By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy by Adewale Maja-Pearce; (Verso, UK, 6 Meard Street, London; Verso, US, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York; 2024; 185pp)
Adewale Maja-Pearce does not pull his punches in his prolific engagements in public intellectual pugilism. He packs quite a punch, and comes strongly recommended by such eminent worthies as Jeremy Harding of London Review of Books who writes thusly: “Adewale Maja-Pearce is Nigeria’s most dependable journalist.”
There is no denying the fact that Nigeria as a country is in dire straits. It is as though Africa’s most populous nation is forever thrust in suspended animation, especially after the heavily flawed 2023 presidential elections. Incidentally, Adewale Maja-Pearce starts out with these words: “This book was written against the background of the 2023 elections.”
The author justifies the title This Fiction Called Nigeria early on in the Preface: “Our underlying problem is that we are not really a country in any coherent sense…” An amalgam of well over 250 ethnic groups “yoked together by the British colonial power for its own economic interests”, Nigeria boasts of a fictitious population of 220 million out of which 133 million live in extreme poverty.
This Fiction Called Nigeria spans forth in five broad chapters, starting with the youth riots of speaking up in opposition to police brutality: “On 8 October 2020, protests calling for an end to police brutality erupted in Nigeria. They were sparked by the murder of a young man by officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in front of a hotel in the town of Ughelli in Delta State five days earlier. A witness uploaded a video of the shooting on social media; it quickly went viral, whereupon the witness himself was arrested, further escalating matters.”
The protests across the country shook up Nigeria over a
fortnight, crucially in the capital city of Abuja and the commercial
nerve-centre Lagos. The well-organized peaceful marches of the youths got to a
head when on 20 October gun-toting soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators at
the Lekki Tollgate in Lagos, killing many people.
A brave young lady who goes by the alias DJ Switch live-streamed
the shooting and was declared wanted by the authorities. She now lives in
exile.
Adewale Maja-Pearce depicts the #EndSARS protests as the game-changer unleashing youth awakening in Nigeria. According to Maja-Pearce, “All that energy was deployed in support of Peter Obi, the soft-spoken former two-term governor of Anambra State who spontaneously, and seemingly without warning, emerged as their presidential flag-bearer.
Unlike Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, the former two-term vice president and the third of the leading triumvirate seeking the highest office, he didn’t go around throwing bundles of cash to prove his credentials. For the first time in the country’s history, the majority youths amassed behind a figure who promised them nothing but good governance in the hope of making the ‘giant of Africa’ worthy of the appellation instead of the poverty capital of the world that is our present lot.”
Maja-Pearce then delves back in time to the beginning of Nigeria by way of the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates by Lord Lugard who said: “I wish to try whether we can succeed in ruling the country through the Fulani not by the Fulani… Henceforth they must be our puppets and adopt our methods and rules.”
A barren North unable to pay its way was joined up with “a Southern lady of means”, in the words of Lord Harcourt. The North was mortally afraid of southern domination such that in an infamous BBC interview Ahmadu Bello stressed that he preferred to hire foreigners ahead of other Nigerians, especially the Igbo “whose desire is mainly to dominate everybody.”
The East and West got regional self-government in 1957 while the North got it in 1959 before the country’s arrival at flag independence in 1960, in the words of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe “on a platter of gold.”
The sordid history of post-independence Nigeria led up to the military coups of 1966, and then the civil war in which about two million perished, mostly by starvation, as Maja-Pearce quotes Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s statement: “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.”
After the war, General Yakubu Gowon declared a “No Victor, No Vanquished” policy, even as the erstwhile Biafrans were given £20 no matter their former bank balance and the promulgated Indigenisation Decree benefitted “mainly Hausa and Yoruba elites while robbing the now impoverished Igbo of the same opportunity.”
Maja-Pearce puts out an unsparing account of the oil boom years, the overthrow of Gowon by Murtala Muhammed the butcher of the evil civil war Asaba massacres, the rise of General Olusegun Obasanjo; and some passages leave goosebumps such as this: “The Babangida regime also began the practice of assassinating awkward voices, when Dele Giwa, editor-in-chief of the weekly Newswatch magazine, was killed by a parcel bomb delivered to his house late in the morning on Sunday, 9 (sic,19) October 1986.”
The annulment of the June 12 1993 presidential election won by Chief MKO Abiola threw up another “animal in human skin”, as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti sang, in General Sani Abacha’s dictatorial rule during which Ken Saro-Wiwa was judicially murdered. Of course Abacha died, and Abiola died too, and democracy was revived in Nigeria in 1999 when the military head of state Abdulsalami Abubakar handed over power to the former military ruler Obasanjo as civilian president.
There is no point rehashing the series of rigged elections in Nigeria’s struggle for democracy culminating in the 2023 polls during which Bola Ahmed Tinubu is quoted as saying: “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant… not served in (sic) a la carte. It is what we are doing. It is being determined to do it at all cost. Fight for it! Grab it! Snatch it! And run with it!”
Peter Obi, on his part, said: “I will challenge this rascality for the future of the country. This is not the end but the beginning of the journey for the birth of a new Nigeria.”
Maja-Pearce offers up this lament: “But what was especially dispiriting in all of this was the way the ethnic card was deployed to get Tinubu there, which is the final proof that it was all about one elderly man’s suffocating sense of entitlement – ‘it’s my turn’ – to achieve such a shoddy ‘victory’, as even his cheerleaders seem to have realised, which is why they have since toned down the rhetoric. As in the civil war half a century ago that we seem intent on repeating, the Yoruba have once again teamed up with the Hausa-Fulani, in the process squandering the people’s opportunity to choose an Igbo president and thereby bring closure to the national wound.”
Adewale Maja-Pearce has delivered a watershed book in This
Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy. I am at one with
his candour as he boldly states that “Nigeria has no future as presently
constituted… we have to restructure if we are to find our way out of this
morass in which a few a few choose to drink champagne and the many are denied
clean drinking water…” in the revolutionary spirit of late Thomas Sankara of
Burkina Faso.
*Uzoatu is a poet, dramatist literary critic
and public intellectual
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