Meeting A Man Who Fed Biafrans

By Okey Ndibe

One of the fortunes of my frequent travels is that I meet fascinating people at different locations, even when I have no inkling of the possibility of such encounters. In stops in such cities as Los Angeles, Abuja, San Francisco, Johannesburg, London, Washington, DC, Houston and Austin, Texas, I have met classmates from my elementary, secondary school and college days, childhood playmates, former students of mine, elders who knew my parents before they were married, those who knew me as a snotty nosed, impish child, and folks with whom I had communicated for years, by email or telephony.

Last week, I put out a notice on Facebook and Twitter that I was spending a month in Pittsburgh, PA, to give several workshops and lectures as well as present my memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American. I received a note from Ndaeyo Uko, once one of Nigeria’s wittiest and most popular columnists, who is now an academic in Australia. Ndaeyo, who was a star writer at The Guardian and Daily Times, now holds a PhD. For his dissertation, he researched the daredevil motley of adventurers and philanthropists, who discounted unimaginable risks to ferry food and, in some cases, arms, into Biafra during Nigeria’s ruinous thirty-month civil war.

Ndaeyo’s message was simple: I was not to miss the opportunity, before leaving Pittsburgh, of meeting David Koren, an American, who was part of that team of expatriates – Americans, the British, and Europeans – who, at grave risks to life and limb, undertook the perilous missions to fly-smuggle relief into Biafra. He explained that he had flown from Australia to Pittsburgh to interview Mr. Koren – and had found his recollections memorable.

Via email, Ndaeyo introduced me to the rescue activist. Mr. Koren and I then spoke over the phone. I told him I was a child of the Biafran War, and directed him to a link to my piece titled “My Biafran Eyes,” a series of vignettes based on my childhood recollections. On reading my essay, he responded, “I read ‘My Biafran Eyes.’ It was a touching story.”

Last Saturday, Mr. Koren (accompanied by his wife, Kay) and I met at a bookstore run by the City of Asylum, the organisation that arranged for my monthlong fellowship in Pittsburgh. It was an emotional experience, for both of us.

Biafra And The Business Of Killing

By Okey Ndibe

Except in extremely isolated cases — for example, as an act of self-defense — it is morally indefensible for individuals to engage in extra-judicial killing. When a government makes it its business to slaughter unarmed citizens that government reveals itself as criminally thuggish and the state in whose behalf that government kills loses its moral legitimacy.

That, I am afraid, is the burden that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has placed on itself.

Last week, Amnesty International (AI), a human rights group, released a chilling report on the Buhari administration’s excessively brutal response to members of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) who have been agitating for the rebirth of Biafra. The AI report is a thorough job, based on interviews of 193 people (most of them eyewitnesses), analysis of 87 videos and 122 photographs “showing IPOB assemblies, members of the security forces in the process of committing violations and victims of these violations.” Much of the 60-page report is devoted to offering painstaking accounts of how Nigeria’s security agencies, including the military, killed, maimed, and tortured pro-Biafra agitators.

For those who can’t stomach much gore and horror, I would recommend AI’s executive summary, which highlights the sad, sobering facts. That summary begins, “Since August 2015, the security forces have killed at least 150 members and supporters of the pro-Biafran organisation IPOB (Indigenous Peoples of Biafra) and injured hundreds during non-violent meetings, marches and other gatherings. Hundreds were also arbitrarily arrested.”

According to Amnesty International, “Video footage and eyewitness testimony consistently show that the military, which has been deployed instead of police to control pro-Biafran events, has dispersed peaceful gatherings by firing live ammunition with little or no warning. This report documents extra-judicial executions and the use of excessive force by military, police and other security agencies. It also shows a worrying pattern of arbitrary arrests and detentions, including soldiers arresting wounded victims in hospital, and of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees.”

As the head of the Nigerian state, President Buhari bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage committed by Nigeria’s security agents. He is not the first Nigerian ruler to oversee mindless mass killing. Under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerian troops went on a homicidal rampage in Odi, Bayelsa State, and Zaki Biam, in Benue State. The late President Umaru Yar’Adua was in control when Nigerian soldiers swept through Maiduguri and other cities in Borno State, killing hordes of men on mere suspicion that they belonged to the Islamist group, Boko Haram.

President Buhari has earned a place in the bloodlust. Under his watch, troops slashed and burned their way through a Shiite neighbourhood near Zaria, Kaduna State. His inflexible stance on the vexed issue of Biafra, marked by a dismissive tone, has helped to create a violent climate. Perhaps encouraged by the President’s hectoring style, heavily armed soldiers and other security personnel have gleefully mowed down agitators who dared hoist up IPOB banners.

Nigeria: Chronicles Of Tragedy And Absurdity

By Okey Ndibe

As a novelist, I frequently experience the sensation that I could never invent imaginative events that, in their tragic or absurd extraordinariness, can stand beside the strangeness of life, as it is lived in Nigeria. Indeed, I follow public events in Nigeria with a certain sense that some grand master of fiction, versed in absurd tragedy, stands just out of sight to shape and orchestrate these events. For me, to read the pages of Nigerian newspapers is often akin to reading the most wrought fabulist fiction. Except that the events one encounters in news reports, bizarre as they may appear, are deeply rooted in and describe the shattering realities of Nigerians’ lives. These are often events that trigger the declaration, “Only in Nigeria…”

Before I get to recent illustrations, I must quickly cite some classic examples that have become so woven into the essential fabric of Nigerian life that they hardly strike Nigerians anymore as odd much less astonishing.

It’s only in Nigeria that God “votes” in elections – and, in fact, casts the decisive vote. So, Nigeria’s election riggers invented the disingenuous mantra that only God gives power. If Candidate B is declared winner of an election, even though everybody knows Candidate A won it handily, all the imposter has to say to settle it all is, “God has given me power.”

It’s only in Nigeria that public officials fatten their bank accounts from funds budgeted for public purposes – and then demand that the people whose lives they have impoverished must fast and pray for better electric power, to be spared death in road accidents or death in ill-equipped hospitals.

It is only in Nigeria that a governor would declare that he has “totally transformed” every sector of his state – and then promptly fly abroad for medical treatment the instant he experiences a headache.
It is only in Nigeria (as happened in Ilorin, capital of Kwara State in January 2009) that a commissioner of police would call a press conference and point to an “arrested” goat, as a robber who turned himself into an animal just as pursuers were about to grab him. Newspapers around the world reported the absurd drama. It is only in Nigeria that the said officer would make such a global ass of a major national institution and retain his job.

Nigeria must be one of the few places in the world – perhaps the only one – where governors are effusively declared “performers” for paying the salaries of state employees. And if these governors happen to invest some funds in the rehabilitation of a few kilometers of roads, why, they are simply canonised.

Nigeria is arguably the world’s most notorious location where a mindless embezzler of public funds is no longer a thief if s/he belongs to the right (ruling) party, the right religion, the right state and the right circles. Nigeria is a country where just about anything is rigged or riggable in favour of the rich and connected where the police would hardly ever disturb the peace of a well-placed suspect, however grave the crime, and where many judges are only too willing (for the right price) to oblige well-heeled suspects and accused every manner of justice-evading legal gymnastics.

Pres Buhari, Take A Hard Look At Nigeria’s Map

By Okey Ndibe

I recently surveyed President Muhammadu Buhari’s top appointments recently and was left wondering when last he took a long, hard look at Nigeria’s map. Before the president makes another important political appointment, he would do well to spend some time looking at the map of the country that’s under his charge.

*President Buhari

President Buhari’s disdain for geopolitical spread and religious diversity in his appointments is so stark as to constitute a scandal. As far as appointments go, it’s as if the man believes that Nigeria is reducible to one half of its geography, the north, and one major religion, Islam.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Buhari was frequently characterized as a man given to excessive clannishness. Some critics alleged that his fealty to the northern half of Nigeria and partiality to fellow adherents of the Islamic faith trumped his belief in Nigeria and commitment to treat people of other faiths with fairness.

Since his presidential ambition aroused such anxiety, Mr. Buhari might have taken care to reassure Nigerians—as he stated in his inaugural speech—that he belonged to all of them. Instead, he seems to have gone out of his way to validate his critics’ worst fears. His personnel decisions as president have suggested a man whose mindset is as sectional as his political instincts are terrible. In one year as president, his appointments have deeply disappointed many Nigerians’ expectations of equity. He has operated as if unaware of the longstanding requirement that important political appointments ought to reflect the country’s federal character.

I believe every section of Nigeria has a pool of talented people. Therefore, the president’s default stance, choosing candidates for major positions from his own geographic area and religious group, is troubling. Is Mr. Buhari’s vision so blinkered that, each time he looks at Nigeria, he sees (mostly) Muslims and Northerners? And has he no handlers and advisers willing to speak honestly to him, to save him from his parochial instincts, to tell him, quite simply, that his appointments don’t tell a flattering story about him?

During Mr. Buhari’s first few months in office, some excused his lopsided appointments on the ground that he needed to surround himself with people he knew closely, whose loyalty he could count on. But even that apologia was untenable. Here was a man who ran for the Nigerian Presidency four times before he got elected. I don’t recall him professing that, if elected, he would fashion himself primarily into a Northern president. Surely, we should expect that a man who spent so much time and energy seeking to govern his country would have made some effort to broaden his base of loyalists.

Fayose And Nigeria’s Immunity Scandal

By Okey Ndibe

Governor Peter Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State has a solid claim to the title of politician par excellence of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. In many ways, the man symbolises the idiosyncrasies, texture and other pathological characteristics of the high-priced, frustrating experiment that goes by the name of democracy in Nigeria.

*Gov Fayose 

His storied political career has involved a controversy over his academic credentials. It is ironic that questions were – perhaps –  are raised about the educational training of a man who presides over Ekiti State – a state with one of the highest PhD degrees per capita in Nigeria. During his short-lived first stint as governor – from 2003 to 2006 – Mr. Fayose was accused of several crimes, including massive theft of public resources and ordering a murder. He left office in disgrace, impeached by a state legislature that was under pressure from then President Olusegun Obasanjo. The US government once had cause to revoke visas issued to him and members of his immediate family. He is as brash as they come, a bolekaja brand of politician, who takes no prisoners.

At a public function in Osun State in 2014, Mr. Fayose traded insults with his nemesis, Mr. Obasanjo. He had ignored the former president while greeting other “dignitaries.” Not one to recoil from making a spectacle of himself, Mr. Obasanjo demanded to be greeted. “I won’t greet you. You are bad person! I don’t greet bad people!” exclaimed Mr. Fayose.

“You are a bastard,” an irate Obasanjo railed.
“You are a father of bastards!” Mr. Fayose countered. And he wasn’t done yet. He threw a few more verbal punches at Mr. Obasanjo, accusing him of wrecking the PDP in the southwest.

In 2014, Mr. Fayose signaled a desire to return to the office from which he was ignominiously sacked in 2006. As he sought the PDP’s governorship ticket, some political pundits thought it was a long shot. After he secured the ticket, the consensus among political talking heads was that he would not be competitive against then Governor Kayode Fayemi, an articulate PhD owner. Shunning the incumbent governor’s air of sophistication and emphasis on matters of policy, Candidate Fayose refined a pragmatic political message calculated to resonate with the voters’ gullets. He dismissed his opponent’s accent on developing infrastructure in the state. What the people needed above all, he insisted, was “stomach infrastructure.” He had introduced an ingenious new term into Nigeria’s political lexicon.

I confess to being among those who gave Mr. Fayose little chance of winning the governorship. His rustic, charming gift for words would carry him only so far, but certainly far short of the gubernatorial goal. I reckoned, as some others did, that the man’s past would doom his quest.