Collapsed Bridge

By government admission, some of the 150 private jets in Nigeria are used to ferry more than passengers; they are being used to fly huge sums of money out of the country. That, by itself should not be a surprise in the view of lawyer and activist, Femi Falana, who observes that most of the jets are owned by fuel subsidy thieves. Transporting the sum of N2.6 trillion – the amount crudely stolen in the fuel subsidy scam – obviously requires crude methods as well.

Those that do not have private jets are forced to travel like mere mortals – though with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in their luggage. That the Nigeria Customs Service manages to catch a few of these ‘cash movers’ every now and then is indicative of how widespread the practice probably is. It may be that the amount of money in private hands is beyond the capacity of the Nigerian economy to absorb as investments or more likely, the owners of these funds – due the shady deals that bring about such huge cash – feel safer stashing their loot abroad.

Whatever the sources of the billions being shipped out of Nigeria, it is clear that the country is bleeding money that should have been invested in critical sectors of the economy, especially infrastructure development. Indeed, if a single issue can be defined as symptomatic of the general deterioration of living standards in Nigeria today, that factor would be the collapse of critical infrastructure – leaving us with poor roads and bridges, dilapidated schools, severe shortage of electricity, run-down and ill-equipped hospitals, inadequate water supply and huge housing deficits.

In no sector is the lack of investment as evident as in power generation where a decade and half after the return of democracy, and despite high expectations, electricity generation capacity remains grossly inadequate – at less than 5,000 megawatts for a country of about 170 million people. The Minister of Power, Chinedu Nebo, put the situation in clearer perspective when he said that Nigeria needed to generate 200,000 megawatts of electricity simply to meet domestic demand. In other words, Africa’s largest oil producer only generates 2.5% of its electricity needs!

The usual explanation for this failure is that government does not have the resources to fund the required investments. Of course, it would be closer to the truth to say that the monies released for public works usually end up in private pockets – and ferried out in private jets; which may explain why some Nigerians including more than a few politicians and public servants are becoming richer than the government.

However, beyond the corruption that has led to a class of inordinately wealthy Nigerians amidst unacceptable poverty, the fact also remains that this government has been unable, or better, unwilling to source and manage investments in infrastructure development. The lack of activity in these sectors has further worsened the already deplorable levels of poverty and unemployment in the country. And given the worsening insecurity in Nigeria, not many foreign investors would be willing to bring in their money, especially as Nigerians seem to be taking their money the opposite direction.

Thus, the onus lies on government to encourage local investments in critical infrastructure to fill the ever-widening gap. It may surprise many Nigerians, but there is actually a government agency set up to bridge the infrastructure gap and grow the process developing public private partnerships. Though the Infrastructure Concession Regularity Commission (ICRC) began operations in 2008, it is yet to neither attain the visibility nor act with the kind of urgency needed to mitigate the country’s infrastructure deficiencies.

It is estimated Nigeria needs to invest over $500 billion in critical areas such as rail and road network, water and electricity to be considered a leading global player. But with competing demands from education, agriculture, national security, public services and corruption (yes, it is now a sector) where will these funds come from? This is against the backdrop that the country’s external reserves have continued to dip while the Excess Crude Account funds are shared on the basis of political expediency (how a poverty-ridden country like Nigeria can refer to any money as ‘excess’ is another matter).

Nigeria needs infrastructure concession arrangements to improve the availability, quality, and efficiency of power, water, transport and other public services to increase economic growth, productivity, competitiveness, and access to markets. There is also a need to increase the capacity and diversity of the private sector by providing opportunities for local investors and contractors in public infrastructure and encourage efficiency and innovation.

Obviously, the demand for basic infrastructure services has grown over the years, quickly outstripping the supply capacity of existing assets. Nigeria’s experience is one where huge infrastructure deficit has greatly constrained economic growth and development, thus inhibiting the country’s ability to improve the quality of life of citizens. But now that so many Nigerians have become richer than government, the issue should be how to ensure that some of the money leaving Nigeria is invested in infrastructure.

Ifeanyi Uddin

When, recently, in a circular to all staff, my employers forbade the speaking of “vernacular” in favour of the English language, my initial reaction was of extreme crossness. I guess at the back of this was a recollection of the distasteful responses associated with similar policies growing up. Overtly paternalistic teachers in the primary and secondary schools enforced this ban on the vernacular with a passion much suited to nobler pursuits. Add to this my parents’ insistence that English was the “lingua franca” at home, and like my teachers (and current employers) prohibited the speaking of all “vernacular”, it was then an irresistible invitation to rebellion. And rebel a couple of us did.

Looking back on those days, it would have been nice to have had today’s insights to hand, and to have tried them on my school masters just before they enforced the not too slight chastisement from their ubiquitous wand of noble wood. Nonetheless, by the time I reached secondary school, I intuitively recognised a problem with this ban on the vernacular. Growing up in Ilorin, where Yoruba was the native language it was easy for most persons to imagine English as the only non-vernacular. But with an Esan father and an Igbo mother, I was convinced that to the extent that both Esan and Igbo were just as foreign to Ilorin as English was, they had just as much claims over Yoruba as English did when it came to forbidding vernaculars.

Much latter, I learned that in so far as a definition of the “vernacular” included use of “a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language”, the use of this adjective was passé. Derogatory even! Easy to understand the effort by the colonial administration in force in the country until 1960 to derogate from whatever utility our local languages had. Raising up their English language as a more literary and cultured one than any of our local variants must have helped reinforce their right to rule. Just as the associated doubts raised over the utility of our cultural products helped make us more subservient.

But post-1960 this argument ought to have lost much of its shine. There are tremendous advantages from our status as an English speaking country no doubt. And there could be more. Both India and South Africa are building offshoring competences on the basis of this status – so there could be commercial gain too. However, just as important, new research has found that considerable advantage accrues to multilingual children. They are obviously better adjusted than their peers who speak only one language.

In truth, (to my regret today) most of my growing up was spent resisting another foreign impost: the French language. I would have been better of literate in another European language, but the free 45 minutes that one got from not attending French lessons in the secondary school was spent honing my Yoruba. The language of truancy then was not English. I doubt if it is even today. Not surprisingly, we ended up with local languages too poor to be of much use. And a handle on the English language that still is pathetic, especially when it tries too hard to impress.

Yet, it is this ersatz English that is the dominant feature of our lived experience, including its most odious form: the de-odourised version that our sophisticates deploy when announcing their presence. Our local languages, on the other hand, literally atrophy, despite UNESCO’s best efforts. There are strong and obvious arguments for promoting cultural diversity. Just as there are for enriching our “vernaculars”, including being able to find corresponding words or phrases for such key concepts as “quantum computing” and “deoxyribonucleic acid” – in other words, to move them out of the cultural ghettos to which both colonial and post-colonial policies have consigned them.

I despair, though, that forbidden to speak vernacular in school, at home (where parents still remain, as mine were concerned some 4 decades ago, to ensure that their kids speak like the Queen and her court), and at work, our local languages are doomed. I think that they are doomed any which way. For the “strongest” argument I heard discussing the ban on “vernacular” at work is that it is not “corporate” to speak Yoruba in the work place. Our “vernaculars” may yet thrive as the argots for shebeens and speakeasies; but they are not now likely to rival Mandarin Chinese as a language of science, arts, or of good breeding.

As part of my five-week blogathon on the five shortlisted stories in the 2013 Caine Prize, I present some thoughts on the first story: Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi, first published at http://www.percontra.net/issues/25/fiction/bayan-layi/.

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Bayin Layi is a story of street children, located this time, unlike those in Olufemi Terry’s Caine Prize-winning Stickfighting Days, in a real and defined city. The violence they experience is situated in recognizable political landmarks and scenarios, but like in Terry’s work, the scourge they in turn infest on themselves and the society is portrayed in isolation from the children’s personal stories. Who are they? Why are they here? Who are their parents? We are to assume that we know, because they are almajiris, merely hapless homeless urchins forced to survive.  And survive they did, these children, aggregated from different defective backgrounds from around town, finding themselves without anyone else but each other, decide to live by rules they made up, egged on by a selfish and enabling society. Their presence in these larger crises in turn destroys society, and the cycle continues.

I approach the story from the familiar. A similarly sounding small town in Plateau State, called Barkin Ladi, was close to the little town of Riyom where I spent a year in 2005 as a “Youth Corper”. And through the rough year, living hundreds of kilometres away from home, one constant worry was a threat of sudden violence by aggrieved youths pursuing a social, political, or religious cause. By the time the NYSC was over, there were at least five nationally-reported cases of violence around Plateau, sometimes very close to where we were, where many people lost their lives. Compared to what is going on in the Plateau today, and Northern Nigeria in general, those were the more peaceful times in the state.

The similarity with Terry’s work are many: the kids fought a lot, they used hard drugs, they killed when necessary to survive in the harsh and brutal life they lived. Thematically, the author should prepare for these comparisons to Terry: kids fighting to survive on their own without any redeeming lifeline from the world of adults. Here’s an excerpt from Stickfighting Days:

I’d dreamed of a killing blow, the single cut that cleanly ends life, but I’ve done that already, with Tauzin earlier. It was sweet. But now’s not the time for precision. I swing and thrust, mindlessly raining blows, and Markham is with me, shares my aim for we club at the judge’s head with no thought for accuracy. Even when he no longer moves, Markham and I swing for some minutes. Then I stop.

while the following is from Bayan Layi:

I hate that he was hiding like a rat, fat as he is. I strike behind his neck as he stumbles by me. He crashes to the ground. He groans. I strike again. The machete is sharp. Sharper than I expected, light. I wonder where they got them from…

The man isn’t shaking much. Banda picks up the gallon and pours some fuel on the body. He looks at me to strike the match. I stare at the body. Banda seizes the matchbox from me and lights it. The man squirms only a little as the fire begins to eat his clothes and flesh. He is dead already.

The sentences in both work are short and reasonable, with apt and vivid depictions of violence. In Elnathan John’s story at least, we come to expect that anything could happen.

In one short and frightening scene, the boys could not repress an ethnic blood lust that led eventually to a lynching when a boy suspected to be Igbo gave his name as Idowu, a Yoruba name. Sophisticated enough to know which name sounded Igbo, or which sounded Yoruba, they still gave the poor victim a beating which led to his death later in the day, away from the triumphant mob. “He had the nose of an Igbo boy,” we heard the mob say, and one’s blood boiled. As is the case with an actor getting into character to play an extremely dark role in a movie enough to elicit hate from an audience so believing of the portrayal, the writer succeeds in getting us into the children’s heads, and want to get out as soon as we can.

In another scene, a man escaping from a fire is referred to as dan daudu or “effeminate/homosexual” just before he was struck down and set on fire. We know from reading this that it is no exaggeration, that bigotry lives healthy and strong in many parts of the country, even on Facebook, that we fought a 30 month civil war over a series of crises that involved acts of genocide stemming from ethnic affiliation, and that in the hands of those to whom a sacred duty to purge the world has reputedly been granted from on high, this is a moment of cathartic orgasm. But the story is not one of that kind of balance, or political retribution, or justice. It is one of participant observation and reportage in a horrible scene. Anyone seeking redemption, or an artistic righting of that emotional assault somewhere in the story, would not likely find it.

According to Leila Aboulela, one of this year’s judges of the Caine Prize, in a piece discussing her process of choosing the stories, “nearly every submitted story reflected the economic, political and social difficulties of life in Africa.” In the case of this particular story, we glean the factors that enable child soldiers, child election riggers, child urchins, child thieves, and even children terrorists and suicide bombers: neglect, hunger, and immaturity. Does this reflect the “economic, political and social difficulties of life in Africa”? Yes, in many cases. Is that the whole story? No. But Leila continues: “The writers did not shy away from sensitive issues or gruelling realities.”

But serious subject matters do not guarantee a good story.  There are other qualities that are more important – creative imagination, skills, the ability to invoke delight,  plough depth, stir drama and chart connections, a sense of place, history and culture,  characters who intrigue, an individual vision.

I will leave to the judges the decision on how this story meets the other criteria, or at least reserve my overall comparative judgment until I’ve read the other four shortlisted stories. As a creative treatise on the cause and effect of election violence, stolen childhood, and life on the streets however, it is an affecting story, but not a fresh intervention. The universality of the story and its premise makes it at once easy to relate to and understand, and to abuse.

Those interested in resurrecting old debates about the audience of our stories will have a field day with Bayin Layi. Addressed to a Nigerian audience, the line between good and justifiable evil not being clearly delineated might turn the text in the hands of a less-discerning audience into a justification for evil.  The hero of Bayan Layi is no hero at all, but a victim. We feel sorry for him in the end because the authors made us do it, but we are not sure that he – the character – is thus totally purged or cleansed from the conditions that created him (or his kind) in the first place. At the end of the story, he is fleeing, but there is no indication that it is a permanent one. How long until he returns in company of others to wreak violence? We don’t know. There is no redeeming factor. In the hands of a foreigner, the story plays into the caricature of the African experience as a cycle of meaningless violence, and the escape is romantic, redemptive, and cathartic. Not to me. Yet I suspect that it is the foreign audience for which the story is written. After all, many of the Hausa phrases in there are translated immediately afterwards.

Don’t get me wrong, the story is well-written. It is an important piece in the understanding the mosaic of violence now in the age of Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. It barely tells us anything new though (and by us, I don’t mean aliens just arriving in the world and meeting Nigeria – or Northern Nigeria – for the very first time). It does however create an affective interest in a flawed character, and makes us care for him as if he were one of us – which he is. This, for me, might be the story’s greatest strength. Across from the government secondary school where I taught English language as a Youth Corper was the country home of a popular Berom politician who once hosted us young graduates in his home to talk about politics, policy, and developmental issues. Sometime in 2012, after he had been a member of the Nigerian Senate, he was dead, killed in a sporadic (or, who knows, planned) attack on his convoy somewhere in the city of Jos, by warring tribes of suspected Fulani fighters. This depiction of the reality and root of violence (as inevitable results of neglect), though familiar, designates Elnathan’s work as a cautiously important one.

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A glossary of the Hausa words in the story: Lambu means “garden”. Kuka means “cry” or a “Baobab tree”. Bayin Layi means “toilet” or “the next street” depending on context, while Gobedanisa is a proverb which means, literally, “tomorrow is far” or “tomorrow maybe late”. Acishuru (mistakenly written phonetically at least once in the story as Ashishiru) is a type of dwarf bean seeds, Ladadi is the name of a female born on Sunday, while Tanimu is a name given to a male born on Monday. Sabon Layi is a “new street”. Dan daudu means “effeminate” or as usually used as a form of extreme insult, “homosexual.”

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Kola Tubosun is a linguist and the editor of the NT LitMag.

Fantastic news! Out of this year’s five shortlisted stories for the annual Caine Prize for Writing, four of the stories are from Nigeria. This is unprecedented in the history of the organization. According to the announcement on the Caine Prize website,

“The five contrasting titles interrogate aspects of things that we might feel we know of Africa – violence, religion, corruption, family, community – but these are subjects that are deconstructed and beautifully remade. These are challenging, arresting, provocative stories of a continent and its descendants captured at a time of burgeoning change.”

The shortlisted stories are:

• Elnathan John (Nigeria) ‘Bayan Layi’ from Per Contra, Issue 25 (USA, 2012)
• Tope Folarin (Nigeria) ‘Miracle’ from Transition, Issue 109 (Bloomington, 2012)
• Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) ‘Foreign Aid’ from Journal of Progressive Human Services, Vol. 23.3 (Philadelphia, 2012)
• Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) ‘The Whispering Trees’ from The Whispering Trees, published by Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, 2012)
• Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) ‘America’ from Granta, Issue 118 (London, 2012)

Like many literary-minded bloggers did last year, I intend to participating in this year’s pre-award review of the five short stories for the reading and critical public. Keep a date on this blog for a review of each of the stories, one for each week that passes between now and the announcement of the winner.

A review of Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi will be up here on the Nigerianstalk LitMag  website and on the KTravula blog in coming days.

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Kola Tubosun is the Editor of the Nigerianstalk LitMag.

I have not written for NigeriansTalk in quite a while but after reading Salisu Suleiman’s piece titled Private universities in Nigeria: Where are the ‘big’ men? I could not resist the need to comment on a particular part of his article.

By the time I finished writing my comment, I realised I might well have broken an unwritten rule of concision and brevity required of comments that I decided it was best published as a rejoinder-blog to the original article as appears below.

Dear Salisu,

I very well agree with the main drift of this article which is the need to establish more universities, hopefully of academic excellence and qualitative progressive education with far-reaching benefits or endow existing ones to spread opportunity and access in Nigeria.

However, when I got to the part I highlight below, I do have misgivings I must voice.

“Also, many families have found to their cost that sending children to schools abroad may not necessarily produce the better students in terms of qualification or moral development – many students sent abroad ended up victims of alcoholism or drug addiction. Having private universities here will help parents monitor their children’s development in person, not through vague progress reports from foreign schools.”

This is a generalisation too expressive in stereotype that needs to be challenged. The issue of moral development when put in the context of being at home or abroad is simplistic at best. One had to take exception to this characterisation of foreign academic pursuits that suggests waste, loss and reckless abandon.

Much as many students including Nigerians can be given to social vices abroad, it smacks of cant if that is not juxtaposed with even more serious issues of cultism, abuse of females especially, the shirking of responsibility by academia in terms of incessant strikes, the absence of accountability of authorities for overreach and much else in Nigeria – you castigate serious students abroad too harshly.

The other issue of moral development you allude to in monitoring students is exemplified in the egregious abuse of authority and megalomaniac atrocity accompanied with reprehensible punishments as meted out most publicly by Covenant University and others in that ilk.

These private universities, rather than stimulate development of the mind and the person, tend to diminish the personality and esteem of young adults, creating a glorified secondary school atmosphere of non-inquisitive, non-questioning pliant drones of rote-learning and cloned attitudes of closed-minded conformity.

I say, let universities be mainly institutions of learning, expression and progressive development but leave the moral upbringing to parenthood, the community and society at large – the downward trend of converting private universities into fiefdoms and pseudo-borstal homes of presumed innocence in pursuit of academic achievable should be not be encouraged.

It is of the utmost importance that we properly define the purpose of universities and the role of society at large without conflating issues; good moral conduct is generally expected of people in university but morality, no matter how broadly defined and presumed to be essential to our sometimes myopic outlook to life should not suddenly become part of the credit-scoring system of academic attainment.

University of Abuja

When, about 20 years ago, signboards announcing Heritage University sprang up around Kaduna, many thought the founders were setting the stage for the emergence of private university education in Nigeria, especially in the disadvantaged areas. Today, even the faded remnants of those signboards cannot be found. The much heralded Heritage University never took off.

Nigeria’s 170 million people have a grand total of 156 universities, when we should have at least two or three thousand. This explains why only 10% of the 1.7 million candidates that sat for UTME last month will secure admission. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the number of candidates and available spaces – a gap that government is unable or unwilling to close.

In the southern states, private groups and individuals took on the challenge by establishing private universities, many of which have produced several batches of graduates. But in the already educationally disadvantaged north, the groups and individuals with the financial and political muscle to establish or support the growth of private universities are, as usual, “missing in action”.

Of Nigeria’s 156 universities, 51 are private, but only 10 are in the north. If those allied to religious or special interest groups are removed, American University of Nigeria, Yola, and Baze University, Abuja, may emerge as the only northern owned and accredited private universities.

To put the situation in proper perspective, Kano state, with its population of over 10 million people, has no private university; indeed, the entire North-west zone, comprising Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara, with a population of about 40 million people, does not have a single private university. While there may be concerns that given the high cost of private education and the inadequacy of qualified teaching staff, if it would be rational to establish more private universities in Nigeria; the answer is yes.

True, few families can afford private universities, but they have many advantages; the cost of training students abroad is very high – reaching upwards of millions of naira per student per annum – monies that could create jobs and stimulate economic growth. Also, many families have found to their cost that sending children to schools abroad may not necessarily produce the better students in terms of qualification or moral development – many students sent abroad ended up victims of alcoholism or drug addiction. Having private universities here will help parents monitor their children’s development in person, not through vague progress reports from foreign schools.

Currently, the 10 private universities in the north are: Al-Hikmah University, Ilorin, founded in 2005; African University of Science and Technology, Abuja (2007); American University of Nigeria, Yola (2003); Baze University, Abuja (2011); Bingham University, New Karu, Nasarawa state (2005); Katsina University, Katsina (2005); Nigerian-Turkish Nile University (2009); Salem University, Lokoja (2007); University of Mkar, Benue state (2005) and Wukari Jubilee University, Wukari, Taraba state (2005).

At the moment, countries like Ghana, South Africa, Malaysia, India, Cyprus, UK and the US are draining Nigeria of hundreds of billions of naira per annum from Nigerian students studying there. According to the U.S. Embassy Educational Advising Center, Nigeria sends more students to the United States than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 6,500 students studying at over 733 institutions. There are 71,000 Nigerian students in Ghana, costing Nigeria N160 billion; the federal government spent more than N900 million to sponsor 150 students abroad in 2011, nearly 10 per cent of the 14.14 billion allocated to Nigerian universities.

In the same year, there were 17,585 Nigerians studying in UK universities. A report in 2010 shows that Nigeria fuels the UK education sector to the tune of N246 billion; over 60 per cent of the 2012 education allocation. It is estimated that by 2015, there will be about 30,000 Nigerian students in the UK – about seven per cent of the total UK university population.

Given that the costs of private universities may be beyond many, there are alternatives to private universities in the form of community colleges. A community college is a public institution of higher education and is characterized by a two-year curriculum that leads to either a bachelor’s degree or prepares students to transfer to a regular degree programme. The transfer programme parallels the first two years of a four-year degree programme while degree programme generally prepares students for direct entrance into an occupation.

Community colleges usually have low tuition, are established locally and have relatively easy entrance requirements. If we are to give hope and a sense of belonging to the millions of youth across Nigeria that currently lack education, no real-life skills and no job prospects, every senatorial zone should strive to establish a community college, paid for from public and private resources.

As for the ‘big’ men, granted, not all of them can establish private universities, but those with the means should support existing ones by creating educational endowments or initiating scholarship schemes to help bright but indigent students to attend the few existing private universities, while also exploring ways of creating and supporting community colleges. Nigeria cannot afford to lose another generation of young people.

Ifeanyi Uddin

On Saturday morning, last week, in a conversation with friends on Facebook, I was reminded of Reverend Martin Niemoller’s famous 1937 statement – more about this later. Over the week leading up to this conversation, I had had problems with the (lack of) quality of after-sales service for my car (from one of the country’s leading car retailers). I complain a lot. And, unfortunately, there is plenty to complain about in this country. At work, I learnt (in response to my kvetch) that it was not just my car make that was prone to these terrible after-sales service standards. I heard complaints over just every car type that is sold in the country. Arguably the most piquant of these plaints were the ones involving a replacement of parts.

Apparently, all our big car retailers do not stock parts for the cars they sell, especially when these vehicles are new or top of their respective ranges. Instead, upon a customer bringing a car to them requiring a part to be replaced, they then place an order (to Japan, Korea, even the United States of America) for parts as ridiculously small as side mirrors. This order could take anything from a month to three months to fulfill. The more the injury to the car, though, the longer the turn-around period – of course, the customer pays for the order. Not just in terms of the cash disbursed, but in terms, too, of the associated inconveniences.

In one particular instance, a friend had to wait as each part (of her single order) came in separately – every other week, over a four-month period. A “danfo” had run into her car with extreme prejudice. The response of other recipients of my plaints (especially the conversation on Facebook), however, made me realise that it was not only the “danfo” driver’s running into my colleague’s car that was extreme. A great number of my compatriots had absolutely no sympathy for these cases. “Big man big moto, big moto, big trouble” was one of the more easier-sounding prejudices.

All of which reminded me of an incident several years back, as the bus I was travelling in on my way to work neared the Ketu-Alapere node (in Lagos). Right before us, in heavy traffic, armed thieves (I suppose that is what they were, but the brutality of their operation suggested otherwise – “class warriors”, they may have been) had savaged the rear windscreen of this obviously new sedan, and were dragging (or attempting to forcibly evict the occupant of the back seat out through his side window). Eventually they got him out and forced him to his now open boot. Time stood still. Long enough for our driver to eventually execute an evasive manouevre that saw us leave the back of this unfortunate vehicle.

Interestingly, while we were still behind the star-crossed vehicle much of the conversation was sympathetic. “How dare they break the windscreen like that?” “Look at how they are tugging at him. Are they not aware that he could be the head of a family?” “What is the country turning into that small boys get away with outrages like this unchallenged?” As soon as we managed to make our get away, though, the nature of the narrative changed. “If he (the victim, now) is not a thief, where did he get the funds to buy such an expensive looking car?” All of a sudden, the robbery incident underwent an apotheosis. Transfigured, it had become the comeuppance of a “likely thief”. And so, for a good number of my friends, the service failure at the car place is just dessert for owning a “big car”.

And what to make of ATM failures at the retail end of the banking industry market? Equally just desserts for not having access to private banking facilities? The point these, and similarly structured narratives miss (and a point on which our civil society fails), is that a non-negotiable condition for the just consumption of each of our rights is that we all stand up against potential infringements of the rights of others. For no person’s rights are more justiciable than another’s.

Reverend Martin Niemoller put the argument differently, but more forcefully. “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

When I heard Chimamanda Adichie was writing a new book that drew heavily from hair and race as themes, I was excited for two reasons: first, because the bibliophile in me lives for everything Adichie writes; and second, because race and hair are familiar territory as an ex-member of the African diaspora in America. Indeed, one of my first adult memories of America involves both hair and race. Although I was born in America, my family moved to Nigeria when I was child, and I spent all of my adolescent years there. When I returned to America for university, I found that adjusting to the culture change was not as easy as I had imagined it would be. I will never forget the puzzled look on one of my Caucasian-male friends’ face when I sat next to him in the cafeteria one day during those first few weeks. I had just gotten a weave put in my hair, and it turns out he was wondering how my hair had miraculously grown so long since the previous day. I laughed and began to mumble something about the versatility of black hair when an African American female who was sitting across from us fired, “don’t come here with yo’ African self tryna think you black!” It was then that I first realized being American and being African, did not give me a membership card to the African-American club.

On the surface, Americanah is a riveting love story between high school sweethearts Ifemelu and Obinze that starts in Lagos during a time of military dictatorship. With Obinze, Ifemelu was “at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.” The two are separated when Ifemelu moves to America amidst ongoing university strikes in Nigeria. In America, Ifemelu becomes aware of race, falls in love with her natural hair, explores an interracial relationship and becomes a prominent blogger. Obinze, on the other hand, moves to England where he battles loneliness and struggles to make a living working under the table jobs after overstaying his visa: “[h]e lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch.” Eventually, the two reunite in Lagos, where Obinze has become a ‘big boy’ and Ifemelu is struggling to carve a new career after being away from home for 13 years. In the end, Ifemelu and Obinze must make a very difficult decision.  But Americanah is more than a love story: it is a social critique and a dissection of the politics of identity.

What is genius about Americanah is that almost anyone can find something to relate to in it: there is no doubt that this novel will appeal to an even broader audience than Adichie’s previous work.  However, the virtue of Americanah-it’s ability to cut across 3 continents and multiple subject matters- may also be its vice. The book attempts to do too much by cramming so many complex topics (race, politics, hair, class, interracial relationships, the immigrant experience, nouveau Lagos, etc) into one story line. Several of her full-length blog posts with titles like: ‘To my Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby’ and ‘A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor’ are included in the book. After a while, reading the blog posts can become cumbersome (they reminded me of all the assigned reading I had to do in law school for a critical race theory class). Also, at some points in the novel, the hair angle seemed forced (for starters, why was Ifemelu getting braids to go to Nigeria aka the land of cheaper and better braids?) and proselytistic. Interestingly, religion is subtly critiqued and slightly caricatured where explored: characters are found fasting themselves to sickness and diagnosing evils spirits.

Yet, the literary quality of Americanah is preserved despite its overt political tone and near nihilism. The characters are so fully developed and believable that you might think Adichie has met your friend, relative, classmate, or hair dresser. Unlike Purple Hibiscus and some of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, there is no unfinished business in Americanah. One leaves the novel at least certain of its conclusion, and at best satisfied by it.

Perhaps the only questions I had after reading the novel were about Adichie herself. There are pieces of the places Adichie has been littered throughout the book such as Nsukka, Connecticut, Maryland and Yale. In the 24 hours during which I devoured Americanah, I found myself wondering: did she draw some of the dinner table intellectual banter from conversations she and her Doctor husband have had with their friends? And most importantly: how much of Ifemelu is Chimamanda?

In 2009, I had the privilege to meet Adichie during a book signing for The Thing Around Your Neck.  Alas, I echo the gratitude I gave her then for Americanah: thank you for giving a voice to the experiences that I have always remembered but sometimes forgotten how to articulate.

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Buy Americanah on Amazon

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IBB

Over 30 years after leaving office, former US president Jimmy Carter remains one of the most visible and respected international figures. By contrast, George W. Bush, who left office just four years ago, remains generally hidden from the public. While President Barack Obama called on former president Bill Clinton to help him campaign, neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney called on Bush. If anything, they both made concerted efforts to avoid the highly unpopular president credited with taking America to unnecessary wars and nearly crippling the world’s largest economy.

Try as much as I may, though, my sense is that we have too many of the “celebratory type Nigerian”, and not enough of the angry ones. Consequently, we over-applaud non-events (4,000Mw of electricity generated by an economy of 160 million people; 4G data and voice transmission networks that are nothing of sort; etc.), and are indifferent to/or readily tolerate more troublous facts (apparently we have not done enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015; we will not generate, despite numerous iterations of promises to do so, 10,000Mw of electricity by year-end; we will miss all the Vision 20:2020 goals; etc.).
In the run up to a new general election cycle, what is the nature of this debate? In the “Red Corner”, we have the “Messiah Complex”, according to which failure to re-elect incumbents could signify the end of the world as we have come to know it. In the “Blue Corner”, the fin de siècle crowd plies its trade. This bunch advertise themselves as the solution to the national problem: boot out the incumbents, and the vicious auto-generating cycle that we have been victims of since 1960 comes to a delightful end.

Despite the hubbub that has been generated by the beginning of a new election cycle, it is hard to tell what the nature of the national problem is from listening to both sides. “Corruption” is a problem we are told. But we have the one advantage that all current parties to the national discourse have/are running governments at different levels – none of which is a poster child for clean government. If corruption is then a constant, it is self-evident that this one risk will not alter much any of the contending parties’ equations.

Last week, in conversation with a friend, he posed a question that I think goes to the heart of our national headache(s). “How come”, he asked, “this economy has averaged GDP growth of 8% annually since 2007, and things still remain like this?” He has invited us (much later) to investigate changes to key indices in emerging market and developed economies elsewhere that grew by 8% annually over a decade to see what lessons we may learn from these countries.

Until, then, though, I worry that we do not have enough educated conversation – even argument – around the economy to help shape the policies that will move this country forward. The death, recently, of Baroness Thatcher briefly forced to the forefront, debate over her policy choices in her years as prime minister of the United Kingdom. Between her Tory government, and Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration in the United States, a choice was made between state intervention in the economy, through public spending designed to drive aggregate demand, and a small state relying on prudent fiscal policies to drive non-inflationary growth. The world has since had to live with the consequences of these choices.

What choices confront us? The Sanusi Lamido-led CBN has done a healthy job keeping inflation contained. But unemployment remains a key worry. How do we tackle this? With make work schemes, like SURE-P? Or by getting businesses to grow enough that they demand new workers? And the new workers, where will these come from? Our social infrastructure – schools, hospitals, and general welfare – do not support the kind of labour force that will make this economy competitive outside of the most basic industries. At which point we return to the character of our economy. And the question: “Have our current stewards of the economy done enough to make Nigeria a good place to do business?”

I don’t think so.