nigeria, can proceed towards a nation-state status and become a political expression of not only racial and continental possibility, but an important part of the statement of human possibilities and commonality. But even those who acknowledged his capacity to lead this historic effort at national and racial redemption stood in his way and blighted, at least for the foreseeable future, the practicalities of a socially redemptive project in this perpetually depressing contraption. Ajibade acknowledges the man here as one, whose ‘life continues to serve as a living rebuke to all the ruffians in the political vineyard’.

But the author warns us not to give up on Nigeria. Perhaps, this is why, ‘What A Country!’ - a phrase of exasperation and regret - for him, was a more fitting title, than one of dismissal and utter hopelessness – ‘Not a country!’ Even though Ajibade concedes, as Dele Giwa argued, that Nigerians ‘regard themselves as passing sojourners on the geographical amalgam called Nigeria. It is like standing away at a distance and looking like riveted spectators at the greatest inferno in the world. Nigeria is on fire and the citizens are amused’, noting that ‘a cloud of despair hangs over the nation’, and concluding, in desperate pain, that ‘I can scarcely express the pains I feel in words. At our peril we’re losing many opportunities as a country to chart a new course.’ However, he is still of the opinion that Nigeria is redeemable. Argues the author, ‘We can still crawl from the wreckage and do great things.’

And this brings me to the practical, political questions which this book invites us to confront. What A Country! compels us to state afresh those nagging questions that sit at the very heart of the conception of Nigeria. Perhaps it is for these reasons that the composers of the national anthem, moved from “hailing Nigeria” as a “dear native land” in the old anthem to asking “compatriots” to “arise” and obey “Nigeria’s call” in the current anthem. And indeed, compatriots obeyed this call for long. Particularly from the late 1980s up to the 1990s, when a civil ferment was witnessed in Nigeria. Ajibade’s prison notes, Jailed for Life is soaked in this story. From the anti-SAP riots organised by the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, in 1989, a new era of ideologically-lucid, intellectually-driven and transformational form of social protest against martial insolence began. From the first step of that new process which shook the aberrant martial regime of General Ibrahim Babangida, through the gallant confrontation with General Sani Abacha when the miniscule and murderous General rolled out the tanks, to the political outrage, both local and international, channeled and sustained by the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO, and allied groups which predisposed General Abdulsalami Abubakar to quickly hand over power, not many would have concluded that that long and tortuous process, with grave and great sacrifices, one of which was Ajibade’s own imprisonment, would produce the kind of characters that inherited power in 1999. Ajibade’s ‘country’ rewarded all those who worked hard against democracy, justice and good governance with key public offices and unrestrained access to the till. It is, therefore, not a surprise that the author engages with ‘what should have been’ and not only ‘what is’.

Divided into nine sections, including essays, interviews, and visual representations, What a Country! is as much about the likes of Beko, Giwa, W.S., Rushdie, Grass, Awolowo and so on, as it is beyond them. It is about a common humanity outside of which no one, no matter how demonic, is to be allowed to exist - whether he is an IBB, an Abacha, an Obasanjo or a Yar’Adua. For instance, the author reminds us through the exchange of letters between Beko and Obasanjo in their post-jail relationship that when a people decide to make such a reprobate character whose insensitivity, crudity and appalling capacity for cruelty constantly challenges the common humanity which we are supposed to share with him, they cannot but end up exclaiming what a country!

Ajibade’s style, for the most account, almost delicate, and I must add, deliberately so, is, in a way, a mirror of the writer. But there are times in this narrative that the critic is too angry for slight words and mere metaphors. On such occasions he calls the spade by its name. For example, on Obasanjo’s presidency, Ajibade argues that, ‘What hovered around the president’s residence was evil itself – the spirit of Mobutu! Under him Nigerians were served nightmares as food.’ He then invites the rest of us, to ‘a special contemplation of the monstrous hypocrisy in the corridors of power, and the violence that is constantly inflicted on the soul of our country’. Another example: Dele Giwa, Ajibade argues, ‘must also be groaning in his grave that our country keeps reproducing clowns and idiots as rulers’. Again, he not only accuses Obasanjo of ‘blinding hubris’ and of despising our humanity, but concludes that the Ota farmer ‘helped in nurturing the modern Nigerian barbarism by deploying the machinery of state coercion in support of political thugs and irritants…’

All over this book, we have the evidence that indeed, Nigeria is not a country, let alone a nation. That is, as I argue in the blurb, Nigeria is not a humanised instrument of collective social life; it is not a binding force; it is not a politically effective instrumentalisation of civic commonality, which expresses itself in some minimum standards of common sensibilities reflected as much in life as in law. However, the author’s optimism shines through. For instance, he notes that despite Beko’s sufferings, the late civil rights activist showed no sign of disillusionment about the country. But the country about which Beko showed no disillusionment was not Nigeria. Before he died, we know that Beko had totalised Nigeria and concluded that, ‘ko le work’ [‘It cannot work!].

In this book, Ajibade celebrates those who should be honoured, condemns those who need to be denounced, reprimands those who need to be reproached, and dismisses those who need to be rejected. For instance, while Soyinka is celebrated by Ajibade as ‘a dreadful debunker of denigrating assumptions and myths’, and one who weds ‘handsome ideas…to a beautiful form’ in ways that ‘are capable of frightening every charlatan in power’, Obasanjo, Ajibade’s co-sufferer in Abacha’s jail, is, though indirectly, dismissed as ‘the vacuous egotist who throws tantrums at [his] intellectual superiors’. Günter Grass, the German Nobel laureate, is celebrated as ‘pushing the limits of fantasy fiction to the fascinating realm of the profoundly political’, while Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses, comes to us through this book and tells those who, at best, feel ambivalent about terrorism and fundamentalism that masquerades as religion, or indeed, sanction the manifestations of this on their principled, or ideological, opposition to the excesses of the powerful Western nations, that: ‘I do not believe that al-Qaeda seeks the greatest social justice in the Middle East. What al-Qaeda seeks is the talibanisation of the planet…. He [the terrorist and fundamentalist] would not sit down with you to make a deal. He needs to be defeated. It is important to say that’. Quite illuminating, one should hasten to add, in the light of our local contest with the politico-religious Talibans in our own space.

On the other hand, the author grapples with the social challenge that new-day Pentecostalism presents to our collective, public life – not necessarily in contrast to Islamic fundamentalism. Avers Ajibade: ‘We see these neo-revivalist daddies and mummies decked in expensive attires mouthing animal jabbers as interpretation of scriptural injunctions.’ The crisis presented by the excesses of Pentecostalism in its contemporary manifestation, or Expressway-religiosity, as raised by Ajibade, is critical to our understanding of the challenges that confront our social capacity for collective problem-solving.

Ajibade does not spare his colleagues, journalists, despite their heroic efforts in saving Nigeria from the band of rogues and assassins in military uniform. He notes, ‘Among our country’s media owners and newspaper editors, rank greed has set in. How do you hope to call robbers in power to proper accounting if you are a beneficiary of their loot?’ But I like to argue that it is less challenging to note the rank corruption in the media than it is to address the social conditions that have turned even some of our finest journalists to ‘wetin you carry?’

The visual representations in – or you could say, of - What a Country! is a commendable part of the book. The representations are as adequate as the words in the book to describe the tragedy that is Nigeria: The painful visual of the mother whose three children were cheaply murdered by an inefficient aviation industry, desperate beggars with their children on the streets of major towns, power generating sets on sale – in lieu of official regular power supply - without which no home can claim to be in the 21st century in today’s Nigeria, the oil and killing fields of the Delta, Alams with a shopping bag - the man who credited God with making his ‘miraculous’ escape from the law in the UK possible!; Fawehinmi, Soyinka, Chima Ubani and Moshood Erubami, in different poses at the unending barricades against the abuses of power…. Indeed, the story of Nigeria is told by the photographs. Also, the use of orality and popular culture, though limited, constitute another of the strengths of this book. We must also praise the quality of the production of the book.

However, it is in the final chapter, entitled “What Exactly is Good Governance?” that the citizen-intellectual attempts to confront the trouble with Nigeria. Here, Ajibade presents his thesis for social salvation. He writes about ‘great citizens who will in turn produce first class leaders’. This, for me, is a critical question we often fail to address in Nigeria. With a series of questions in this chapter, Ajibade addresses the core questions that challenge us to think deeply about our present national disabilities relating to the followership as much as the leadership. The author travels the world and encounters multiple cultures to draw pertinent examples for the social space into which he was born and in which he lives. When Salman Rushdie posits that ‘to simply articulate what is going on. To turn the light on the problem is the first step towards understanding it and then decide what action to take about it’, he is, in fact, summing up the fundamental basis of Ajibade’s What A Country!

Like every good piece of literature or even social history, Ajibade’s book has a few weaknesses. I will dwell on one which I think is the most important: That is the absence of general historical contextualisation by the author - despite the brilliant sociological framework in this book. It is only through historical contextualisation, not the sociological - for instance, even something as ‘ordinary’ as the telegram sent by the English Crown to the new Nigerians at the amalgamation of the two Nigerias in 1914 - that we can explain how, even why, it is historically plausible, that a country such as Britain, that is emblematic of the age of Enlightenment, would create in the heart of Africa, a geographical conundrum which, even a century later, would still find it difficult to fully join the comity of civilised nations in the most basic aspects of its national organisation and processes. It is by throwing light on the historical backdrop and relating this to the sociological context that we can fully account for the consequences of the political tragedies that have befallen and may still befall Nigeria. From Lord Frederick Lugard to the present heirs of the Lugardian experiment in how not to build a country, a clearer picture will emerge on how, for instance, a regional project of politico-cultural enlightenment that produced the likes of Wole Soyinka, Ajibola Ige, Gani Fawehinmi, Olu Falae and Obafemi Awolowo, just to mention a few, would be asked to make the most incontinent of its aberrant humanity as its contribution to national political office – as the rest of Nigeria insisted between 1998 and 1999. You cannot explain the emergence of Olusegun Obasanjo, for instance, or even that of his successor, President Umaru Yar’Adua, by looking at the present times only. The emergence of both is rooted in history.

Despite this limitation, however, beyond the hollow idea of ‘unity and faith, peace and progress’, touted by the morticians of the Nigerian state, What a Country! reminds us of our crucial duty to make Nigeria a proper country by humanising it and bringing it in step with the universals of our common humanity. Any book that accomplishes that ought to be celebrated. A country where it is those who are educationally-disadvantaged who determine and make policies for those who have advantage; where it is the super thieves who determine who should head the agency that was set up to catch them; a country where the education minister cannot competently read his prepared speech; where a judge that supposedly wrote a critical judgment could not pronounce important words that she assumedly chose to use herself in that same judgment in an open court; where a man who cut the hand of a cow thief is himself now avoiding his day in court, for an alleged heist, for which he is to face even a less punitive system of justice; where Ali Baba and the other thieves can absolve a thieving vampire of any wrong doing even when millions of his stolen monies are still being returned to the country. Indeed, what a country!

Kunle Ajibade’s What a Country! invites us to think again about what to do when we find ourselves in a ‘country’ that is not a country! - so that, in making a call to his earthly home, the next Nigerian president that ends up in Hell will not have to make a local call!

—Dr. Adebanwi, who is a Contributing Editor to TheNEWS, just defended his second doctoral thesis at Cambridge University.