Federal Republic of Fiction @ 63

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is fiction. The country’s Constitution has been transferred to a new shelf in the library: the shelf containing fictional works. The latter-day patriots of Nigeria can cry all they want against me, but in this instance I only choose to stand solidly in solidarity with the words that Samuel Johnson uttered on the evening of April 7, 1775, to wit: “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

There can never be a short supply of toadies and ill-assorted scoundrels defending the many fictions of the government of Nigeria in this new age when former activists and revolutionaries have turned into government spies and informants. 

The newfangled trumpeters of the government’s many lies are ever ready to defend the indefensible such as the dubious copying of former President Buhari’s nepotism and parochialism like a Rank Xerox machine. 

Prebendalism which stunted Nigeria’s growth from the years of yore has shot up a gear or two with the praise-singers of the government defending it all via primordial prostration. 

There was the hot fiction that the authorities of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had lifted the visa ban on Nigerians, a lie that shot up in decibels of intercontinental embarrassment.

A party was almost set up to celebrate the announced return of Emirates’ flights to Nigeria only for the Nigerian public to learn soon enough that it was yet another miserable lie from the smithy of a pathetic copycat of the lickspittle Lie Muhammed.  

In fictional matters, the government of the day tops the antics of the purveyors of rampant fiction in Onitsha Market Literature – or how can one explain the bloomer about the first African president to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a vomit that the vomiting bloke had to publicly swallow?

A government that offhandedly boasted that “petrol subsidy is gone” is reportedly still mired in the subsidy regime while living a lie.

It’s a mark of formidable lie-telling that Nigeria sent a large entourage to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York based on the fiction that President Joe Biden will indulge them with a tete-a-tete.

As the immortal poet Christopher Okigbo asked, “How many million promises can ever fill a basket?” 

The basket of lies also contains the promise of making the American Dollar arrive at 1-1 parity with the naira which has eventually translated to One Thousand Miserable Naira to One Mighty Dollar. 

A tear for the fiction named Nigeria! 

Well, Nigeria had been a fiction, a scam from the beginning of time because everything about this country is shrouded in the kind of mystery that underscores the 419 phenomenon. 

Nobody can tell for a fact the accurate population of the country. 

Literally all elections in the country have been rigged, not the least of which was the last one which results were announced on the ungodly wee hour of 4am.

The very idea of democracy in Nigeria bears a different definition as per “coup at the polls”, that is, “grab it, snatch it, and run with it!”

There is the ready advice for anybody that does not agree with the get-go of it all: “Go to court!”

The judiciary is at liberty to write its judgement with the letterhead of di capo di tutti capi. 

Time was when Nigerian authorities cried foul over the dismissal of the country as a nation of marvelous scammers by the then American Secretary of State General Colin Powell. 

The heart of the matter is that Nigeria is a veritable 419 “mugu” made for exploitation from the very beginning.

Today, Chicago State University and all makes of shady American lawyers have stepped up in the matter of not exposing Nigeria’s “first class” material. 

Even so, to start from when the rain started to beat us, what greater Advance Fee Fraud could have been arranged on God’s earth than the so-called Amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 by Lord Lugard from which our colonial master Britain continues to reap from bounteously to this day? 

It was classic 419 that the British inaugurated when they merged three unequal regions into the wobbly patchwork of fiction baptized as Nigeria. 

The country inauspiciously began life somehow managing to stand on three unequal legs, no matter how staggeringly.

The dubious intentions of Britain on Nigeria started quite early with the very first census figures doctored by the colonial powers to favour the North – the facts are there in the recently uncovered archival materials in Westminster. 

The 1959 elections were rigged in the interests of the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) by the selfsame Britain.

The NPC won the least popular votes behind the NCNC and the Action Group, but more constituencies were multiplied in the North to ensure pre-determined results! 

The manipulations made the North to see itself as king of the land that can do and undo such that it can foist a Muslim-Muslim ticket and tell anybody who cares to listen that they manufactured the winner of the election – of their own accord.

The manufacturers of fiction should be made to understand at this hour of the country’s celebration of her 63rd Independence anniversary that Nigeria is wallowing in worldwide derision as a fictional entity. 

It’s so sad that Nigeria is still a child at 63, for as legendary grandmaster of fiction, Chinua Achebe, wrote: “Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child – gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward.” 

If Nigeria wants to win the respect of the world, it should at the very least grow up by organizing proper elections and announcing the proper results to win proper legitimacy for her leadership. 

All the lie-telling of the present-day can only cement Nigeria’s inglorious placing as ordinary fiction.   

*Uzoatu is a journalist, poet, playwright and public intellectual