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What A Country!

Kunle Ajibade’s What  a Country!  is a narrative and visionary triumph. The book reflects on Nigeria’s moral and political tragedy in a global context. He tells his compelling stories in a language remarkable for its directness, elegance and crystalline beauty. Ajibade writes with amazing verve and moral clarity about Nigerian rulers who make life unliveable proposition, but he never spares the cowed citizens who acquiesce in their own moral and material degradation.
-Okey Ndibe

What a Country!

This is an unusual book. To profit from reading it demands a special kind of sensibility, and this demand is obvious from the seeming idiosyncrasy of its shape. The author struggles against unnecessary mass suffering that passes for life in Nigeria and the absolute lack of taste or honour common to the bandits who rule it. He does this not so much to provide simple answers, but mostly to challenge the reader to think of preventable suffering as arising from a failure of imagination. In its uncompromising seizure of a moral high-ground, this book is a corrective to that failure.
-Akin Adesokan

A country is a binding force; it is a politically effective institutionalization of civic commonality, which expresses itself in some minimum standards of common sensibilities, reflected as much in life as in law. What a Country! shows this through its flowing prose and intellectual scrutiny of the impossible enterprise called Nigeria in the context of global flows. In the end, in its strident appeal to reason, the book beckons us to make Nigeria, if not a nation, at least, a proper country.
-Wale Adebanwi

Kunle Ajibade goes beyond the narrative aesthetics of Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes to grapple with questions of justice, popular welfare, human rights and good governance. Although taking Nigeria as the site of the many debilities and devilries that maul the values that he upholds, he adopts a universal and universalising code that is answerable to the demands of ordinary people everywhere.
-Odia Ofeimun

What a Country! is eloquent and poignant. Its vision is broad, both powerfully anchored in local knowledge and robustly cosmopolitan. Its passion for the betterment of Nigeria - indeed, What a Country! - is evident and infectious. It is, above all, an affirmation of the power of writing and of critical journalism as instruments of change of that passion. A terrific achievement.
-Tejumola Olaniyan

Kunle Ajibade’s What a Country! is a gift of voices. He examines, with empathy, vision and immaculate prose, some of the world’s ethereal woes and hopes. From the voices in the book emerge the gallantry of Grass and Soyinka; the humanity of Beko and Kufuor; and the radiance of Rushdie and Giwa. Ajibade transforms a burden into celebration and glory. We ignore his courage at our own peril.
-Sam Omatseye

Kunle Ajibade: What A Country! -By Reuben Abati

I spent some time on Thursday, July 17 at Jazzhole on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, attending a book reading session featuring Kunle Ajibade’s book, titled What A Country!. I had been invited as one of the discussants of the book. It was the second time that this book was being presented to the public. Three weeks earlier, on the occassion of Ajibade’s 50th birthday, he had invited a group of friends and bibliophiles to La Scala Restaurant where What A Country! was officially presented. It is his second book. In 2003, he had published Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes, his account of the three years and two months he spent in General Sani Abacha’s gulag, as a prisoner of conscience.

He had refused to disclose the source of a story published in TheNEWS, the magazine of which he is co-founder and co-director, and on the basis of this alone, the Abacha junta had labelled him a coup plotter, and without the right of fair hearing, sentenced him to jail for life. Abacha’s death, and the change of government brought relief but this was after he and others: Chris Anyanwu, George Mbah, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Olusegun Obsanjo, Musa Yar’Adua (he died in prison) had been unjustly imprisoned. In his well-reasoned introduction to What A Country!, Odia Ofeimun, the gifted poet and polemicist, who now nurses the ambition of becoming Nigeria’s President some day in the future, and who moderated the July 17 readings, had described What A Country! as a corrective: critics of Ajibade’s Jailed for Life had noted an absence of personal ideology, the latest book has now been written to articulate that personal ideology, but what I find here in terms of ideology is the ideology of faith, faith in the limitless possibilities of the human essence, the ideology of optimism, and humanistic idealism, the ideology of nationalism circumscribed by the temper of revolt. What A Country! is Ajibade’s dialogue with the land of his birth, his interrogation of the Nigerian question, and more, his reflections on universal ideals for the making of a good society. Reading this book, I am struck by three environmental issues.

The first has to do with the fact that increasingly, Nigerian journalists are raising the bar of the possible role of the journalist as a public intellectual, by moving from mere reportage of events to the writing of books through which they put a fence round their own works as journalists, or they seek to engage in debates in the public sphere at a more extensive and organised level. It used to be the fashion that Nigerian journalists admired foreign journalists who authored books, but these days, this is also becoming an industry locally, even if with varying quality of output. Ajibade has now done two books and he is presumably working on a third, we note that he is emerging as a strong, clear and assertive voice that promises to endure in this enterprise. I also note the style that Ajibade has adopted in presenting his book to the public. Ordinarily, a book presentation, better known as book launching, is a festival of sorts in Nigeria; it is the equivalent of an owambe party in most cases, where money is sprayed and deep pockets launch the book with millions of money.

The only problem with events of this nature is that if care is not taken, the book, the main subject of the occassion, is pushed to the background as the Master of Ceremony, conspiring with the Chairman, struggles to get chief launchers, guests of honour etc to part with fat cheques. I recall one particularly memorable incident where I was book reviewer, and there was a birthday event going on simultaneously, and I was told even before I started the review that I should not bore the audience with too much grammar; if I could do it in less than five minutes, the organisers would be eternally grateful because they did not want people who were going to donate money to leave the hall in the course of something called book review. I grabbed the microphone and tried to fight back. It didn’t help. In presenting his book to the public, Ajibade has chosen to place emphasis on the book itself, on the ideas contained therein.

This is an important gesture, in a country where so many books still get published, but after the ceremony of launching, very few people actually read those books, and those who try to do so and discuss ideas are advised not to bore others. It is one of the paradoxes of our land, that very few Nigerians are interested in ideas. Knowledge is the fertiliser of human progress but Nigerians are voting with their hands, feet and mind for ignorance. There isn’t what can be called a reading culture; even those who pretend to be educated show greater gift for gossip, blackmail and abuse. Each time a book reading session is organised, it is therefore so refreshing. But even then few persons show up. The Ajibade event was scheduled to start at 4 pm. But two hours later, we had fewer than twenty persons in Jazzhole, Kunle Tejuoso’s bookstore which also doubles as cafe and cultural rendezvous. If Ajibade had organised a big party, with the book as a footnote, there would have been a crowd.

My third point, before returning to the book proper is that this is a well-made book: the grammage of the paper, the design of the cover, the editing and proof-reading ( I spotted one spelling error and only one wrong word use). The author and the publishers present before us a book that can meet even the most exacting requirements of book publishers anywhere in the world. Many books are being published in Nigeria every year, but too many of these books are made for the local audience in terms of the technical quality of presentation. Nigerian book publishers complain about the challenges of economic depression and the explosion of artisanal publishing entreprise and the vanity press, but the point is to be made that a book is in a real sense, a commodity. It has to be well-packaged for it to attract a potential buyer/reader’s attention. The economics of the effort is as important as the content. What A Country! passes this test. The critical engagement with the text at Jazzhole on July 17, was fortuitously preceded by an ironic twist of sequence, which has now proved to be sub-textual and affirmatory.

While we were still waiting for more persons to arrive, we suddenly heard a loud crash outside, on Awolowo Road. The event was right at our doorstep, and the author, Kunle Ajibade was a character in the unfolding drama. A white Toyota Sienna car, coming from the Falomo end of Awolowo Road had gone off course and crashed into two cars in front of Jazzhole. One of the affected cars belonged to Kunle Ajibade, and it suffered greater damage, although the other car that was pushed onto the main road following the impact of the crash had actually been parked behind it. The offending car went straight between the other car, a four-wheel drive belonging to an Embassy, bypassed an electric pole, and ripped off its own front end, and the rear of Ajibade’s Toyota Avensis, rear lights severed and scattered on the floor, the car itself hedged precariously on the gutter. At the moment, Ajibade’s two sons: Folarinwa and Mayowa who had been with their mother, inside Jazzhole had gone into their father’s car to pick up something or play a game (I saw the younger one with a Playstation II).

If there had been no other car to hold the impact of the assault, the Toyota Sienna would have crashed directly into Ajibade’s car and the story could have been different. It was a busy hour, but the driver of the Toyota Sienna, a young man, with his trouser sitting far away from his waist (it is called sagging) had been pushing the car, which had no registration number at high speed. He showed no contrition at all. He was so unruly Ajibade had to plead with him to calm down. When asked: where is your driver’s licence? His response was: “Can’t you see that this is a new car? Am I supposed to carry a driver’s licence when driving a new car? You see a new car like this, you are asking for licence? My licence is at home.” Ajibade’s driver tried to challenge him, but he shot back angrily: “Don’t talk to me like that. Do you think I am a driver? I am not a driver for your information. Don’t let me get angry with you.” All through, he strutted about arrogantly, until the police arrived. It turned out that the car belonged to the young man’s mother. Femi, that is his name, and he had been asked to go down the road to fill the tank with fuel. The car had only just been bought, and indeed the car dealer was inside the car with him. One could only soak in the entire incident, something familiar and typical here, and scream: What A Country! Incidentally, it is this same lawlessness, this arrogance of the Nigerian leadership and social elite, the unruliness, the lack of civility of the followership, the uncertainty of life in Nigeria, the insecurity, the wanton disregard for law and order, the unending crises in the lives of the people, that form the substance of Ajibade’s What A Country!

The focus is on a country that is a state in retreat, a nation of missed opportunities and failed potentials, a land and a people blessed with natural and material resources which they have failed to aggregate for progress and development. ` Ajibade poses the same recurrent question: why are we so blessed and yet so cursed? On page 96, he writes pointedly: “Many of us have been asking: is this what we went to jail for? What has our entire struggle come to? Is it just a mere clearing of path for another set of murderers and looters? Right now, a cloud of despair hangs over our country. There is so much insecurity everywhere. Assassinations of key political personalities are rife all over Nigeria. An army of jobless youths roam our streets. Many of the country’s private businesses are crumbling. And in the Niger Delta, the fire rages on without a solution.”

This theme is further fleshed out in the last chapter of the book titled What Exactly is Good Governance? in which Ajibade deals at great length with the ommissions, the crazy commissions in Nigerian history, the contradictions that have stalled progress, the problematic quotidian reality and the devaluation of human value. He is angry, insouciant and unsparing. He contrasts for example two types of leadership: Rudolph Guilliani’s heroism in New York on September 11, 2001, when he led the people to deal with the agony of terrorism on American soil, and former President Obasanjo’s crude arrogance in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 27, 2002, when he went to the Ikeja cantonment where exploding bombs had wreaked havoc and tragedy in the barracks and in the city of Lagos only to tell those who looked up to him for emotional support: “Look, I am not supposed to be here.?” The author not only covers the failure of leadership, he provides in a preceding chapter titled ” People in Dire Need: Visual Representations”, telling photographs, to convey in colour, an imagic dimension of the Nigerian crisis: poverty, plane crashes, crisis of transportation, corruption, environmental degradation, protest and rebellion. And martyrdom.

But in spite of the problems that he identifies and the anguish that he expresses, Ajibade neither regrets his own sacrifice nor does he despair. His ideology is one of optimism, of faith that Nigeria can still become a country of the people’s dreams. He blames the people for their acquiescence and challenges them to use adversity to call upon the gold within and seek to make a difference by resisting all forms of oppression and negative values. The author blames both the leadership and the people for the present sorry pass but he believes that a people-oriented, welfarist, democratic arrangement in which the values of freedom and order are preserved, jobs are created for the people, the law prevails, would help to make a difference. But these are familiar recommendations. How can this be achieved? The author is not so forthcoming on such specifics.

Who are the Nigerians who will create the new order? Will they come from Mars or Venus? How can we create new leaders and nurture them? What shall we do about the Nigerian people and their attitudes? Ajibade’s optimism in spite of all that he has seen and experienced may also not be shared by many Nigerians: there are too many of our compatriots who are opting out of Nigeria, and seeking a new life elsewhere, there is a critical population of Nigerians in diaspora who do not know Nigeria and many never know Nigeria at all: the children of Nigerian economic refugees in diaspora, whose roots are here, but for whom Nigeria may forever be an abstraction. They may never return.

The values that Ajibade presents as arguments in the later part of the book, are expressed through other voices in the earlier parts in tributes to Beko Ransome Kuti, and Dele Giwa, essays on Gunter Grass, and Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian media, and interviews with Salman Rushdie and John Kufuor, the Ghanaian President. There are parts of this book that are autobiographical, particularly in Beko:What A Country! and As We Gather in Barcelona but Ajibade only uses his experiences to illustrate higher values and the context of his own preferences are unmistakable: writing, literature, journalism, politics, democratic governance and protest. He identifies through the icons that he celebrates what should be the reponsibility of civil society, and of the citizen in society and of literature and journalism. There is an iconisation process within the text: Beko Ransome-Kuti as an exemplar of the committed and self-sacrificing champion of progressive ideals, Dele Giwa and his brand of courageous journalism and advice to other journalists, his heroism as well, Wole Soyinka’s progressive, radical politics and his critique of journalism and interventions in societal progress, Gunter Grass and Salman Rushdie on freedom and functionalist art, Ajibade’s other icons include Bill Clinton, Jawarhalal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Obafemi Awolowo, Aminu Kano, Michael Okpara and Lee Kuan Yew.

The focus on professionalism and ethics in journalistic practice which recurs in this book are well-taken, but often times, the expectations in this repect seem supernatural in definition. Ghanaian President John Kufuor is overtly diplomatic in excusing the failings of Nigerian leaders in comparison to Ghanaian leaders. The observed difference is not one of population and size as he alleges, but in the content of his own depositions. In the discussions that followed, Sam Omatseye talked about the surrealism of freedom and the growth of Nigeria into a vast, unattractive prison, Babafemi Ojudu talked about social decadence especially among the youths, and the failure of the generation next, Ayo Obe drew attention to the need for Nigerians to stay at home and build their own mousetraps like the Chinese. Kunle Ajibade’s What A Country!, essentially a collection of past writings, which together, form a fine thematic and polemical whole, is a challenge, and a call to action. 
-Dr. Abati is the chair editorial board of The Guardian. He published this on Sunday 20 July 2008.

Not A Country!
By 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  the University of Cambridge. He read  this review on 18 June, 2008 at La Scala Restaurant, MUSON, Lagos, during the presentation of the book. It has since been published in TheNEWS and other journals.

TOWARD THE LIBERATION OF NIGERIA
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is in dire straits, and many intellectuals are donning the toga of depraved partisan politicians to barely make ends meet. Intellectual rigour is forever lacking in the tackling of the country’s multiform problems. One public intellectual who has refused to be cowed is Kunle Ajibade who had to spend time in General Sani Abacha’s gulag for his courageous efforts. He was in 1995 jailed for life because of a story published in THE NEWS magazine. He was only released in 1998 after the death of Abacha. He published his prison memoir, Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes, in 2003 and it deservedly won the first Victor Nwankwo Book of the Year Award instituted by the Nigerian Book Fair Trust. To underscore the critical fact that he may have been bloodied but remains fervently unbowed, Ajibade has come up with another incisive book on his life and times aptly entitled What a Country! with the requisite exclamation mark.

In his as ever combative foreword to What a Country! the acclaimed poet, essayist and political commentator Odia Ofeimun writes of Ajibade: “Largely on the strength of his moral comportment as a journalist and because of what I came to know of his love of decency, we grew to be friends. That’s how come, when he and his other colleagues left M.K.O. Abiola’s African Concord magazine in the 90s and began to run THE NEWS and TEMPO - two magazines that had been banned but refused to stay banned - I swore from my London redoubt as an intellectual exile to write for them free of charge. On my return to Lagos, I yielded my place in a more established medium in order to get embroiled in the more indeterminate waters of guerrilla journalism of which they were such intrepid exponents. I later became Chairman of the soon-to-be-rested A.M. NEWS of which he was editorial page editor, the job from which General Sani Abacha’s goons yanked him away before we could evolve a work ethic.”

Me too, I had to abandon THISDAY which I was given the start-up capital to found, and I took a pay cut of nearly half my take-home salary to serve on the selfsame editorial board that Odia writes of. So I was there when Ajibade was taken away to serve an imprisonment for committing no offence whatsoever, least of all plotting a coup to topple Abacha! It still rankles as one of my saddest memories in life.

In a clear case of Nigerian life being stranger than fiction, I have to quote a passage from Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, in which the crooked politician Nanga seduces the girlfriend of his younger compatriot Odili, and the following conversation ensues for starters:

“Don’t be childish, Odili,” he said paternally. “After all she is not your wife. What is all this nonsense? She told me there is nothing between you and she, and you told me the same thing… But anyway I am sorry if you are offended; the mistake is mine. I tender unresolved apology. If you like I can bring you six girls this evening. You go do the thing sotay you go beg say you no want again. Ha, ha, ha!”

“What a country!” I said. “You call yourself minister of Culture. God help us.”

It is a daily Nigerian fare for sundry compatriots to wring their fingers in anguish and scream “What a country!” In Achebe’s novel the young Odili took up the mantle of partisan politics to challenge the Nangas of Nigeria while in the committed words of Ajibade change is possible through passionate affirmation.

The first essay of the book entitled “Beko: What a Country!”, dedicated to the redoubtable human rights activist Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti who was jailed alongside Ajibade in the Abacha coup trials, takes its highlight from the moment in the trials when Beko said to Ajibade: “If you’re expecting life imprisonment, I’m sure mine would be death by firing squad. What a country! What a life!” It is ironical that Obasanjo whom Beko was ready to pay the supreme sacrifice for ended up not bothering with his fellow Abeokuta man when serving eight years as Nigeria’s President. In the words of Ajibade, “It was one of the coincidences of history that President Obasanjo, who had not met the victims of the 1995 phantom coup since he had been in power, eventually had a meeting in Abuja with some of them - Col. G. Ajayi, Chris Anyanwu, Ben Charles-Obi, Shehu Sani etc. - on the very day that Beko Ransome-Kuti died in Lagos: 10 February 2006.” The heartrending essay comes with pictures of Beko on a motorbike in the course of his last protest and lying on the floor while being tear-gassed in the midst of protesters.

In the essay “Remembering Dele Giwa”, Ajibade celebrates the trailblazing journalist who was killed by a letter bomb on 19 October 1986 in circumstances indicting the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. Giwa loved the good life and would not on the pain of death return to the poverty of his childhood. A pioneer of modern Nigerian journalism, as attested to by Ajibade, Giwa could not understand why Kole Omotoso, author of Just Before Dawn, would claim to be a writer as opposed to him who was a master of the new journalism genre.

The essay “A Celebration of Gunter Grass” showcases Ajibade’s mastery of the works of the German Nobel Prize winner, stressing from the very beginning that he had before him as he wrote seven novels of the master: The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, The Rat and The Meeting at Telgte. Ajibade ends the essay with “Grass’s controversial admission in his memoir, Peeling the Onion, that, at age 17, he served in Hitler’s Waffen-SS which was later declared a criminal organisation by the Nuremberg Tribunal.” The 60-year secret of Grass, Ajibade asserts, should in no way reduce “the pleasure that his wonderful writings give.”

Nigeria’s own Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has had a chequered love-hate relationship with the country’s press, and the topic engages Ajibade’s constructive powers in the essay entitled “Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian Media”. From being photographed with a broom trying to sweep away prying press hounds to penning the satirical masterpiece on the phoney accents of airport announcers in his 1986 article “Phnetkl Nansmnts” for the African Guardian magazine, Soyinka is a celebrated standard bearer armed with the common touch.

In a question-and-answer fifth chapter entitled “A Conversation with Salman Rushdie”, Ajibade in Barcelona, Spain engages the controversial author of Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses among many other novels and actualities on shared topics such as freedom of expression and human rights. What follows later is “As We Gather in Barcelona”, Ajibade’s ten minute address delivered at the International PEN Writers-In-Prison Committee conference in Barcelona, Spain, 17 May 2004.

“Why Ghana Works: The Kufuor Interview” starts thus: “The public attitude towards President John Agyekum Kufuor when I visited was generally positive.” In the interview that intervolves Ghana’s arrival at the golden age of independence and the leadership question in Africa President Kufuor treads a steady course of refraining from criticizing Nigeria.

The section, “A People in Dire Need: Visual Representations” is a pictorial rendition of the Nigerian facts of avoidable plane crashes, desperate beggars, massive importation of generating sets as opposed to steady supply of power, overcrowded trains, gas flaring, the judicially murdered Ken Saro-Wiwa, the escapee DSP Alamieyeseigha, policing inadequacies, environmental degradation, damaged ecosystem, aborted democratic rallies, Gani Fawehinmi as the symbol of popular struggle, activists Wole Soyinka and the late Chima Ubani, and of course the covers of the irrepressible THE NEWS magazine.

The last essay, “What Exactly is Good Governance?” extends the argument on leadership to take in doses of personal example, emotional intelligence, reading experience as suggested by 1987 Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Brodsky, education, and Ajibade cites Nigerian examples in leadership such as Mallam Aminu Kano, Dr. Michael Okpara and Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Chinua Achebe’s rejection of Obasanjo’s award of the high national honour of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) in 2004 is a source of pride for Ajibade who quotes the novelist’s letter to Obasanjo: “I write this letter with a very heavy heart. For some time now, I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connection in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.”

Indeed, what a country! Kunle Ajibade has limned a benighted world where darkness is an ever present danger, yet the humanity of his words brings to bear on this world a measure of hope. Ajibade belongs to the frontline, and assuredly so. He does not mince words, as where he stands is as clear as daylight. The book is set out in beautiful type and is such a delight to read, a winning advertisement for his publishers, Bookcraft. Apart from the misspelling of magazine as “magasine” and a couple of other typos What a Country! stands out as the quintessential well-made book. Ajibade’s eloquence should be celebrated in many more books pointing positively toward the liberation of Nigeria.

-Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a poet, short story writer and journalist. He wrote this for Thisday on Sunday, 2 November 2008

The Journalist as Intellectual
By Rotimi Fasan

I first met Kunle Ajibade via the written word some twenty years ago. It was, I think, on the pages of one the weekly magazines that flourished in the late 1980s- either the African Guardian in its scholarly bent or the more colourful Thisweek, with Nduka Obaigbena as the publisher and Editor-in-Chief. Dele Giwa, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch had been letter-bombed only months before and Nigerians were yet grappling with the novelty of his departure. Giwa, a colourful journalist and one of the leaders of the profession, had been iconised, if you will, as a pioneer of investigative journalism, one with just about the right mix of zeal and skill for his job. And his death via a letter-bomb was considered an outcome of his commitment to his style of journalism.

The media was awash with lots of conspiracy theories and the legend, ‘Who killed Dele Giwa’ emblazoned not a few daily and weekly publications until it became too dangerous to continue with it. The Giwa saga would, however, spawn several publications many of them celebrating his life. One of such was ‘Born to Run’ written by Dele Olojede and Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, two enterprising and admiring acolytes of the Giwa brand of journalism. While the one has since gone on to win a Pulitzer in Journalism, the other was at a time on the very corridors of power in the past Obasanjo dispensation. But their book would incur the ire of Ray Ekpu, Giwa’s bosom friend who stepped into his shoe at Newswatch. Ekpu didn’t consider ‘Born to Run’ a flattering portrayal of Dele Giwa’s life, especially the period in Ile-Ife. He brought the full might of his journalistic power to bear on the offending book- and perhaps the authors. That would have been the end of the matter and, it might be imagined, the book. Until Dele Momodu , now publisher of Ovation and his friend Kunle Ajibade, now of TheNEWS came to the rescue.

Both MA students of Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Momodu and Ajibade took Ekpu to task. Thisweek had a field day reporting the spat and it all became a messy affair as they went as far as accusing Ekpu of plagiarising Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason.

I was not to confirm things for myself until some five or six years later when, at the University of Lagos, I got hold of a friend’s threadbare copy of Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’. It would take some six more years or thereabout after this before I would meet Kunle Ajibade in flesh. By then he had just returned from Makurdi where he had been jailed for life for what is now generally acknowledged as a phantom coup charge under the Sani Abacha regime. Abacha had suddenly died, Abdulsalami Abubakar had taken over and the gates of the various prisons in which many Nigerians had been languishing had been thrown open. One of those who walked out was Kunle Ajibade. Of course I was at this time nowhere close to Makurdi, the prestigious portals of whose Government College, would introduce me to secondary education. Although no longer certain of its exact location, I’m sure I knew where the Makurdi Prison was.

Yet my memories of that land of the Tiv was far happier than anything connected to a prison could inspire- except, perhaps, for the brief period I was in the boarding school.

But the meeting with Ajibade took place at the premises of the Nigerian Law School in Lagos where, Wole Soyinka, just home from exile, was to deliver his first post-exile lecture, ‘When is a nation?’ under the chairmanship of the late Justice Akinola Aguda.

The closest person to Kunle Ajibade where he sat quietly in an obscure corner of the auditorium was several rows away. He cut the image of an intensely private person, a far cry from the combative mien of a warrior you get of him from the graphological world of journalism, particularly the guerrilla brand championed by TheNEWS under the military.

I would hand him a copy of Soyinka’s ‘The Credo of Being and Nothingness’ which he autographed rather reluctantly because, as he pointed out, he was not the author. But I assured him it didn’t matter. This was the initial meeting that would start me contributing to both TheNEWS and the defunct TEMPO over several years during which I continue to encounter Kunle Ajibade at public events mostly connected with the arts- lectures, readings, book fairs, plays etc.

In all of these the overwhelming impression you have of him is that of an intellectual, the kind you find in the more sedate and contemplative environment that our universities have ceased to be. You hardly saw him as a journalist. Or could it be that he missed his calling? Far from it.

The truth, for me, is that Kunle Ajibade who recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, is that kind of journalist, perhaps of the ‘old school’, that today’s journalists in the struggle to keep body and soul together are not- the kind who stays atop of the issues in his beat and through whose work you could have a sound knowledge of the state of the art and the dominant currents of views in his chosen specialisation. This does not come by chance but rather a deliberate choice to make a mark and be different from the run of the mill scribbler and down-on-the-heel ‘flotsams’ and ‘jetsam’ of the profession that Chief Obafemi Awolowo wrote about many years ago.

My view of Ajibade as a member of that disappearing class of journalists who in the ordinary line of duty manage, quite unobtrusively, to provide an intellectual dimension to the profession was reinforced when several weeks back I received a copy of his latest book, What a Country!, published to coincide with his golden jubilee celebrations. His earlier book, Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes chronicles his experience behind Abacha’s gulag.

A friend, himself a former journalist, who now lectures with a Ph.D in a university, had seen the book with me and wondered, in a derisive tone, what the author had to say. No doubt what lurked behind his mind was the unspoken question, what can a (Nigerian) journalist write about in a book? He simply did not think that the Nigerian journalist is educated enough to write a book. Beyond flipping through the pages, I was yet to read it first before reaching any conclusion. With no apparent intention to give it more than a cursory look he took the book from me and started reading. He would sooner than I expected turn to me and announce gleefully: ‘The book is well written - I mean it!’ His words were the first I head as to the quality of the book. Which is another way of saying Ajibade’s book is indeed very readable, written in direct, lucid prose: so eye-friendly and uncluttered with too many details. It’s the kind of book you could read and finish in hours - a testimony to quality of labour that went into it, proving that every part of it must have been planned before the first word was ever set to paper.

The best way to describe What a Country! is to call it a collection of essays. But just five of this nine-chapter book are actually essays in the conventional sense. They dwell on subjects ranging from politics and journalism to Ajibade’s abiding interest, literature. Essentially they are features on such personalities as the German Nobel Prize-winning writer Gunter Grass, slain journalist Dele Giwa, the late medical practitioner and human rights activist, Beko Ransome-Kuti and, of course, Wole Soyinka. Almost always if you read anything literary on Soyinka or Grass from publications on the Independent Communications Publishers’ stable you could be sure it would bear Ajibade’s by-line. The essay on Beko is a portrayal of his life as an activist and a prisoner twice jailed for life for his activism and, indeed, scion of the Ransome-Kuti family; the piece of Grass captures the essence of his writings in the wake of his winning the Nobel Prize, while ‘Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian Media’ is simply Ajibade’s own account of Soyinka’s durable relationship with the Nigerian Media. The ease which Ajibade punctuates his writing with quotes from the subject’s works underscore his deep understanding of those works. Describing What a Country! as a collection of essays is, I say, the closest one could come to putting a conventional tag on the book. But a collection in the like of Ajibade’s is in every sense futuristic as the reader cannot but notice the avantgardist strand of the book with two chapters of interviews with Indian-born British writer, Salman Rushdie and Ghanaian President, John Kufuor.

There is yet another chapter of pictures ‘A People in Dire Need: Visual Representations’ that tells the heartbreak that is the Nigerian story in pictorial form. Perhaps nowhere is Ajibade more scathing of the Nigerian state than in the chapter titled ‘What Exactly Is Good Governance?’ In which the Nigerian leadership, especially the likes represented by the Obasanjos and the Babangidas, comes in for much bashing. His apparent blend of righteous anger and anxiety in this chapter is anchored in Ajibade’s worry that there is no clear agenda towards which Nigeria aspires other than that which places it in the direct line of failure.

As a whole, the nine chapters of What a Country!, in as much as they tell the Nigerian story from diverse perspectives-interviews, essays and pictures - can be taken as a narrative of recent Nigerian history from someone who is in certain respects a participant in that history. It is in this sense that the book can be called a collection of essays. And the good thing about Ajibade’s account is that, for him, all hope is not lost provided the Nigerian child, the much-touted but abused leader of tomorrow, is given a good study/training in leadership, the sort that has apparently eluded their parents.

Nigerian journalism is perhaps the only professional group where people are hired and set to work with nothing next to training - not even some kind of professional orientation. Journalists are employed and simply put to their beat with no preparation whatsoever. A friend recently got employed by one of the media organisations repositioning in the Nigerian market. The very day she was employed she was assigned two pages to produce every week. Some days after her employers provided her with a camera that could also serve as a recorder - for interviews. And that was it. The only thing that prepared her for the job was that she could write but the inadequacy of this would become apparent when days later she came asking me how she was to go about gathering materials for her pages. Such a journalist would sooner than later get frustrated with the job with the outcome that she would see no reason why she needs to equip herself intellectually anymore than her bosses prepared her for her job. An ill-prepared journalist will not and cannot be expected to have the right attitude and knowledge as would enable them write a book, as Ajibade’s, that demonstrates their commanding knowledge of the field. Until this trend is reversed, today’s journalist though better educated (certificated?) than their predecessors cannot match their knowledge.

-Dr. Fasan is a columnist for Vanguard newspaper. He published this on 30 September and 7 October 2008

Nation In The Midst Of Ruins, Bliss

By Gbemisola Adeoti

In his summary of characterisation in the novels of Gunter Grass, Kunle Ajibade captures the goal of his new book, What a Country! It is to show us (Nigerians) “our flaws and strengths as we seek meanings among ruins and bliss of life” (p.44).

Living in post-independence Nigeria has been a persistent struggle in snatching some grains of order from a huge pile of existential rubble. With hindsight, one sees the sense in Oscar Wilde’s profound statement that there are two tragedies in life: getting what you desire and not getting it.

The country’s decolonisation and demilitarisation struggles of the 20th century seem to illustrate the two tragedies of expectation and fulfilment encapsulated in Wilde’s wry remark. No sooner than independence was achieved than its prospects were dimmed by bitter politicking of the 1960s, leading to a ruinous pogrom, civil war and long years of absolute rule. The struggle for democracy and demilitarisation in the 1990s also curiously produced a General Olusegun Obasanjo led civilian regime that was, according to Ajibade, distinguished by “arrogance of power, heartlessness and looting spree” (p.155).

Part of the national tragedy is the trial and conviction in 1995 of Beko Ransome-Kuti, the Chairman of Campaign Democracy (CD), Kunle Ajibade, George Mbah, Ben Charles -Obi and other Journalists by a military tribunal set up by the regime of General Sani Abacha, for their alleged involvement in a military coup. This was a basically unfounded offence. Much of that strand of national history has been narrated in Jailed for Life, Ajibade’s prison notes.

Unfortunately, the post-Abacha years culminating in the fourth republic have not offered much respite in terms of human freedom and national development. Nigeria daily sinks into deeper confusion; a situation that provokes veridical angst as enunciated in What a Country! If the book sounds optimistic amidst its overall ambience of despondency, it is not out of tune, coming from a writer who, through a kind of providential dues-ex-machina, was once jailed for life, but is alive and free to tell the story. Thus, the author is lamenting the collapse of collective heritage while at the same time, affirming with confidence the possibilities of a re-construction.

It is an ode to resilience, a muse that is essentially Nigerian.

What a Country! offers mellowed but trenchant reflections on the state of the nation. It contains nine chapters of various lengths; each bearing the author’s candid evaluation of Nigeria’s collective “error of rendering” that is the hallmark of postcolonial governance and citizenship. At intervals, the author’s account elicits surprise and disappointment, both wrapped together into a resonant refrain: “what a Country!”

There is a paradox of existence ringing forth in Ajibade’s portrait of a country that is endowed with immeasurable oil wealth but has mass poverty, unemployment and collapsed infrastructure as dividends; a putative democratic republic that is ruled in succession by leaders who are weaned on the ethos of autocracy. The paradox finds a parallel articulation in the book with the author celebrating those who struggled for the expansion of democratic space and denouncing the perceived architects of socio-political anomie, both in one stroke of the pen.

On the list of heroism are journalists, writers, intellectuals, politicians and statesmen whom he holds in sublime veneration. On the contrary, he has harsh words for military rulers like Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and more unsympathetically, Olusegun Obasanjo, for violating the spirit and essence of democracy. According to the author, they are responsible for making democratic governance in Nigeria, an irksome experiment in endless dictatorship.

The chapters can be categorised into three thematic concerns. Four chapters celebrate personalities whose achievements in the private and public spheres are deeply admired by the author - Beko Ransome-Kuti, Dele Giwa, Gunter Grass and Wole Soyinka. Two chapters contain interviews with Salman Rushdie, the endangered Indian novelist, and John Kufuor, the out-going President of Ghana. In two essays - “As we gather in Barcelona” and “What exactly is good governance?” - Ajibade mounts the podium and directly addresses his audience.

Both essays are refined versions of some earlier public lectures. The final chapter offers insights into the role of the civil society in a volatile democracy. Reflecting on the knotty question of what constitute good governance, he hangs the answer on the balance of responsible leadership and conscious citizenship. Good governance, he contends, is a collective struggle both from within and outside the officially designated spaces of power.

The author’s tributes to Gunter Grass and Wole Soyinka, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature are rendered in lyrical prose spiced with poetry. These are writers adored for their uncanny sensitivity to the march of history and the trends of politics. Grass is celebrated as a “sceptical social democrat” and as a writer “who has been truly made eloquent by the sufferings” of the twentieth century. Characters in Grass’ novels serve as the canvass for commentaries on human conditions in the contemporary world. In the process, a common bond is established across space, time and cultures among the ordinary people who are often regarded as the “scum of the earth”.

Interestingly, Soyinka attracts attention not for his literature and politics, but for his politics in the media as an essayist, a public affair commentator and a columnist. He is no less confrontational as he tackles media practitioners who violate “editorial integrity and ethical rigour” (p. 71).

As a writer and student of literature, there is something of both writers in Ajibade’s style. He weaves metaphors into intricate patterns of intelligible narrative like Grass, while he shares Soyinka’s vision of literature as a barb constantly honed against the perceived enemies of the people.

In the interview with John Kufuor, the Ghanaian President’s leadership model is contrasted with Obasanjo’s. While Kufuor is presented as a statesman, Obasanjo is declared a “self-seeker”. While Kufuor makes Ghana work, Obasanjo takes “politics to the threshold of the horrible” (p. 154). But the author seems to celebrate here too hastily.

It is unfortunate that in setting up Ghana as a success story, he relies on those statistical evaluations made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials. These are the same set of people responsible for Africa’s perpetual dependency and underdevelopment. In the rankings that the author celebrates with glee, Ghana comes out a dismal failure; an index of how deep Africa is sinking head, body and legs in the swamp of globalisation.

On the whole, the essays find appropriate accentuation in photo art. Most of the pictures show different images of a sick polity, largely provoking spite rather than sympathy. What a Country! is not a straight-on cataloguing of Nigeria’s woes, neither does it provide an in-depth analysis of its political and economic sour-points. But both serve as the hub of motivation for the author.

More importantly, it shows the journalist as a fusion of the creative artist, the teacher, the historian and the interpreter of social events. Although the author denies ever looking back at the past in anger like John Osborne, the British dramatist, no phrase better captures the tenor of discourse in the book. Its candid stock-taking approach is in many respects, a welcome development, at a time when many of those who are to be held accountable for the country’s misery are attempting to re-construct historical facts through the genres of biography and autobiography.

-Dr Gbemisola Adeoti is currently a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the School of English, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He lectures in the English Department of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. This review was published in the online edition of Daily Sun, Tuesday 18 November 2008.

Celebrating his heroes, mourning his country
By Akeem Lasisi

For any creative writer based in Nigeria to impress his audience, he may simply have to double his imagination. This particularly applies to the one who wants to capture events on the socio-political scene. Reason: Many incidents that should be witnessed only in the realm of imagination occur live. The challenge – if not a trial – for the discipline of the muse, therefore, borders on how not to end up celebrating as a myth what has become the reality in the reader’s experience.

On the other hand, the writer set out to capture happenings as they are, say, in essays or any other form of documentation, faces the ‘sweet risk of outsiders’ finding it difficult to believe that the account he has given is not fiction. This gets compounded if the writer is the type that has a robust literary gift that he has explored to propel his narration. This is largely the situation with What a Country!  the recently-presented collection of essays by the author of Jailed for Life and Executive Editor of TheNEWS magazine, Kunle Ajibade.

Coming in nine chapters that take the reader on a 176-page of excursion to a past that appears to have infested its future with a terminal disease, the book affords Ajibade an opportunity to critically dialogue with a fatherland that puzzles him. But as the reader will discover, the title of the work could as well have been What a People! because, in a way, it is also a puzzled country that is dialoguing with its senseless leadership, with Ajibade acting as its (Nigeria’s) mouthpiece. That is why while language use in the book is tender and, indeed, flowery, the tone is harsh in several respects – almost like that of a depressed parent talking to a vagabond child.

But the structure adopted is, however, not to chronicle the strange events as they happened. Rather, Ajibade chooses to reveal and engage them by presenting the experiences of some major characters who had asked the same or similar questions about the nature and fate of the country called Nigeria. These are people who had invested their lives, wanting to bring the nation back to its senses – but have had to pay dearly for it. As a result, Ajibade is able to kill two birds with the same stone: he beaming light on those that can be interpreted to be his heroes – the likes of Beko Ransome Kuti, Dele Giwa, and Wole Soyinka – while also putting in perspectives the severe contradictions plaguing the country.

In the opening chapter, Beko: What a Country!  the writer gives a vivid description of the personality of the late pro-democracy activist, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, establishing him as a dogged fighter for the emancipation of the country. He captures Beko’s arrival at the Directorate of Military Intelligence, when they were charged alongside other people over the 1995 phantom coup. Ajibade had given some account of this in Jailed for Life. But he offers a deeper insight here, and this is generally a marked difference between both books. In his foreword to What a Country! renowned writer, Odia Ofeimun, puts the difference in perspective, saying that Ajibade explores it to placate critics who argued that, as excellent as the prose in Jailed for Life is, the author failed to descend heavily on the symbols of the contradictions that got him as well as the country imprisoned. Writes Ofeimun, “A corrective, it seems, is what Ajibade offers to assuage the heckling by friends and critics who had wished that he inserted some personal ideology, or his motivating force, into his prison memoir, Jailed for Life.”

But while Ajibade also delves into the history of pro-democracy struggle in the Kuti family, he has reveals how efforts to establish a non-governmental organisation by ‘graduates’ of the Abacha gulag were allegedly technically thwarted by the former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also a victim of the controversial coup. Besides, Ajibade accuses the Obasanjo administration of celebrating hypocrisy by recognising Beko as a great man upon his death in 2006 – after having refused to accord him any honour when he was alive.

Chapter two is also like a right of passage for the late brilliant writer, Dele Giwa, who was assassinated with a parcel bomb in circumstances that, many believe, made the Babangida government suspect number one. To invoke his brilliance, the author, who earned a B.A. in English and M.A. in Literature- in -English from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), recalls Giwa’s professional principles, his stance on ethics, his lifestyle while also extensively quoting several of the late journalist’s articles. On the basis of Giwa’s reported notion of the qualities of a good journalist, the imperative of having to constantly secure exclusive stories by a reporter, Remembering Dele Giwa makes What a Country! a great resource material for every student of journalism.

If What a Country! had ended without a tribute to the Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, many readers would have been surprised. These are people who know how tight the tie between Ajibade and Soyinka is. And one can only hope that such people are not slightly piqued that Ajibade does not have a separate essay on the slain Minister for Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, the late Chief Bola Ige, based on a similar consideration. While Ajibade manages to give him due recognition elsewhere in the book, one may have the cause to think that Ige, Ken Saro-Wiwa and a Gani Fawehinmi may be among the right candidates to focus on in a similar collection he may want to publish in the future.

In Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian Media, Ajibade examines Soyinka’s place in, and views on, the media. Parts of the beauty of this chapter are excerpts from various writings of Soyinka, thus ventilating the book with more than a single writer’s style. One of the excerpts that will make the most interesting reading is found on page 73. In the piece that Soyinka published in the African Guardian in 1986, he sharply criticises officials who make public service announcements at airports, and foolishly mimic European accents.
While A celebration of Gunter Grass and A Conversation with Salman Rushdie will especially interest literary-minded fellows, Why Ghana Works: The Kufuor Interview, where President John Kufuor establishes the renascent and regeneration spirit that is turning Ghana around – the type that the last two chapters A People in Dire Need and What Exactly is Good Governance? – affirms what is missing in Nigeria.
The visual representations splashed on pages 121 to 136 tell the story almost better than a million words would do. That it is very good that Ajibade acknowledges the photographers who took the shots at various national engagements – Idowu Ogunleye, Akin Farinto (both winners of the Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Journalism) and Tunji Obasa. Earlier in chapter four, the writer had also paid a tribute to The Punch photojournalist, Soji Adegbesan, over a dramatic and professional battle he had with Soyinka at an occasion in Shagamu.

And in terms of production aesthetics, What a Country! is a very pretty book to behold and own. The publisher, Ibadan-based Bookcraft, has, again, proved its worth in terms of the quality of production as exemplified by the attractive texture of the cover, the standard of the printing of the inner pages as well as editing and proof reading that are painstaking. There are a few errors to be corrected in subsequent editions, though. For instance, demand could and should do without for on page 10. Also, the question of the second comma missing when a noun is used in apposition rears its stubborn head in a few places, just as the sentence quoted in the second to the last line of page 60 ought to have started with a capital letter. Also, “Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi” should have been qualified in terms of his being the Chairman of Tanus Communications or/and making reference to his being the editor of an ever-worth book like Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, especially for the benefit of people who will pick up What a Country! outside Nigeria.
And it is a book that all and sundry should pay attention to. It is a valuable material for historians, sociologists, media practitioners, politicians and whoever wishes Nigeria well.

. Lasisi is an award winning poet and a senior journalist with The Punch newspaper where this review was published on 24 July 2008.

Nigeria, A Country Like No Other
By Akintayo Abodunrin

Going by the title, one had expected What a Country! Kunle Ajibade’s latest effort to be a jeremiad on the country’s woes. But Ajibade does not toe this path in this beautiful, 176-page book with a reader-friendly layout published by Bookcraft, Ibadan. What Ajibade does, except for the penultimate and last essay out of the nine in the book is to showcase individuals whose lives and works have affected humanity positively and highlight values like honour, integrity, service and justice they commend to us to improve ourselves and Nigeria.

The poet, Odia Ofeimun, in the foreword aptly captures this when he says “…The thrust of What a Country! is the celebration of some of the world avatars and exemplars whose courage, resilience and outspokenness have powered the spirit of the struggle for justice, and the defence of memory as a means of keeping evil and evil doers, tyrants and traducers of common good at bay and odium.”

Nigeria, everybody knows, has had a good number of tyrants who, together with Nigerians’ apathy, have turned the country into a challenged state. Some of these challenges – epileptic power, decaying utilities / infrastructures, poverty, corruption, fiscal federalism and minority problems, military, human rights abuses, etc – are what Ajibade poignantly highlight with photographs in the second to the last essay he calls ‘A people in dire need: visual representations’.

The last essay, ‘What exactly is good governance?,’ like ‘Ask Nothing of God,’ the keynote speech delivered by Dele Olojede, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and published by Spectrum Books Limited asks frank questions of, on the one hand, the callous, intemperate, visionless and thieving leaders and on the other hand, apathetic citizens who seem to have forgotten they are also stakeholders in the Nigerian project.

Ajibnade bemoans why Nigeria has never had men who qualify as real leaders but has instead been afflicted with rapacious leaders and politicians in whose lexicon the word service and humane does not exist. The reaction of former President Olusegun Obasanjo to the January 27, 2002 bomb explosion at the Ikeja Military Cantonment, Lagos, who said “I don’t have to be here” when he got to the scene (unlike a caring Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York after the 9/11, 2001 terrorist attacks and even Saddam Hussein during a visit to a secondary which walls were riddled with bullets after “Operation Desert Storm”) and immediately left rankles Ajibade. The author of Jailed for Life actually cuts the former president and his likes no slack just as he enjoins us not to give up even with the dysfunctional public utilities and social institutions. Apart from urging Nigerians to become responsive to other Nigerians, break the fetters of oppression and shun unmerited gratification which enables an unscrupulous few to ride rough shod over them and embrace honour (like Olojede mentioned in his Ask Nothing…) Ajibade tells Nigerians not to give up because the country is redeemable.

The preceding chapters, however, are a celebration of men whose sterling qualities Ajibade hold out as shining examples for Nigerians. In the first essay, ‘Beko: What a Country!’ Ajibade not only profiles the life of an altruist, but underscores prudence, courage, stoicism, justice and fair play of all of which the late human rights activists and medical doctor possessed. The life and invaluable contributions of the late journalist, Dele Giwa, is what the Executive Editor of TheNEWS magazine writes on in the second essay. Entitled ‘Remembering Dele Giwa’, Ajibade reminds us of the trailblazing role the late Giwa who was killed with a letter bomb in 1986 played in heralding a new journalism, and the lofty tenets of the profession he enjoined practitioners to uphold. Of course, he includes the bio data of the maverick newsman but beyond this, he also highlights the ethics and values the moustachioed man would have journalists imbibe. Apart from integrity, which every Nigerian, not journalists alone, should imbibe, Giwa, according to Ajibade, also wanted reporters to: “ … have passion for the job. Be brave but don’t be reckless. Don’t allow them to beat you into silence. Cry out questioningly. Try and rise above trivial pursuits. Give your country quality journalism”. Giwa, also required from journalists and Nigerians patriotism, the kind that would make a man commit seppuku (suicide) for the fatherland. Before his death, Giwa also used his columns to clamour for a Nigeria where unemployment would be reduced to a minimum; where there will be security of lives and property, where the common wealth would be equitably distributed, conservation of resources and environment upheld and respect for human life. Given their crucial role in the society, Ajibade wants journalists to honuor the memory of Giwa by shunning inducements and working for the promotion of the common good.

The next chapter celebrates Gunther Grace, a Nobel Laureate and the morals he preaches to humanity through his satirical works. For the controversial writer, there is nothing like literature for literature’s sake as all arts must be oriented towards achieving a goal(s) and literature itself should never retreat from public life. It should speak truth to power and mirror the events in the society by being controversial. As he commends the lessons in Grass’s works to us, Ajibade also does same in the fourth essay on Professor Wole Soyinka. That Kongi, as he also called, is a knight in shining armour to millions of Nigerian youths is a well known fact but what fascinates Ajibade here is the hoary haired writer’s intervention in public life with his journalism, and how kike Giwa, he demands ethics, service and integrity from journalists. For Kongi, junk journalism shouldn’t have a place in a sane society.

Two very illuminating conversations with Salman Rushdie and President John Kuffour of Ghana are also contained in the book and because the taste of the pudding is in the eating, readers would do well to read up the conversations as well as Ajibade’s ten-minute address he delivered at the International PEN Writers-In-Prison committee conference in Barcelona.

A Most interesting read which beauty and lessons are best appreciated by a personal perusal, the only flaw of this otherwise quality work written in immaculate and elegant prose is three typos. There is ‘Lost Angeles’ on page XV of the foreword, ‘reader’ on page 24 and ‘magasine’ on page 90.

. Abodunrin is a journalist with Tribune newspaper where this review was published on 16 September 2008.

Thriving In Chaos
By Adewole Ajao

A struggle against the pervasive reality of Nigerian life, beset with a lack of taste and honour is the origin of this startling anatomy. The flawed Nigerian notion of a nation, riddled with its pervasion of intellect, values and ethics is the starting point. But it is not just negativity. The positive side of his arguments also explore courage, resilience and outspokenness in the quest for a much-needed paradigm shift. These are some of the elements powering Kunle Ajibade’s latest What a Country!

From its glowing foreword and advance praises from the likes of Odia Ofeimun, Okey  Ndibe, Sam Omatseye and Wale Adebanwi and Akin Adesokan, you are prepared for a piece that surpasses Jailed for Life. But don’t think it is a sequel to the author’s prison notes. It is an improvement and simply his crusade against numerous episodes that have eroded the remaining traces of humanity in Nigeria. Rather than a boring recapitulation of the author’s experiences, he takes us on the interesting journey of his experiences with various voices and experiences. This anatomy of his contiguity with popular names adds more weight to the whole reality of confusion on ground. Research is key in this book and we see Ajibade’s reasoning at its best as his premises and conclusions are far-reaching and spot on.

Split into nine sections, it commences with Beko; What a Country! The setting is July 1995 along Kofo Abayomi Street in Victoria Island, Lagos. The street associated with conviviality and intellect is now den of trigger-happy officers bent on terminating the existence of the author and Beko Ransome- Kuti on charges of planning to overthrow the government. Their trial for the phantom coup of 1995 leads to life in a dingy cell with the late freedom fighter. An adherent of conscientious parsimony, we see shards of Fela, and other family members in Beko’s selfless character. This episode engenders a fruitful friendship that can be likened to that of a student and mentor. We are also able to fully appreciate Beko’s stoicism and voracious appetite for the general human good. We see a circumspect and upright individual whose heart is always with the people. His death in 2006 was a defeat for a wonderful activist who was a stickler for morals.

In Remembering Dele Giwa, we see the story of an individual who embodies the archetypal journalist. As a flamboyant extrovert and firebrand writer, this aspiring spirit of the journalism enterprise died as a hero. But even in death, his memory still lingers to haunt his killers, a pleasing irony to the author. For Ajibade, the importance of Giwa’s portrait lies in the need to resound the honour and glory in his passage. In an era where the unflapplable integrity of the journalist is being eroded by the brown-envelope syndrome and other unethical practices, this eulogy of this fallen journalist and his various pieces are a form of inspiration and lecture on what  modern journalism entails.  As a profession, it should be predicated on the ideals of truth, excellence and reason. This quest for timelessness and bluntness characterised the pieces of Dele Giwa. Apart from engendering continuous rumination, they also drive home Ajibade’s points on the need for diligence, reason and courage in the profession. These are the best solutions to the recurring problems in the field.

One writer that seems to have inspired Ajibade is Gunter Grass. The German writer with a fetish for discussing Soviet dictatorship and capitalist exploitation captures the author’s hearts with stimulating pieces. This makes his Nobel Prize more significant as the close of 20 century would not have been complete without recognition of his literary prowess. His continuous praise of this multi-media artist resides in his admiration for the evocative style of writing, sprawling imagination and fantasy fiction that constantly push the limits of reality. These profoundly political pieces also depict the tragedy of human existence through various characters symbolic of his beliefs that literature must not lie. This is what buoys any serious writer. His noteworthy presentations are striking and so are his abilities to remould and expand language with astonishing freedom. His themes of homelessness, ambition, egocentricity, hybridism and emotional identity have attracted mixed feelings among writers and critics. But Grass is just the product of a society that is untiring in his quest for new forms of expression with invigorating explorations on literature, writing and society-certainly, the onion juice of his pieces have found suitable container in Ajibade’s heart as his style leans towards the poignant and pungent.

Soyinka has also been a keen influence. The relentless fascination with Soyinka’s cerebral profundity, charming poise and triumphs of humanity over conscience transcends a skill with letters. As a voice of the voiceless majority, Soyinka is a liberator of truth. This makes him a journalist’s delight as his freezing dialogue and lyrical utterances provoke deep thought. His ideals and ideas remain the same despite the passage of time while his battles against junk journalism; oppressive governments and lacerating criticism of Obasanjo are truly symbolic of Soyinka. And really, you have to agree with Ajibade. A country with junk journalists will only produce junk presidents, junk policemen, junk youths and a junk way of living.

There is also Ajibade’s conversation with Salman Rushdie. This interview discusses terrorism, Indian elections and the role of the serious writer. Rushdie’s refreshing views on these diverse topics of international significance are a good read.
In his throwback to his prison incident, the section As We Gather in Barcelona gives a clue into the bitter experiences and how they come to life in his works. Having spent a length of time in prison, the lack of change in the nation has quickly evaporated the taste of democracy from his mouth. This list of national disasters includes the Niger Delta imbroglio, crumbling businesses, unemployment and other issues. He compares the dismal situation with a better life in Ghana. His interview with President Kufuor reveals a leader that has international respect for his ability to think things through and a people that are carried along in the leadership process. The gentle giant of Ghanaian politics shows he is a true diplomat by picking his words carefully when asked to compare Ghana and Nigeria. Pictures are an integral part of words and in the pictorial People in Dire Need, we see protests, sorrow, anguish, squalor, waste, environmental degradation and struggles against bad leadership. These are true images of the Nigerian setting.

After all the criticism of bad governance, Ajibade appropriately ends with his views on good governance. By paralleling New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Olusegun Obasanjo, we see stark differences, as the rule of law is pitched against that of man. In a setting rife with power-mad politicians and propaganda, the political horizon is riddled with vultures instead of stars. Political sanity has given way to political insanity, while money seems to be the motivating factor. This is very true. In the scathing summary of the madness in the Nigerian situation, we see crony capitalism and a bleak prognosis for humans that are yet to take the membership of the human race serious Obasanjo particularly comes under fire from the author. As a political failure, his comparison with Bill Clinton adds more strength to this fact. For Ajibade, the solution to bad leadership resides in scholarly education, clean hands and a provision of people-driven policies. Good governance is against deferred dreams, galloping inflation, high prices, and high cost of production, fetid slums, armed robbery and violence. He ends with a thought for its casualties while ending with the truly Nigerian optimism in adversity.

Apart from being well structured, Ajibade’s book is a bundle of information, research and imagination. He goes a step further by commenting on the various problems that have struck his insides. His movement from writer to social critic is also a step beyond his efforts in Jailed for Life and we see his objective acumen at work. This might just be an attempt to follow in the footsteps of his favourite writers, and the book will surely make them proud. Spiced with nuggets and excerpts from a glut of popular names, it is an exhaustive critique of the Nigerian anomaly. Apart from the profundity of the topics and a nation on the brink of a melt-down, the book also boasts a numerous marvellous production features. A bold black-and-gold hue gives a clue into its seriousness. This is augmented with clear legible pages, a glossy cover and an enjoyable reads from beginning to end.

.Ajao is a journalist with ThisDay newspaper where this review was published on Sunday 10 August 2008.

Glimpses of a Country
By Femi Macaulay

What a fitting moment to chat with a bibliophile! It was Book Day at Alliance Francaise, the French Cultural Centre in Ikoyi, Lagos; a celebration organised “to promote books and encourage people to read and buy books.” Kunle Ajibade was billed to read from his newest book What a Country! The author of Jailed for Life, his prison memoirs documenting his bizarre trial and imprisonment in 1995 by a notorious military dictatorship, had recently released a collection of his essays and interviews to mark his milestone 50th birthday in May 2008. Ajibade had just arrived from Benin where he also did a reading. His enthusiasm was catching as he spoke of his reading tour.

He chose to read from Jailed for Life. Before he opened the pages of the book, however, he asked the expectant audience to rise for “one minute silence for Dele Giwa,” the flamboyant journalist and former editor-in-chief of the then trail-blazing Newswatch magazine. Ajibade prayed: “May his soul rest in peace and may he continue to haunt his killers.” The two wishes were incompatible. It was a day before the 22nd anniversary of Giwa’s gruesome murder by a mysterious letter bomb on 19 October 1986. As he read from his book, his mobile phone rang, and he paused to answer it. After a brief conversation with the caller, he made excuses to the audience, saying, “That was a call from Wole Soyinka. I was expecting it; that’s why I kept my phone switched on.”

Giwa and Soyinka, Nigeria’s distinguished literary master and Nobel Laureate, are subjects of two of the essays in Ajibade’s latest book. Also in the book are his writings on Beko Ransome- Kuti, who he described as “one of the most civilized of our freedom fighters”, and Gunter Grass, the dazzling German writer and winner of the last Nobel Prize in Literature in the 20th century. Ajibade’s conversation with Salman Rushdie, the famous Indian author of the explosively controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, and his interview with Ghana’s President John Kufuor, have places in the book, along with his ten-minutes speech at the International PEN Writers-In-Prison Committee conference in Barcelona, Spain, and his Founder’s Day Lecture at The Vale College, Ibadan. These essays and interviews are from the period of 1991 to 2007. A splash of expressive pictures that capture diverse aspects of a problematic country provide colour; but they are potentially provocative. These are “visual representations of a people in dire need,” according to the book. Top of this line up of offensive images is the one showing a smoky scene of defenceless women “who were tear gassed in Lagos on 16 December 2005 as they set out on a peaceful protest to sympathize with the parents of the 62 students of Loyola Jesuit College who died in a plane crash.” Indeed, this is also the book’s disturbing cover picture. “Their gesture was truly inspiring,” said Ajibade. “Dedicating the book to that grand gesture of courage, for me, is part of the spirit of this book. I have written it not just to complain, but for people to be conscientized to know that it’s important to do much more inspiring things than we are doing at the moment.” The book is also dedicated to the author’s late father, Alabi Ajibade, “who believed adamantly in excellent education,” and to Professor Biodun Jeyifo, who Ajibade described as “one of my extraordinary teachers at the University of Ife.” It was at this university that he got his first degree in English and a Master’s in Literature- in- English.

What a Country! This exclamatory title, which Ajibade took from a perceptive utterance by Beko Ransome- Kuti, could as well suggest a feeling of positive astonishment. But in this case, it is the implication of the opposite. Ajibade’s anger seeps through the lines of his essays. He said, “Bitterness is not part me but it is difficult not to be angry.” He then asked a series of rhetorical questions. “Why won’t you be angry to live in a country where chaos has become the norm? Why won’t you be angry to live in a country with so much potential without good leaders to harness the potential for the benefit of humanity? Why won’t you be angry that you’re a citizen of a country that is ruled by idiots?”
The particular country that Ajibade bashed so heatedly is, of course, Nigeria. But, he explained, “More significantly, this book is not just about Nigeria. I just take off from Nigeria; Nigeria is just my context – to arrive at the general. What is, for example, the essay ont Gunter Grass doing here, if it is just about Nigeria? What are those things that Gunter Grass is interested in? What are those things that Salman Rushdie is talking about? He speaks about the role of the intellectual in a state of anomie, for instance. And Kufuor talks, among other things, about the role of the good politician also in a state of anomie. Of course, Wole Soyinka is not just a child of Nigeria – I’m interested in that. But what he says about the media in Nigeria is also true about the media in other places. Who else? Beko Ransome- Kuti in this book is just a typical activist anywhere in the world. We are talking about values that would make us grow and endure as people all over the world”.  For Ajibade, the decisive factor in the selection of these essays and interviews for the book was the all-important questions, “Can this fly beyond this border, beyond Nigeria’s border?” He added, “Even in my treatment of Nigerian issues, I have my gaze set on someone reading me outside of Nigeria. Have I failed, have I succeeded? I leave you and other perceptive readers to judge.”

This universality of audience which enriches his book, encourages Ajibade to make prescriptions for good governancne, a concept that is describable but elusive. In the piece, “What Exactly is Good Governance?,” he recommends: “a general course on responsible leadership should be taught in our schools; the purpose of which will be to train our student our students on leadership skills.” He sounds uncomplicated when he speaks of “working for the public good,” and “knowing how to work in the public interest.” Politics, he argues, should rise above the pettiness of being a power game. He defines it as “an art of selfless service to humanity.” This social conscience, habitually alien to politicians, is the kernel of Ajibade’s political philosophy.

“History says no to the conclusion of inescapable doom”, he said upon reflection, while emphasizing the importance of consciousness-raising and the need for the people to have a sense of “personal responsibility.” According to him, “The people I have celebrated here did not just intellectualize about their countries, they acted positively in the direction of what they believed in. We have positive energy that we can turn into something really great in this country. We can crawl out of the wreckage. We just need somebody to galvanize us.”

Certainly, thinking of a redemptive dynamo, Ajibade didn’t have General Sani Abacha in mind. The tyrant jailed him for life on manipulated charges in the course of his work as a journalist; he regained his freedom three years later, shortly after his tormentor died suddenly in 1998. His first book published in 2003, Jailed for Life is a poignant narrative that captures “the trial we went through and what you may call the triumph over evil.” Thanks to PEN Centre USA West in Los Angeles and the 1998/1999 Feuchtwanger Fellowship of Villa Aurora, he was able to put his prison notes together. In his opening remarks before reading from the book, he highlighted the fact that Makurdi Prison where he served time is “one of the worst prisons in Nigeria, built in the 1930s. “During the reading, the audience met “the mad man,” and also Terry, a convict on death row, two of the characters that Ajibade encountered in jail. He was caged on account of a story published in TheNEWS magazine about an alleged coup plot against Abacha’s administration. He is a co-founder/publisher of the combative weekly. For reporting the events leading to Ajibade’s oppressive arrest and detention, his farcical trial, his soul-torturing prison experiences and his rapturous homecoming with such telling vividness, Jailed for Life won the first Victor Nwanakwo book of the year Award in 2003/2004. He dedicated the book to his wife, Bunmi, “for bearing the ordeal of my enforced absence with exemplary resilience.” She bore Ajibade’s second son, Folarin, while the writer was behind bars.

How did he rise above his shackles? His answer can be found in the address entitled “As We Gather in Barcelona,” which is part of his new book. According to him, “Each time I’m asked: how did you survive prison? I always talk, among other things, about the four big boxes under our staircase in our Lagos house, which contain a mass of letters written to me in Makurdi prison, mostly by members of PEN and Amnesty International from different parts of the world. There are two other boxes containing books like Pat Baker’s The Ghost Road, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses, Angela Carter’s Shaking a Leg, Festus Iyayi’s Awaiting Court Martial, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Martha Gellhorn’s The View from the Ground. In the stinking environment that was Makurdi prison, where only common criminals, madmen and corrupt warders thrive, my mind would have been mangled if I did not have those letters and books to cushion my anguish. Communing with many of those brilliant authors, I read extensively and vigorously.” The emphasis is his.

Ironically, Ajibade was rather fortunate that he was imprisoned. “It really helped,” he said of the opportunity that jail provided for the enrichment of his mind. His stubbornly heroic refusal to cooperate with the probing state security agents who wanted him to reveal his magazine’s source of information on the coup story could have endangered his life. He was, don’t forget, caught in the trap of a murderous megalomaniac. After pausing for a while to relive the past, Ajibade tackled the question on how far a journalist could go to protect his sources. He said, “it’s about principles. And that’s why they say if you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything. Every journalist is taught to protect his sources. Why? Because you’re as good as your sources as a journalist – if you don’t protect them, where will you get the blood and tonic that you require to work with as a journalist? That was just what informed that. But much more importantly is also the fact that I was protecting my colleagues as well. Those who wrote the stories were not arrested (except one of them – may his soul rest in peace – for some reason, they arrested him and killed him – Bagauda Kaltho). The others, even in my detention I was still smuggling out notes to warn them about the danger of being caught. It was important for me because I was just one man down; I didn’t want the entire organisation to fall. I knew that if the organisation did not fall, I stood a better chance of surviving. So what I did arose out of enlightened self-interest – that if I tried to protect those people, which was what I did, they would also look after me, which was what they did. They would have arrested all those who contributed to the stories, and the story would have been different because that would have been the end of the organisation at that point. The organisation survived largely because of the indomitable spirit of my colleagues who were fighters.”

He admitted though that it was a highly risky game he played. However, it has brought rewards that he can’t quantify, and which continue to fill him with awe. “I was playing down the devilry of the system that was dealing with me,” he acknowledged. “I never thought for one moment that I would be jailed for life and some people would be condemned to death. But the good thing about this is that each time I meet those military officers today, I feel extremely humbled by the kind of things they say – ‘Kunle, we just thank God for you people, that you did not allow them to kill us.’  If that simple act helped them to survive, then I do not need any other prize. No reward can be greater than that. No other prize can be greater than the prize of life, the prize of liberty.”

Preoccupied with the leadership question, Ajibade didn’t pull his punches as he pummelled the Obasanjo presidency in his new book. Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general and former military ruler of Nigeria, was among the wrongful victims of the trial that resulted in Ajibade’s incarceration. Against all odds, he later emerged as the country’s democratic president, and served for two four-year terms from 1999-2007. “It’s difficult for me to forgive him because he had a wonderful opportunity to turn around a lot of things in this country, but he failed terribly,” Ajibade lamented. “Obasanjoi and I were in detention. He was almost killed. My thinking is that if you had the kind of chance Obasanjo had – a triple chance – which is always rare, you would make a difference.” Emphatically, he passed judgment on Obasanjo, saying, “He is not a good leader.” That’s Nigeria for you. Yes, What a Country!

.Macaulay,  a  freelance journalist, wrote this for The Nation on 4 January 2009.

The trouble with Nigeria

By Wale Fatade

“What’s the problem with your country?” This has been the recurrent question posed in different forms to Nigerians, especially outside the country. Lovers and haters of Nigeria alike just cannot understand or decipher how a country with so much potential, bustling with energy at its seams could seem perpetually consigned to a life of poor performance.

Not a few books have been written on the issue. Some have considered it largely in the political realm, dubbed fancifully, “the Nigerian question”. One recall such books like The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe, Just Before Dawn by Kole Omotosho, This House Has Fallen, Nigeria in Crisis by Karl Maier, and Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years – A Memoir by Wole Soyinka, among others.

Furthermore, the civil war of 1967 to 1970 has continually generated tons of books on the problem afflicting this potentially great black nation. When one remembers the words of former Ghanaian leader, Jerry Rawlings, at a public lecture in Abuja in 2006, that the greatness of blacks worldwide depends on Nigeria, then the fact that the country is foundering must be a subject for serious concern.

In a bid to address some of the issues holding back Nigeria’s progress, Kunle Ajibade wrote What A Country! Ajibade, 50, was jailed in 1995 for life because of a story published in TheNEWS magazine, where he was Editor. He was released in 1998 when his jailer and mazimum ruler, Sani Abacha died. A consummate writer and bookworm, he had earlier written his prison memoir, Jailed for Life: A Reporter’s Prison Notes, which Heinemann published in 2003.

Classifying this latest offering by Ajibade, who abandoned a more glamorous career in advertising, for journalism – at least by Nigerian standards – is a little tricky. It is a bit of a memoir, journalism, sociology and political science, going by the collection of essays contained in the book.

In a country where there is a constant and perennial search of heroes, it is not surprising that in a bid to address Nigeria’s woes, Ajibade decided to celebrate some of our greatest. While some are deceased, others are like the largely unknown catholic priest he refers to on page 153; and well known ones like Wole Soyinka, the late Beko Ransome-Kuti and the late Dele Giwa. The author gives copious reasons why they deserve his canonization. Authors like Salman Rushdie and the German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass, who have also inspired him and whom he has been fortunate to meet in the course of his career are also venerated in What a Country! This is in a bid to celebrate the good of all men, irrespective of race or creed.

That a chapter is devoted to Soyinka though in reference to his encounters with the Nigerian media, is also not unexpected. Ajibade is one of the well known worshippers at the Soyinka altar where he pours his libation regularly. This is reflected in the many interviews with the white-haired humanist and author, and other collaborations between the duo. Soyinka has equally not hidden his affection for his younger friend and compatriot.

The book opens with Beko. What a Country! treats us to a rich dose of Bekolorari Ransome-Kuti: medical doctor, human rights activist extraordinaire, and sibling of that irrepressible musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Known simply as Beko, by the young and old, it is quite instructive that for the late doctor, what is wrong is wrong, not minding who was involved. And so, his enemies today could as well become the subject of defence tomorrow if they have become the objects of inhuman treatment.

And that’s why the former Nigeria president, Olusegun Obasanjo (whom Ajibade seems to have so much bile for, and justifiably so, especially since he seems to have learned nothing from his prison days), who was responsible for the demolition of Fela’s Kalakuta Republic, could actually become a beneficiary of Beko’s humanity. Beko protested against the incarceration of Obasanjo before he was picked up eventually.

Not many Nigerian journalists remember Dele Giwa today, especially going by their lack of attention to detail and panache in their profession. Giwa, perhaps more than any member of his generation, demonstrated what great influence the determined journalist could excert on the psyche of readers and listeners. Even sadder, some of the writings of Giwa hold true today, 22 years after his death from a parcel bomb on Oct 19, 1986. The highest tribute Nigerian journalists could pay the memory of this fine writer would be to unmask his killers.

Told in fine prose, one gets the feeling that Ajibade’s book could have benefited from more research, as there seems to be so much that needs saying about parlous state of affairs in Nigeria. But a writer can only say so much in one book; others too should join in the discussion and come out of the paralysis Nigerians have been thrown into. The photographs, too, could also be a little bit sharper than they are. A fine effort nonetheless.

We should disprove Giwa’s word: “Nigerians, let’s face it, like easy answers and easy money” – by rigorously questioning our leaders more, while other smaller countries like Ghana are making great progress. Let’s be the country we ought to be.

—Wale Fatade works for NEXT newspapers where this review was published on 22 February, 2009.

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