Nigeria: The Making Of Supreme Confusion

 By Chidi Odinkalu

Most people do not know or remember that, strictly speaking, there were and remain no official results for Nigeria’s 2007 presidential election. Organised by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, the vote itself occurred on April 21, 2007 under Maurice Iwu, a professor whose academic discipline coincidentally was alchemy. His main qualification for the position of Chairman of the INEC was that he was close to President Obasanjo’s fixer, Andy Uba.

The results began trickling in the following day. Under Nigeria’s Constitution, a winner of a presidential election must secure the highest number of votes in addition to winning a minimum of 25% of the votes in at least 24 of the 36 states of the federation. What this means is that it is impossible to declare a lawful result in a presidential election until the results in at least 24 states have been computed.

The Collapse Of The Nigerian Tripod

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria today stands on wobbly legs, and what needs to be done to make the country to stand steady and strong is to go back to where the rain started beating the country in the modern day.

At independence in 1960, Nigeria was said to stand on a pivotal tripod of East, West and North. The 1967-70 Nigeria-Biafra war ensured that the North in alliance with the West defeated the East.

The oppressed minorities of course took sides with the victors because nobody would ever want to be in the corner of losers.
That is a simple historical fact, and any other embellishments only exist to serve expedience.

Dangerous Times In The Dear Country

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The demons of death are on the loose, arranging mayhem and spreading annihilation all over Nigeria. We walk an ungodly but very familiar Nigerian road littered with shattered bones and broken dreams.

The struggle for political power is all the rage with the ruling party presenting a Muslim-Muslim ticket in a multi-faith country while the main opposition party presents a Northern Fulani Muslim candidate to succeed a Northern Fulani Muslim incumbent after eight years of incumbency. There is the third force rousing the youths into fervid activity such that if the elections are tampered with the EndSARS riots may pale into a child’s play. The dangerous times of Nigeria today cannot but force one to look back in anger at the country’s history on how the land came to this pass.

The Story Of Media Leaders In Nigeria’s Construction And Reconstruction

 By Owei Lakemfa

Nigeria was partly built by journalists who fought the British colonialists so ferociously that Frederick John Lugard, their colonial poster boy who amalgamated the country in 1914, was forced out as Governor General within five years. The media campaigns for the soul of the country went on through the colonial period and into the new century.

But the country has been very badly used, so much so that today, it is in urgent need of reconstruction. The media, as one of the main builders of the country, convened a roundtable on Saturday, November 26, 2022, to examine its part in constructing the country and what role it needs to play in reconstructing it.

To do this, the Nigeria Media Merit Award, or NMMA  convened a conclave of experts led by Emeritus Professor Michael Abiola Omolewa, an education historian and diplomat who was the 32nd President of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.

Biafra, Or An Oasis Of Prosperity?

 By Obi Nwakanma

 Let me be on the record, and say that I align myself ideologically with those who seek the right to self-determination as a fundamental human right. This right is enshrined in the charter of the United Nations of which Nigeria is a signatory.

*Odumegwu-Ojukwu taking the oath of office as Head of State of Biafra

These facts are so clear that it begs the question, why is the Nigerian government persecuting, and criminally violating the rights of those like Nnamdi Kanu who has devoted his life to the pursuit of what he sees as his right to be free of the Nigerian enterprise? The answer is: the word, “Biafra” gives Buhari and his ideological fellow travellers the excuse to wallop the Igbo.

Soludo And The Made-in-Anambra Work Ethic

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

There is palpable fear amongst the serious commentariat in addressing relevant issues because most of the viral news attributed to esteemed personages may have been cooked up by the feeble minds of the fake news industry. Anambra State Governor-elect, Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has had many words put in his mouth by these fake news manufacturers.

*Soludo

It’s therefore interesting seeing Prof Soludo while interacting with the members of his transition committee laughing off one of the fibs that quoted him as saying that he would not spend more than N20 million for his swearing-in ceremony.

Soludo cleared the matter thusly: “I have made a wish that not even One Kobo of Anambra people’s money will be spent on the swearing-in ceremony. It is a wish, and I mean it. What are we spending money on? Just a few people coming to the inauguration and witnessing it, then I will open office and get down to work immediately. I do not wish any event, dancers or players and all that. I just want to show up for work, like every first workday. Though it is going to be a Friday, which is the weekend, I’m going to work for over eight hours that day. No ceremony, no event, no party, nothing. Not even 10 Kobo will be spent. So the people who are saying N20million has been budgeted should go and tell us where they will get that money. It is going to be work, work, work, and that is what we epitomize.”

Let Us End The Nigerian Civil War!

 By DAN AMOR

For those who were born during or after the Nigerian Civil War, recent publications, provide an illuminating pathway to the events that led to the war. No nation among the third world countries makes a stronger claim on the interest and sympathy of Africans than Nigeria. What Nigeria has meant to the black continent and to blacks across the world, makes her future a matter of deep concern. Nigeria might be doddering or tottering behind less endowed African countries as a giant with feet of clay, no thanks to the tragedy of irresponsible leadership. 

  *Displaced South Easterners during the Biafra-Nigeria War

But whatever happens to her usually serves as a huge lesson for other African countries. To view therefore with judgment and comprehension the course of present and future events in Nigerian life and politics, we must possess knowledge and understanding of her past, and to provide such understanding within concise compass, we must consult history. Yet it is an unbiased, disinterested and unprejudiced inquiry into the history of our country that will ensure that we leave a legacy of truth for generations yet unborn.

In fact, the true story of Nigeria must begin with the foundations of the nation-its geographical and economic character; its socio-political and religious influences and the psychology of its peoples. 

Besides the existence of multi-ethnic nationalities before the fusion of the Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British imperialist military commander, and the almost 100 years of British colonial rule, the great period of post-independence crisis – 1960 – 1970 – must be vividly delineated for posterity.

The death in November 2011 of Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu who has come to symbolise that great epoch of epic struggle brought to the front burner of national discourse, the issues and convergent forces at play in the Nigerian Civil War. But recent developments point to the fact that our leaders who prefer to learn their geology the day after the earthquake would want history to repeat itself. 

Unfortunately, rather than telling in bold dramatic relief, the tragic and magnificent story of what brought about the war and its aftermath, some commentators have elected to mislead the reading public on who actually caused the war. Some have even pointedly accused Chief Ojukwu of having masterminded the war in order to divide Nigeria. 

What can be more mischievously misleading than the deliberate refusal to allow the historical sense transcend the ephemeral currents of the present and reveal the spirit of a people springing from the deepest traditions of their tragic experience? How could one begin to appreciate a legend who continued to be astonishingly misunderstood even when the realities of the factors that pushed him to rise in defense of his people are damning on the rest of us more than 50 years after his action? Why is it so difficult for us to appreciate the fact that Ojukwu had come to represent, in large and essential measure, not only a signification of heroism but also a courageous attempt to say no to an emerging oligarchy which was bent on annihilating his people from the face of the earth? 

No Nigerian in his right senses should support any nebulous attempt to re-awaken the Biafran experience. But if we believe the time-tested aphorism that few men are austere or dull-witted enough to scorn the pageantry and romance of history, then we must ask ourselves why, for God’s sake, would people become so barren in thought as to hold the view that Ojukwu caused the Nigerian Civil or what some mischievously call the Biafran War? 

Even for those of us who were born during the holocaust that was the war itself, a deep reflection on what brought it about cannot in all sincerity be divorced from the greed and unbridled ambition of Nigerian politicians – the quest to dominate others and the winner-takes-all mentality of the lackeys to whom the colonialists handed over power on a platter of gold. 

Why must we forget so soon the blatant rigging of the 1964 Western Region election by the Federal government – controlled Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in favour of S.A. Akintola at the expense of Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the Action Group who was believed to have won that election in the first place? How can we forget so soon that it was the upheaval that followed that manipulation in the Western Region and the inability of the government at the centre to contain it that orchestrated the January 15, 1996 military coup and its aftermath? 

In fact, in all the accounts of the developments that led to the war, both local and international, none particularly mentioned Ojukwu as a key player in either the coup of January 1966 or the July 29, 1966 counter revolutionary coup led by young Hausa/Fulani soldiers. Ojukwu’s response to the wanton killings of Igbo and other nationals of Eastern Nigerian origin was a latter day development which in all practical purposes followed the natural course of history. He was just an uncommon patriot who responded decisively to the issues of the day. 

We bow courteously before the mighty personages of other traditions. The appeal of Nigeria’s annals is not that of a success story. The record of our soulless country is strangely somber. Like in France, our earliest heroes might be heroes of defeat. But the story is shot through with episodes of unequaled magnificence. That history is repeating itself just as we recall our ugly past shows that it is the destiny of Nigeria to live dangerously. 

Last month, January 15, 2021, Nigerian leaders pretended to have marked the 51st anniversary of the end of the Nigerian Civil War. All of them, including the victims of the war itself who pretend not to know, went to the graves of the "unknown soldiers" to lay wreaths in remembrance of the supreme price they paid for Nigeria to be one. Yet, in the minds of most notoriously undemocratic Nigerians, the war has not yet ended and the country is not yet one. The last administration made an Igboman Chief of Army Staff and brought the Civil War to its knees. He prosecuted the Boko Haram war almost to its logical conclusion. 

          *Ojukwu, Ankrah and Gowon at Aburi, Ghana, 1966
But another man came and reversed what the last administration did by insisting that an Igbo cannot be Chief of Army Staff; cannot be Chief of Air Staff; cannot be Chief of Naval Staff; cannot be Chief of Defense Staff and cannot even be Inspector General of Police. The current one is saying that the civil war has not ended; that the vice presidency which the South East attained seven years after the war was an error. No. It is not true. The Civil War which ended on January 15, 1970 must be laid to rest. No victor, no vanquished. 

Between 1800 and 1945, there have been pockets of civil wars across the world before the Nigerian Civil War which was fought between 1967 and 1970. There was the Castle Hill convict rebellion, 1804; the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition (Texas) 1812-1813; Argentine Civil Wars, 1814-1880; Zulu Civil War, 1817-1819. There was also the Long Expedition (Texas), 1818, 1821; the Greek Civil War, 1824-1825; the Freedom Rebellion (Texas), 1826-1827; Liberal Wars (Portugal), 1828-1834. The American Civil War was fought between April 12, 1861 and May 9, 1865 and the Spanish Civil War was prosecuted between July 17, 1936 and April 1, 1939. All these civil wars ended and the respective countries became more united than before. 

If the Nigerian Civil War has been fought and won or declared "no victor, no vanquished" by Gen. Yakubu Gowon, then it must have meaning and the end taken to its logical conclusion. The South East must produce the next Inspector General of Police and the Service Chiefs, for Nigeria to move forward. God has endowed this country with all that is needed for it to blossom into one of the best countries in the world. We must end sectional greed and domineering postures for Nigeria to get there. The Nigerian Civil War must end without much ado. Let this country be great again.

*Amor, a public affairs analyst resides in Abuja

Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics

BOOK REVIEW

Title: Ironsi: Nigeria, The Army, Power And Politics

Author: Chuks Iloegbunam 

Year Of Publication: 2019

Publishers: Eminent Biographies, Awka, Anambra State

Pagination: 300

Reviewer: DAN AMOR

"Life is terribly deficient in form.

Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way.

There is a grotesque horror about its comedies.

And its tragedies seem to culminate in farce."

– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

How do we begin a critical review of a book on a personality such as Major-General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi? Many writers have been devoted to investigations of great events and great leaders. Few have combined that devotion with the ability to write effectively, amusingly, even brilliantly about those events and people – about the great moments and the low moments, the great men and women and those who were only interesting, entertaining or absurd. Chuks Iloegbunam combines devotion to investigations with ability, as all who read this book will testify. 

I’m Embarrassed For The Ojukwus

By Comfort Obi
Any true Igbo son who held, and still holds Ikemba Nnewi, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, of the blessed memory, in reverence, should be embarrassed by the turn of events in his nuclear family. They must be embarrassed by the gutter behaviour of a couple of the children he sired! And for women, especially Igbo women, they should rise in anger against these Ojukwu children, specifically, Dr. Ike Ojukwu and Emeka Ojukwu Jnr. Both men deserve no respect from any woman who has any self-esteem.

*Late Odumegwu-Ojukwu and wife, Bianca 

Ever since their father passed on, they have been dancing naked in the market square in a futile bid to humiliate his widow, and, indeed, their step mother, Iyom Bianca Ojukwu. The irony: They are fighting over an inheritance they contributed nothing to.

Anambra: Why Gov Obiano Was Re-elected

By Ray Ekpu

In any election incumbency packs a punch. The incumbent always has something to show, completed projects to flaunt, ongoing projects that are nearing completion or even ones that are on the drawing board. He has the paraphernalia of the civil service, the MDAs, the contractors, women and youth groups hired and unhired, all of them are often in the corner of the incumbent. The incumbent is also seen as a bird in hand, the reality not the dream, the person on the job not the one who wants to be on the job. In most elections, all of these factors often work in favour of the incumbent.

*Gov Obiano

It worked for Chief Willie Obiano, the newly re-elected Governor of Anambra State. As all incumbents normally do, Obiano published a long list of his completed projects and asked that the public should crosscheck and establish for themselves the veracity of his claims.

The Slaves Of Nigeria

By Femi Fani-Kayode

Many years ago​,​ ​the irrepressible Hausa leader who hailed from Kano and who was the founder of the radical leftist political party called NEPU, Mallam Aminu Kano, said,​ ​“Until the Fulani Emirs are toppled northern Nigeria will not know peace”.

*Femi Fani-Kayode 

History has proved him right. The feudal structure of the north and its deeply conservative ethos has resulted in nothing but retrogression, poverty, disease, radical Islam, terror and killer herdsmen.

Yet the problem goes much further than the north: it extends to the whole of Nigeria. Worse still it has affected the psyche of the Nigerian people and left them with a very low self-esteem.

We have become victims and casualties of our modern history and little more than miserable serfs in a Fulani-controlled artificial, man-made vassal state which deems non-Fulanis as nothing more than the biblical “hewers of the wood” and “drawers of the water”.

In our very own eyes we are nothing and in our hearts we believe that the Fulani are everything. We bow and tremble before them, we jump when they sneeze or express their displeasure and we smile and commend them when they commit all manner of abominable atrocities and slaughter.

No Cure For Yakubu Gowon Fever

By Tony Iwuoma

Former head of state, Yakubu Gowon, was gifted with opportunity for atonement when he recently appeared on AIT’s People, Politics and Power programme. Unfortunately, the man, who wanted to ‘go on with one Nigeria’ (Gowon), flunked the grace of history.

*Gowon

Perhaps, the greatest take-away was Gowon’s inadvertent exoneration of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. He had actually set out to vilify the venerable Biafra leader by heaping inordinate falsehood on the dead, who can no longer defend himself. Gowon claimed he went to Ghana for the famed Aburi Accord unprepared. That, according to him, accounted for why highly cerebral Ojukwu bamboozled all of them and wringed the concessions he got. He added that secession was not on the card in Ghana and, of course, it couldn’t have been. It was not on Ojukwu’s agenda either. However, secession crept into the matter when the pogrom against the Igbo in the North continued unabated and Gowon, admittedly, could not halt it. According to Gowon and rightly so, the Igbo saw Biafra as the only hope for safety and freedom.

Gowon's Aimless Cut On Odumegwu-Ojukwu

By Sunny Igboanugo

Wouldn't it have been better for former head of state General Yakubu Gowon to just say that his inexperience, age and poor education were responsible for the Nigerian civil war rather than sticking to a 50-year-old propaganda, which has refused to stick.

*Gowon and Ojukwu eating from the
same plate in Aburi 

Having gone to Aburi "unprepared" and completely overwhelmed by an Oxfords-trained graduate, wouldn't it have been better for him to just accept that he simply fell to the manipulations of the British and bureaucrats back home rather than blame the war on "Ojukwu's lies?" 

The PDP Rallies For APGA

 By Chuks Iloegbunam

Without Chief Victor Umeh, Governor Peter Obi would not have had a second term of office. This declaration is an easy start to explaining the title of this article. It happened this way. Well before his first tenure ended, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, fed up to the hairline, ruled Mr. Obi out of a second term. One morning, General Ojukwu arrived APGA offices in Awka, to the cheers of party faithful and expectant journalists. There, he lifted the hand of Mr. Emeka Etiaba, now a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, and pronounced him the man to fly APGA’s flag in the 2010 governorship election. 

*Gov Obiano

Government House, Awka, immediately went into turmoil, with Governor Obi looking like someone poleaxed. Long hours later, he ditched lamentation for counteraction. This came in his flying to Victor Umeh’s patronage. They met later that week at the grounds between Government Lodge, Enugu and the Enugu State House of Assembly, Governor Obi having chased security aides, drivers and other convoy regulars to no less than 50 metres away. Left severely alone, Governor fell to his knees, contrite, subdued and solicitous, pleading with Umeh for a second chance. After some contemplation, Umeh, reluctantly decided to give Obi a kind ear.

Nigerian Unity Is Negotiable

‘Only Restructuring Will Ensure The Unity, Peace And Development Of Nigeria’ – Southern Leaders Forum (SLF)

“President Buhari expressed dissatisfaction about comments on Nigeria (while he was away) that ‘questioned our collective existence as a nation’ and which he said has crossed the ‘red lines’. Against the background of the threat to treat hate speech as terrorism, we see a veiled threat to bare fangs and commence the criminilisation of dissenting opinions in our national discourse. Experience worldwide has shown that any attempt to deal with dissents by force usually drives it underground, which makes it much more dangerous and difficult to deal with.

“The president deployed the imagery of the late Ikemba Ojukwu to play down the demand for the renegotiation of the structure of Nigeria by saying they both agreed in Daura, in 2013, that we must remain one and united. While we agree with them, the meeting between the two of them could not have been a Sovereign National Conference whose decisions cannot be reviewed. The claim that Nigeria’s unity is settled and not negotiable is untenable. If we are a settled nation, we would not be dealing with the crisis of nation building that are affecting us today.

President Buhari’s Illusion Versus Reality

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It should be clear by now to the citizens who are genuinely concerned about saving the country from careering into mortal catastrophes that their first task is to rescue their president. It is not a redemption from his hobbling medical condition. London doctors are equal to this task. This they have uncannily demonstrated by giving President Muhammadu Buhari a new lease of life. Now, apparently far from an afflicted president who was in dire need of the citizens’ empathy and prayer for his good health, Buhari has resumed office with so much vigour that he easily underscores his toughness by casting his expectations from the citizens in fire and brimstone.

*President Buhari in Zamfra (March 2017)

What Buhari is in urgent need of rescue from is his illusions about his fellow citizens, his country and the world. It does not matter that he claimed to be abreast of developments at home and the other parts of the world while he was away. In less than a week since his return, Buhari has shown that he is fixated on his misbegotten notions of governance that he had before his medical sojourn abroad. A graver danger is that these notions have degenerated as they have assumed a misanthropic character. Those who thought that his ill health would have sobered him up and purged him of his self-created distance from the citizens have been sorely disappointed. He has come back home to reprimand them with a sledgehammer for intolerably going errant ways while he was away. After all, in his reckoning, most of those who want a redefinition of the terms for the co-existence of the people have not been confronted with the prospect of their shedding their blood for the survival and unity of the nation.

Will Nigeria Survive Biafra?

By Bob Majiri Oghene Etemiku

In real life, people are told that quitters never win and winners never quit. That aphorism has proven true at the level of individual entrepreneurship and endeavour. Most people have often found out to their chagrin that just after they quit, success arrives. But how far nations can carry on, from what has been perceived as an unholy and uneven matrimony remains to be seen. The same is true with Nigeria, especially after the recent and successful stay-at-home call made on the people of the South East by their de-facto leader and the reactions which followed.

Before we log on to the question for today’s discussion, let me quickly affirm my love for my fatherland. Nigeria is a great country. Foreigners boast that our mangoes are some of the best in the world. Our women are beautiful and our young men strong. Our Jollof rice beats that of the Ghana and the Senegal. I have had the privilege of travelling to the North, South, East and West of this great country. I have met Northerners, Easterners and Westerners, and if they don’t speak their language they don’t look any different from the dudes on the other side. As a matter of fact, when I found myself in the North for my NYSC, I wanted to add a Northern aka to my name because of its phonetic and semantic affinity with my local name. Therefore, today, I manage to find my way with a dash of Hausa, Yoruba and some Ibo, and though I am bothered that this triumvirate do not speak my language, I have carried on nevertheless. 

End The Bad Blood Between The Yoruba And Ndigbo Now!

*Azikiwe and Awolowo 

By Femi Aribisala

The hatred between the Yoruba and Ndigbo has gone on for far too long. Let there be love shared among us!

The Yorubas and the Igbos, two of the most resourceful, engaging and outgoing ethnic groups in Nigeria, are becoming implacable enemies. Increasingly, they seem to hate one another with pure hatred. I never appreciated the extent of their animosity until the social media came of age in Nigeria. Now, hardly a day passes that you will not find Yorubas and Igbos exchanging hateful words on internet blogs.

The Nigerian civil war ended in 1970. Nevertheless, it continues to rage today on social media mostly by people who were not even alive during the civil war. In blog after blog, the Yorubas and the Igbos go out of their way to abuse one another for the most inconsequential of reasons. This hatred is becoming so deep-seated, it needs to be addressed before it gets completely out of hand. It is time to call a truce. A conscious effort needs to be made by opinion-leaders on both sides of the ethnic divide to put a stop to this nonsense.

Both the Yorubas and the Igbo stereotype one another. To the Igbo, the Yorubas are the “ngbati ngbati” “ofemmanu” who eat too much oil. They are masters of duplicity and deception; saying one thing while meaning another. To the Yorubas, the Igbo are clannish and money-minded. They are Shylock traders who specialize in selling counterfeit goods.

But the truth is that stereotypes are essentially generalisations and exaggerations. In a lot of cases, they are unreliable and untrue. Stereotypes must be recognised at their most effective as a joke. They are the stock-in-trade of seasoned comedians; the garnish for side-splitting anecdotes at weddings and social gatherings. Stereotypes should not be taken seriously. We should laugh at them without being offended by them.

Open Letter To Arewa Youths

By Charles Ogbu

Brethren from the north, I bring you greetings from the southern part of Nigeria. On behalf of the peace-loving people of the south in general and millions of Igbo youths in particular, I start this letter by commending you for your recent open letter to the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, where you called on the pastor-turned politician to organise a referendum for the Igbo to enable them to determine their future in line with international laws on self-determination.

*pix: guardian 

By that letter, you proved to be better versed in legal matters and ways of international laws with regard to the right of indigenous people on self-determination than many have given you credit for. Above all, your decision to resort to dialogue by writing a letter as against the option of violence is one I must not fail to commend.

Having said these, let me come to the main reason why I’m here. In your letter to the acting president, I noticed what I’ve been trying to figure out whether to classify as an innocent amnesia-induced oversight or a calculated attempt at revisionism on your part. The aim of this letter is strictly to put the record straight.

You cited the January 15th coup which you mischievously tagged Igbo coup and claimed was the Igbo manifesting their hatred for Nigeria. Quite frankly, when I read that part, I was left wondering whether to pause and die laughing or die crying. Contrary to your assertion, it was not the Igbo who manifested hatred for Nigeria’s unity. It is you and your kind who invented the word “hatred” and even went further to prove that indeed, it is not just a word.

Swan Song Of The Iroko: The Life, Time And Works Of Chinua Achebe: The Lessons For Nigeria

By Professor Umelo Ojinmah

(Paper presented at the Memorial Symposium in Honour of Professor Chinua Achebe by Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) on 20 May 2013 at International Conference Centre, Abuja)

*Chinua Achebe 

 Preamble
There are few writers that their lives and works have been studied as much as Achebe’s. His novels, especially, Things Fall Apart is standard reading in many high schools in America and Europe, including Germany, and all over Africa and Asia. I know that my work on Achebe was excerpted and is used in a text, Novels for Students Vol. 33 Ed. Sara Constantakis (2010) for high school students in America. 

Most of us here have critiqued one of Achebe’s work or the other.  Achebe has influenced writers from all over the world – Europe, America, Australia, and Asia. The New Zealand Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera, acknowledges that he was influenced by Chinua Achebe. He became one of the most famous indigenous writers of the Maori nation and has, himself, influenced a new generation of Maori writers. As editor of the African Writers Series, Achebe edited and mentored a host of African Writers including Ngugi Wa Thiong’0.  Elechi Amadi in a recent interview accepted as much, that they all were influenced by Achebe, which is one of the reasons he is seen as the father of African Literature. Growing up, many of us never knew how books are made. For us, Shakespeare was that nebulous but wonderful writer who weaved magic with words that our teachers asked us to memorise. It was Achebe that made us realise that writers were flesh and blood like us; that is what Achebe did for so many people, bringing literature to life and kindling our interest in writing.

 I: Life and Time 
When  Karl Maier’s This House has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis was published in 2000 there was the usual hue and cry by Nigeria’s elites and politicians on what they saw as the denigration of the Nigerian state. Coming seventeen years after the publication of Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria  (1983) it was amazing that despite the obvious kleptocracies of those at  leadership positions at both state and national levels that have stunted development of the Nigerian state, people still shouted themselves hoarse about the conclusion of Karl Maier’s This House has Fallen. A conclusion that Chinua Achebe had drawn and foretold seventeen years earlier. 

Although this paper celebrates the life and achievements of Chinua Achebe, as a writer and social critic, in the light of the furore generated by There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra and the level of discourse that it has precipitated, I was tempted to jump into the fray, but I quickly realised that what was happening was, in fact, what Chinua Achebe wanted. To draw attention to those issues raised, debate them, criticize them, but definitely not ignore them or sweep them under the carpet). Chinedu Aroh writes that “Achebe … feels the forty-two years the book took him to release shows the seriousness therein. According to Pourhamrang Achebe ‘had to find the right vehicle that could “carry our anguish, our sorrow ... the scale of dislocation and destruction ... our collective pain’’’ (cited in NewsRays, 2012, 40). 

The only sad note, particularly for Achebe scholars, is that the people who should be debating these issues are not; the leaders and government functionaries whose actions impact on the lives of the citizens. For it is for such people that There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra was written, so that we do not continue to play the ostrich as a nation. Achebe’s death has brought out all manner of critics and pseudo-critics. Recently, Odia Ofeimun, in his interview with Ademola Adegbamigbe and Nehru Odeh, under the guise of reacting to Chinua  Achebe’s  There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra took a hefty swipe at The Trouble with Nigeria thirty years after its publication claiming that:

We loved him so much for what he wrote that we hardly ever challenged some of the most contentious positions in his novels and in his non-fiction writings. Achebe said many things that are thoroughly wrong and that we ought to have contested very sharply and strongly.

Ofeimun states that “The trouble with Nigeria is not just bad leadership. That is the first bad point” yet by the time he had summed up Awolowo’s credentials he said “Now, it is good never to forget that what saved Awolowo was not just leadership….” Basic English lesson teaches us that when you use expressions such as “…was not just…” it presupposes that leadership is NOT excluded but included. Of course, it also means that there are other things that make up the qualities being advocated but the important thing is the acknowledgement that leadership is included.