Within
the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway's works – some seven novels,
fifty odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction — The
Sun Also Rises, is something of a curious exception.
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| *Gov Wike |
Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and
relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite
of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial
successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and The Sea
(1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is one most
wholly satisfying book. Here Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for
his famous understated ironic prose style. And here he also made his first
marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his
brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing
career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the
Hemingway "code", the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue,
and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was
still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the
twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the
structure of The Sun Also Rises.
Yet, at
the same time, while The Sun Also Rises is characteristically Hemingway's, it is
radically different from his typical fictions. Indeed, it may be precisely in
the area of its differences that it attains its special quality and pertinence
as a major American novel. For there are subtleties of tone and meaning in The
Sun Also Rises, which suggest a
profounder confrontation with the ambiguities of the modern experience than
Hemingway was ever to sustain again. The Sun Also Rises is a novel about
loss. But this, amongst Hemingway's novels, begins with the loss as a given, as
fatal limitation on open possibilities and opportunities. As in the best of
Nick Adams stories, The Sun Also Rises is concerned with that moral space which
remains for man's occupancy after necessity has affected its inexorable
curtailment on his freedom. And the concentrated passion which gives this novel
its tautness of structure and its authority of statement is its exploration of
that diminished measure of dignity and endurance which a man may still strive
for even while he is a captive in the nets of bleak fatality. It is against
this backdrop that we must acknowledge and celebrate the rising of another Sun
in Rivers State in Nigeria in the person of His Excellency (Barr.) Ezenwo
Nyesom Wike, the Executive Governor of the State.
When one
considers Wike's emblematic heroic resonance against the backdrop of the
gallery of the popular Hemingway heroes - and how difficult it is to refrain
from imposing Hemingway's own photogenic features on those of his heroic
characters- the composite image can almost be stereotyped in Nollywood terms.
The Hemingway "hero" is first and foremost a vigorously athletic
figure. He is a man who eats and drinks with natural gusto, a generally
successful "village boy" who paradoxically, is innocent of lust for
power and of money, a man professionally dedicated to a physically oriented
metier, a hunter-fisherman-soldier who battles against fate with the native
resources of his own skill, endurance, and courage in order to wrest a small
victory in a long war which he knows he couldn't possibly have lost because of
his consuming faith in God and his exuding energy.
All these Hemingway's heroic characters are embedded in Wike.
But the development in Rivers State has become an effort in human actuality.
Like a typical Hemingway setting, the original background of the battle has
affected the final tone. Wike's feelings for the condition of his people after
eight miserable years of alleged misrule and plundering of state resources by
his predecessor drew upon a number of sources: they were partly social, partly
political, and perhaps most of all, emotional. Wike saw that Rivers State,
hitherto the leading light in civilised comportment as the home to the Garden
City in Nigeria, was diminished to a micro-hell where killings and vice-crimes
were the established problematic.
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| *Gov Wike with VP Yemi Osinbajo |
Imbued
with an implacable passion for his people, Wike shuddered and vowed to redeem
his state whose treasury had been looted and rendered prostrate from the jaws
of human sharks intent on emasculating the people to total extinction in their
inordinate drive for power and capitalist venturesomeness. He fought
relentlessly combing every nook and cranny in the state to drive home his
philosophy and programmes. The people who had been left almost breathless like
a fish on a dry sandy beach panting, loved him and voted overwhelmingly for
him. That was the beginning of the liberation of the state and Wike's magic
wand which earned him the sobriquet, "Mr. Projects" by the Vice
President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who was then Acting President. The then Acting
President's timely quip was just a confirmation of what Senator Godswill
Akpabio had said when he visited Rivers state to commission projects just after
Wike clocked one year in office as a working governor, not a sitting one.
Today, much of the importance of Nyesom Wike as governor of Rivers State does
not lie in who he is but in what he represents to the Nigerian imagination. Of
course, Nigerians have had two or three governors who had stolen the heart of
the governed in terms of performance. But Wike is one with a difference. Since
he won overwhelmingly in the 2015 governorship election and was sworn in as
Executive Governor of Rivers State, he has won more awards than all the other
governors in the country put together.
It is in
Wike that the people of Rivers State have seen for the very first time a
governor who is meticulously developing all the nooks and crannies of the state
and setting up institutions that will stand the test of time, in a
comprehensive and holistic manner. This is why the aggressors want him out willy-nilly.
If these trouble makers and confusionists are not deluded beyond redemption,
these protagonists of the Rivers State crisis must be dismayed that beyond the
vast fortunes that they have accumulated over the years, as political jobbers
and god-sons of fraudulent social pretenders, they have little or nothing to
show in terms of followership in their home state, for all the frenzied
manipulations, the willful distortions and obfuscation. They have little or
nothing to show except the blackmail and the lying that have been
systematically employed by them to consecrate their desire to malign the
governor and to make the state ungovernable for him.
But Wike
does not suffer fools gladly. The current rift or tango between him and the
authorities in Abuja is a deliberate ploy by some of his political opponents -
the Abuja politicians - to unsettle him, especially in this season of the
global pandemic which is ravaging mankind across the globe. And let it be known
to the bookmakers who are busy dropping President Muhammadu Buhari's name, that
Wike has no problem with the President and is not taking on him but a certain
minister from his state who wants to dictate to him from Abuja. When the
minister was a governor and Wike was a minister, did the then governor take
orders from him? That is the crux of the matter. Call him whatever you will.
But Wike still towers above his equals in terms of performance and delivery of
the dividends of democracy to his people. From physical and social
infrastructure, opening up of the rural economy, to employment generation, to
curbing the menace of cultism and insecurity and rebuilding decadent state
institutions, he dwarfs all superlatives.
It was
the Vice President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, a man not given to the arcane political
brashness, petty villainy and rancour of our seedy politicians, who called Wike
"Mr. Projects", not a PDP leader. This is because Wike's achievements
are verifiable, not on billboards. As for the constitutionality or otherwise of
the present face off, it is only those gullible Nigerians who do not know or
have failed to appreciate the fact that federalism, anywhere in the world, is a
compromise between the centrifugal and centripetal forces, who try to blame or
malign him for insisting that the state as a constituent unit of the federal
structure must be accorded its due respect and pride of place in the scheme of things.
You simply have no right to impose your decision on a state
governor without adequate consultations. Those who allow political sentiments
to becloud their sense of reasoning must stop equating presidentialism with
absolutism. It is due to the lack of intellectual honesty and the political
will to address squarely the vexed issue of restructuring and true federalism
that we keep repeating ourselves as broken gramophone records. For once, let a
state governor summon the courage to tell the interlopers that Nigeria must be
made governable by law. We need many Wikes in the Niger Delta, the goose that
lays the golden egg. Those political jobbers from Rivers State exiled in Abuja
who keep beating their chest that they would make the state ungovernable for Wike
should bury their faces in shame.
Yet, they
have failed to appreciate Edmund Burke's wise dictum that the most important
platoon to a politician is his home base. If they are popular, if their boast
of overwhelming evidence of mass supporters in Rivers is anything to go by, why
are they still on self exile in Abuja? They have failed to realize that but for
a hardworking and accountable governor like Wike, their effort would merely
help to prolong the agony of their people. These so-called Abuja politicians
have reaped and are reaping huge dividends from the crisis they have created
and from the grief it has brought to their compatriots at home, if not for
Wike's brilliant intervention. To consolidate their new prosperity and
influence, to remain politically relevant, they have to keep stoking the
crisis. But given Wike's pragmatism and composite mien, their braggadocio is
caving into insignificance. Like a typical Hemingway hero, Nyesom Wike knows
that however complex the calculus of political action, at the end one has to
live by one's own convictions. One must finally march to the beat of one's own
drum. As a lawyer, Wike knows what is due his state as a federating unit that
contributes a huge chunk to the country's foreign exchange earnings and his rights
as a state governor. He does not need to beg anybody for the right thing to be
done. Call him whatever you will. But you cannot call him a coward. And so, it
is reality in Nigeria as the Sun also rises in Rivers State.
*Amor, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
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