Renegotiating The Nigerian Project

By Dan Amor

​A two hundred and thirty-six page book written by Dr. Amanze Obi, literary scholar, critic and journalist, who until recently was chairman of the Editorial Board of the Sun Group of Newspapers and published in 2013, is an engrossing tapestry of the Nigerian condition. Drawing afflatus from history, politics, philosophy, culture and every day experience, Delicate Distress: An Interpreter’s Account of the Nigerian Dilemma, navigates the beleaguered contours of a nation, interrogates her chequered post colonial heritage and protean existential predicaments defined by recrudescent, fratricidal debacles, military misadventure, institutionalized corruption and prostrate economies as well as a loud poverty, disease, willful inexplicable deaths, amnesia, and gleeful self negation. 

As a renowned editorialist and distinguished newspaper columnist, Obi, in this book, harmonizes a robust stalking style with a penetrating apocalyptic deconstruction of Nigeria as a failing state. It is written with a fresh, pulsating, stark and chillingly unsentimental prose style.

​Divided into five unequal parts, Delicate Distress is truly a delicate intermeshing of the congealed monumental tragedies and other emerging contemporary realities in the Nigerian historical continuum which have conspired to drive the country to the precincts of a yawning precipice. In refracting these prismatic realities, the essayist generously benefits from variegated trajectories that have yielded a heaving intellectual harvest. Obi impressively combines lyrical lightsomeness and rhythmic richness with abiding patriotism and perspicacity of cultural thought and insight. The result is a bold and visceral gnawing at a nation’s soul and psychology and the rankling of the weeping sores of a mortally wounded nation at odds with itself.  

Amanze Obi’s reservoir of literary resources and reportorial experience has interlaced all the essays in this collection.

​Part One: Tales Unpleasant, which begins with a critical introduction, distills the hydra-headed Nigerian society with such precarious equilibrium that facilitates the paradox of happiness in a shrinking federalism. It circulates the anti-intellectual politics that heralds the perils of disunity and the challenge of constitution-making in a country in which inequity has been elevated to state policy. 

Part two: North-South Divide, appraises an elusive rapprochement that has failed to balance the regional agenda between East and North but rather aggravates regional war even at the Confab. In gloating and fretting over oil, Northern leaders who misruled Nigeria for 39 years out of her 53 years of post independence experience have succeeded in creating a dangerous class of youth in the North who agitate amidst excruciating poverty. While remaining divided by the advocacy for state police, Northern governors and their Southern counterparts are still swimming in the illusion of politics of number.