Chinua Achebe’s Booker Award, Nigeria’s Glory

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

(This article was first published in 2007...)

The recent international recognition of the literary excellence of our peerless literary icon, Chinua Achebe, and the equally richly deserved crowing of the prodigious literary prowess of U.S.-based, up-and-coming novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have been such comforting news especially for those of us living outside Nigeria who have had the unpleasant burden of explaining (actually, in most cases, explaining away) to our friends all the bad international press we’ve had in the last couple of months.

*Achebe 
Since May this year, every well-informed American I have met has asked me about our outrageously fraudulent elections and, of course, about the kidnappings of foreigners in the Niger Delta. These two issues seem to be the only topics people here know about Nigeria when they strike up a conversation with you. I don’t blame them, though. Their news media has had a rather unhealthy fixation with these stories these past few months.

 

Then first came the cheering news that one pulchritudinous and immensely talented 29-year-old Nigerian lady called Adichie has won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her book, Half of a Yellow Sun. (Incidentally, Chinua Achebe was also only 28 years old when he wrote his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart). She trounced many better known and more established women writers to win the prize. Although news of her win didn’t do much to divert attention from the negative publicity of Nigeria in the Western media, it did provide a comforting alternative subject matter to discuss with people about Nigeria here.

Bola Tinubu’s Risky Niger Gamble

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu a few days ago wrote to the Senate to inform it of an impending “Military build up and deployment of personnel for military intervention to enforce compliance of the military junta in Niger should they remain recalcitrant.” This is a dangerous, ill-advised, potentially self-destructive gamble Tinubu would do well to give up because it has the potential to consume not just him but also Nigeria.

*Tinubu 

I detest military regimes because I am repulsed by any system that imposes unequal, predetermined structural limits on the aspirational compass to leadership. It is for the same reason that I despise the unearned, inherited authority that monarchies represent. Everyone should, at least in theory if not in practice, have the latitude to aspire to the highest level of leadership in the land. Military rule limits leadership to professional people, as monarchies limit leadership to bloodline.

Umar’s “BIAFRAN Boys” Dig Up Part of Nigeria’s Unofficial Igbophobia

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

Danladi Umar, the notoriously vain and sickeningly skin-bleached chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, was caught on camera on March 29 physically assaulting a securityguard identified as 22-year-old Clement Sargwak. 

Umar flew into a tempestuous rage because Sargwak besought him to not park his car at a spot that obstructed traffic in Abuja’s Banex Plaza in Wuse 2. 

                          *Danladi Umar 

In the aftermath of the swift, across-the-board social media denunciations that his cowardly physical violence against a lowly security guard roused, Umar caused the head of the Press and Public Relations unit of the Code of Conduct Tribunal by the name of Ibraheem Al-Hassan to issue an agonizingly dreadful and error-ridden press release that, among other things, singled out nameless “BIAFRAN Boys” for blame in a show of shame in which he is the main villain.