Bards and Tyrants: Literature, Leadership and Citizenship Issues of Modern Nigeria

By Chin Ce
Africa Research Institute
IRCALC-ALJ

Now that every state is enslaved
and the rock stairs that we built
crumble on our heads
and the earth is mortally wounded
what use are the memorial drums?
-O. Enekwe

Nigerian writing, like the post colonial Nigerian state, has run full cycle for forty years. And ever after, it cycles around the wheel of poverty and underdevelopment that the country has become notorious for. Most of her writers had often sounded like Rosse in Macbeth lamenting the Scottish homeland during the tyranny of the usurper king ‘…poor country/Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot/be called our mother, but our grave...’(185) One member of the new Nigerian generation of poets sadly muses: ‘Now that every state is enslaved/ and the rock stairs that we built/ crumble on our heads… what use are the memorial drums?' (Enekwe 10)
A small, neglected, pamphlet probably dots the reference section of the national library of Nigeria. The Trouble with Nigeria by Chinua Achebe begins in a language and tone that would annoy its countrymen, particularly the political cheerleaders:

There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership. (1)

African fiction parallels political life too closely. Thus critics who argue from a cultural position where art might exist for enjoyment purposes alone may overlook this historical literary sensitivity –of art in relation to issues as politics and citizenship. The Nigerian literati, since decades of independence, have been preoccupied with social and particularly political paradigms –like marching in the front line. But how further has the literature gone towards the education of society or the political reengineering of the continent?
Sadly, after forty years of independence it is doubtful if Nigerian readership of literature did improve in any case. Nigerian leaders of thought, as Chinua Achebe noted some years ago, read very little, and one, even at the risk of bigotry, may say this is why the development of Nigeria seems to be all talk and little progress.

Surely, the African intellectual reads Newsweek and Time magazine, and one or two local papers as well. And it is conceivable that he might even find time once in a while to dip into that decorative set of encyclopedia one sees more and more these days adorning the sitting-rooms of the intellectual elite and their emulators. Although I doubt it.
Time is a serious handicap….
But there are other limiting factors besides time. The habit of reading itself is clearly the most important, for if it were strongly developed in our intellectuals some of them at least would find the time. But the habit is simply not there. (Creation 29)

With the obvious lacunae of imaginative thinking is it surprising at the vacuity of leadership and at modern Nigeria's descent into an African redundancy syndrome? The answer, of course, must be in the negative. For example, In 1999, three years after coming into government with boasts of a new deal for his countrymen, Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, like the military precursors from whom he earned his tutelage, declared an anti-corruption campaign. Some two years in the same course the country ranked highest in international hall of infamy as the most corrupt country in the world. The president, a maximum dictator at heart, has since reconciled his brief idea of a corruption-free society with the corruptive demands of his own political survival in the politics of Nigeria. Nigerians would remember their president for his glib reaction to that international exposition which held that the greater percentage of corruption in that country emanated from government itself –the central government– which the retired general appears very pleased to be in control. It smacked of a remark by the central character in Children of Koloko inter alia:

We never really got to know why our land remained backward and undeveloped even till the dawn of the new millennium. Only our leaders could tell us why. But whatever was the case, we knew that the people we called our leaders and admired for their achievements never really cared what they said or did in private or public. If they did anything, it wasn't for Koloko or for any other place in the country's map. After all, Dogkiller was once quoted as saying that all the grammar of development didn't belong to high matters of state since it didn't put the food on his table. ( 22)

However, nothing would please beneficiaries of Nigeria's brand of democracy today more than the aphorism that ‘the worst democracy is better than the best military rule.' The apparent mediocrity of the assertion, or the acceptance of it, seems to be the prevailing standard of modern social and political administration without any signs of transition. The literature of Ghana leaves memories of a similar era of their history which the generality of Ghana's civilized populace struggled to put behind. An excerpt from Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born gives an insight into social corruption in the Ghana of the seventies:

A small bus, looking very new and neat in its green paint, came up to the barrier. One of the policemen casually waved it to a stop and then just as casually he walked away to join the others. There were only a few vehicles at the barrier now, but the policemen were busy looking at a large book one of them was holding.
The driver of the small green bus stepped down and walked carefully over toward the policemen. He was young and he was in a pair of khaki shorts, with a light green shirt over them.
'Constable,' he said, as he got to the policemen, 'my passengers. They are in a hurry.'
One of the policemen looked up and said, 'is that so?' The driver pointed to his bus.
'The people inside. They want to go,' he said
The policeman who had spoken raised his right hand and in a slow gesture pointed to his teeth.
The man had seen this gesture several times. Usually its maker would add the words, 'Even kola nuts can say “thanks”.' This policeman, however, was saying nothing.
He was leaving it entirely up to the driver to understand or to wait The driver understood. Without waiting to be asked for it. he took out his license folder from his shirt pocket, brought out a cedi note from the same place, and stuck it in the folder. Then, with his back turned to the people waiting in the bus, the driver gave his folder, together with the bribe in it, to the policeman.
The policeman looked with long and pensive dignity at the license folder and at what was inside it With his left hand be extracted the money, rolling it up dexterously into an easy little ball hidden in his palm, while with his right he made awkward calculating motions, as if he were involved in checking the honesty of the document he held. In a moment be walked with the driver to bus, looked cursorily into it, then gave the all clear. The passengers leaned back in their seats and the bus took off. (182)

Here is how Chinua Achebe reflects this incipient corruption in an emerging independent Nigerian nation in an earlier novel, No Longer at Ease:
Some forty miles or so beyond lbadan the driver suddenly said: 'Dees b--f police!' Obi noticed two policemen by the side of the road about three hundred yards away, signalling the lorry to a stop.
'Your particulars?' said one of them to the driver. It was at this point that Obi noticed that the seat they sat on was also a kind of safe for keeping money and valuable documents. The driver asked his passengers to get up. He unlocked the box and brought out a sheaf of papers. The policeman looked at them critically. 'Where your roadworthiness?' The driver showed him his certificate of roadworthiness.
Meanwhile the driver's mate was approaching the other policeman. But just as he was about to hand something over to him Obi looked in their direction. The policeman was not prepared to take a risk; for all he knew Obi might be a C.I.D. man. So he drove the driver's mate away with great moral indignation. 'What you want here? Go way!' Meanwhile the other policeman had found fault with the driver's papers and was taking down his particulars, the driver pleading and begging in vain. Finally he drove away, or so it appeared. About a quarter of a mile father up the road he stopped.
'Why you look the man for face when we want give um him two shillings?' he asked Obi.
'Because he has no right to take two shillings from you,' Obi answered.
'Na him make I no de want carry you book people,' he complained. 'Too too know na him de worry una. Why you put your nose for matter way no concern you? Now that policeman go charge me like ten shillings.'
It was only some minutes later that Obi realized why they had stopped. The driver's mate had run back to the policeman knowing that they would be more amenable when there were no embarrassing strangers gazing at them. The man soon returned panting from much running.
'How much they take?' asked the driver.
Ten shillings,' gasped his assistant.
'You see now.' he said to Obi, who was already beginning to feel a little guilty, especially as all the traders behind, having learnt what was happening, had switched their attacks from career girls to 'too know' young men. For the rest of the journey the driver said not a word more to him.
'What an Augean stable!' he muttered to himself. 'Where does one begin? With the masses? Educate the masses?' He shook his head. 'Not a chance there. It would take centuries. A handful of men at the top. Or even one man with vision an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. (this writer’s emphasis) But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? (40)

Both literary accounts of real, everyday, situations in the society of that time depict an attitude of citizenship bordering on complicity and active enjoyment of a situation of anomaly. Achebe’s society and opinion leaders gave up on corruption while Armah’s did not. Ghana’s Augean stable was cleansed in the Rawlings revolution. Nigeria’s own stable is set to drown the whole country in its disease and affliction. The result is that today's Ghana has transited from the corruption-ridden society as presented in Beautyful Ones to one of the few stable and descent places in Africa. On the contrary the corruption of the Nigerian republic has kept a steady geometric progression. At present, it includes an executive that claims to fight corruption but performs the Hecate dance round it with senators and assemblymen. It is this celebration of mediocrity of leadership and a sadly mistaken inclination to portray the opposite that the erudite writer identifies as the bane of the Nigerian national leadership. Chinua Achebe notes:

In June 1979 former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany made this comment about his country:
Germany is not a world power; it does not wish to become a world power.
In August of the same year General Olusegun Obasanjo said of Nigeria during his "Thank You Tour" of Ogun State:
Nigeria will become one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century.
The contrast between these two leaders speaks for itself - a sober, almost self-deprecatory attitude on the one hand and a flamboyant, imaginary self-conceit on the other. (10)

The laughable pronouncement of Nigeria becoming one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century was made under a military head of state whose inclination to self-deception since the seventies has altered very little nearly forty years after. At forty Nigeria today, with especially such distended bellies of present-day democracy as Olusegun Obasanjo and company steering her, would actually fit the description of gargantuan folly. The political foppery of unimaginative minds emerging president and lawmakers has become the country's recurring theme in the drama of its own undoing. In the eighties and nineties there was a spirited campaign for the ex-generals to continue their leadership of the country under their so-called civilian democracy. In government-owned radio and television campaigns, their local leaders of thought would point to American generals-turned presidents as some good case in point. But in 1799, Thomas Jefferson before he became president of the United States had said:

I am relying for internal defense, on our militia solely, till actual invasion, and for such naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations…; and not for a standing army in time of peace, which may overawe the public sentiment; nor for a navy, which by its own expenses and eternal wars…will grind us with public burdens and sink us under them.

David Trask, writing on the defense of democracy in the United States, observes that the minuscule size of both services (Army and Navy) was a further guarantee of their almost invisible role in national political life and of the principle of civilian control. (13)

Furthermore, Trask notes:

The military profession also retained its strong commitment to civilian leadership. In 1948 General Dwight Eisenhower, while discouraging efforts of supporters to nominate him for presidency summarized the dominant views of the professional military. He insisted that 'the necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power will be best sustained and … people will have greater confidence that it is so sustained, when lifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and overriding reasons, abstain from seeking high political office.(14)

In the conspiracy of 1999, Nigerians have paid for their characteristic tendency for amnesia, a price seen in the hardship and suffering which the military turncoat has continued to visit upon them with often foolish and uncharitable outbursts comparable only to those notorious quirks of Idi Amin of Uganda. Which is probably why in the millennium, the Nigerian president could run the most corrupt nation on earth and proclaim 'I dey kampe,' (Nigerian pidgin meaning he’s in control) to an impeachment bid; and also why the façade of integrity via his anti-corruption machinery which his countrymen have called witch-hunt machinery, meant to gain credibility from western nations, has been unconvincing. He is perhaps the only leader whose world tours are treated with mild levity by his hosts and have amounted to very little either in terms of world public opinion or generating their economic sympathy.

Ethnic Rivalries and Falling Standards. Nigeria's multiethnic composition has been stated as the single most constraining factor in the evolution of that nation state. Its descent to civil tyranny under retired General Obasanjo reflects the desperate attempts to keep a collapsing federation together. In Africa, the country has the largest concentration of ethnicity numbering over three hundred and fifty two. The rise of these indigenous ethnicities on the path of still debated numerical strength has engendered much angst to the minority ethnicities in that while the bulk of revenue generated through its predominant oil exports draw from the ethnic minorities, the bulk of infrastructural development are concentrated among, and literarily squandered by, the ethnic majorities in Lagos and Abuja. The Nigerian nation state, particularly the Niger Delta region, is being run after the manner of 18th century pre-revolution France where many peasants had to give up their land in despair and took to brigandage, smuggling and poaching (Europe 6). Lately the youths of the delta region have turned to terrorism and other crimes. Lately there is armed rebellion against the Nigerian state with very grim portents for the future. The aggressive peasant groups of eighteenth century French Europe, we learnt, were wont to be given shelter and protection by sympathetic villagers. Tax collectors and game keepers were murdered, and soldiers constantly had to be used to suppress food riots (7 ),' a feature symptomatic of the modern condition of the Niger Delta made up of minority Ijaw, Itshekiri, and Urhobo whose rights to decent life have been discarded with the brutality that is only akin to the parasites and 'absentee landlords' of medieval Europe. A young Nigerian environmentalist poet asks the question no one may ever bother to read in the country's government houses:

First it was the Ogonis/ Today it is Ijaw/ Who will be slain this next day
We see open mouths/But hear no screams/ Tears don't flow/ When you are scarred/ We stand in pools/Up to our knees/ We thought it was oil/But it was blood/ We thought it was oil/ But this was blood
(Blood 14)

Although Nigeria survived a war described as internecine and fratricidal but hers was merely a war of attrition of mutually antagonistic leaders and self-serving decision makers at home and abroad. The conditions that led to that war have since, like a virus, replicated everywhere in even worse and sophisticated operations. The massacre of non-northern ethnicities has yet continued in northern states such as Kano, Kaduna, and Jos. Every northern state has enjoyed the barbarism of slaughtering the southern ethnicities for reasons of religious, economic and political disagreements rooted in primordial ethnic chauvinism.
Where political murders and inter-ethnic rivalry have not blown into civil war, they seethe in the cauldron of competing forces striving to gain advantage over another at the detriment of the whole. Inordinate ambitions and switching loyalties become the hallmark of its civil and political life leaving out only the international football sports where citizens of the state act with a common purpose. But there too the sports ministry of the country like, other national institutions, reels with charges of nepotism and corruption.
A long time ago, the educational sector fell to ethnic irredentism with Northern-backed incendiary of quota and avid ethnocentric admissions systems into tertiary institutions in a country it had fought to preserve as one. Other ethnic groups soon copied rather exuberantly and the 1990s Nigeria witnessed the final crumbling of all that constituted its educational heritage. Foreign nations began to decertify the plethora of degrees and certificates awarded by Nigerian institutions after 1989. This western move, led by the United States, appeared both timely and appropriate in that the 90s was the culmination of brazen bastardization of education merely for ethnic advantages. Overnight, state universities had sprung up with the haphazardness of their creation merely to produce as many graduates as can compete with other ethnicities in federal labour positions. Basic standards for admission were jettisoned and entrees that did not pass basic senior high found their ways into the universities. In the educationally disadvantaged states (one of Nigeria's ludicrous political jargons for elevating mediocrity to statecraft) the half-baked certificate holders became teachers in turn. Having neither the diligence of 'little frogies' nor polished in any high degree, these ethnic warlords of the tower fill the vacant slots in what they deem their own universities. It is consequently not uncommon in Nigerian state universities to find professorial positions such as departmental heads and deans being occupied by 'acting' misfits or to see hastily-converted professors of state universities with hardly any research contributions to society. Some state universities in a hurry to award higher degrees, start postgraduate programs even before rounding off their first-degree graduates. Standards are completely jettisoned as third rate candidates are admitted to higher academic pursuits. Nigerian tertiary institutions turn out graduates and lecturers who can hardly distinguish between 'have' and 'has', 'was' and 'were' or the use of 'at present' and 'presently,' and reel out semi-literate clichés reminiscent of back street American hip hop. But while America succeeds by a trained and motivated force in combatting violence and gangsterdom in schools, Nigeria does not seem to know what to do about her own barbaric equivalents where high-ranking society's leaders are either members or founders and patrons of campus cults. The social impact of degenerate education in Nigeria has taken its toll by the high incidence of unemployed graduates, the collapse of its economy and the erosion of cultural values.

PDP and the Politics of National Stagnation. The fourth attempt at democracy in the country is a charade by the dregs of society. They are either unenlightened military despots with claims to some level of education only available in Nigerian military schools or political hirelings, passenger touts, jobbers, failed academics, and a criminal gangs of crooks, fraudsters and swindlers who hijacked the business of government to become known as Nigeria's leaders at federal and state levels of government. From these have emerged Nigeria's past and present presidents, state governors, local council chairs, and, in 2004, an even more surprising array of ministers, advisers, commissioners and party leaders.
The queue for succession in leadership equally comes from within these ranks as the enlightened and respected elites prefer not to tarnish their world renown and shun participation in such criminal acts like plundering of public resources. Although few in number, they prefer a more respectable opposition. Those in this category include their writers and activists: Wole Soyinka, Black Africa's first Nobel literature prize winner, Gani Fahewinmi, distinguished lawyer and activist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Beko Ransome Kuti whose family had engaged in frontline struggles against political repression by the nation’s entrenched class of exploiters. These are just to name but a few. Unfortunately members of the enlightened intelligentsia that kept aloof from the charade that is Nigerian political administration preferring the written works are few indeed. The literary maestro, Chinua Achebe, and distinguished commonwealth diplomat Emeka Anyaoku have persistently resisted calls to serve the country out of fear of being compromised by the vociferous majority of brigands that people the political class.
Earlier, these writers had pointed out that Nigeria’s martial mentality could only lead itself, and the rest of Africa if allowed, Africa into a final abyss of darkness and despair. In the 1980s Wole Soyinka, maestro of dramatic literature, had even put together a play The Beatification of Area Boy on the festering shame that Nigeria had metamorphosed under the leaderships of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha -two ex military heads of state of that country. Beatification became a mirror of modern Nigeria which internal contradictions could only produce enlightened street kings such as Sanda. There is something about the mentality of Military Officer in The Beatification that resonates successively in the leadership psyche of Abacha's murdering of Ogoni dissenters and Obasanjo's executive pogrom at Odi and Benue states:

(from the beatification of area boy)
sanda. So Maroko is really gone? Gone for good?
military officer. Didn't you see the bonfire? We didn't merely bulldoze it, we dynamited every stubborn wall, then set fire to the rubble. That place was disease ridden! No point developing it for decent citizens only to have them die of some lingering viruses from way back. Those squatters might be immune to anything but we have to think of the future residents. We took them by surprise. They woke up as usual but found themselves staring into the muzzles of guns. Few of them bad any time to pick up their belongings. (80)

In 1988 Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah was released. Its prophetic statement about the revisionism of unenlightened autocracy in Nigerian politics reminds readers of two historical personalities, Ibrahim Babangida (1985 -1993) and Sani Abacha (1994-1998) whose study in manic dementia has yet been fully researched by psychologists or historians. But the strong point in the works of Soyinka and Achebe not easily ignored by many a reader of Nigeria's literature is the knowledge that the throng of Nigerian national heads have been mere pretenders to charisma sustained by a larger throng of political jobbers. Another point is that this constant of anomie, spurred by various orders of government, is sustained from a crude, primitive and highly destructive mythomania that survives one government after another in corruption and abuse of office (Beatification). But since, as it has been stated earlier, Nigeria's political elite do not care for literature or any book for that matter, there is hardly any hope that its liberating thought can ever coalesce in the form of a liberating philosophy. There has been no leader of that nationality who could quote a remarkable passage from a local author in a public speech in the manner of an American Roosevelt or a British Churchill. Insights garnered from the literatures of their brightest minds have been ignored.
This ignorance is due to the inherent structure of the Nigerian state designed to suit only the interests of the unenlightened, unimaginative and perverted political class. The failure of the present PDP-led government and the continued exploitation of public wealth by successive regimes will continue for a long time in that country for its ethnic plurality ensures the rejection of a holistic perspective on issues. National issues are often polarized along ethnicities and then around religious fundamentalist polarities.
The British colonial government was aware of the power of African religions and sought to break their hold through their missionaries. While traditional life seems to blend with even the most fundamentalist christian groups, the division of the north into predominantly muslim, and the south into a largely christian affiliation further bifurcates the country's tenuous unity. Its leadership is sprung from an equally haunted religious divide, and lacking in any nobility of spirit or altruism of vision, fails to counterbalance the centrifugal forces.
The lack of objective attitude to religion and lip service to the secularity of the Nigerian state has robbed the country greatly of scientific advancements. The country rather appeals to a religiously brainwashed populace incapable of objective or scientific reasoning. The ignorance of the Nigerian people and their unscientific attitude to problem solving is manifest in how technological evolution in the modern world turns into a superstitious abstraction in the country. For example, contrary to its population advantage, Nigeria takes the least position in Africa in the use of internet facilities. In the dawn of the millennium public opinion had interpreted the millennium bomb as an actual atomic bomb that was programmed for world destruction.
This abject dearth of objective treatment of contemporary issues becomes the incendiary of despotic regimes that have impoverished that country since 1985 with the advent of the Babangida regime and the current democratic chicanery of Olusegun Obasanjo's government. Today most Christian faithfuls look forward to the Biblical Armageddon in a literal sense. Some members of Igbo ethnic extraction even promote the idea of their Jewish ancestry against all sociological evidence. With the advent of mobile technology, to which the country is a latecomer, the assumption that the 'evil metal' is capable of engendering death gradually began and soon spread quickly around the country like wild fire in the harmattan as one of their fabled writers would put it. As a consequence not a few nationals would opt to ban the use of mobile phones in their vicinity an absurdity only comparable to South Africa's where that government once had no slightest notion of the AIDS pandemic ravaging its country. The ignorance appears rooted in the foreign religions that they had chosen to embrace with the fervency common among uninformed communities where myths are interpreted as actual happenings. Thus while Nigeria may have become one of the most religious countries of the world, this is primarily not for the love of spirituality or truth as one may find with the eastern tradition but mainly because of competing christian and muslim interests and the supremacy battles that rage even in corridors of government.
Paradoxically a CNN survey exposes this 'most religious' country where the highest percentage of people consult their deities regularly as the most dangerous, most environmentally filthy and decadent enclave in the world where all manners of primitive rituals thrive with executive complicity. Even their African neighbours are shocked that ritual murders and cult patronage all come from the rank and file of political leaders, government executives and power elites. One can agree no less with their own writer's supposition that such a country cannot be great, cannot attain greatness, nor have greatness thrust upon it, in spite of any religious faith or executive bravado:

One of the commonest manifestations of under-development is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic expectations.
...
Listen to Nigerian leaders and you will frequently hear the phrase this great country of ours.
Nigeria is not a great country. It is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that give least value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth! (Trouble 19)

Nigerian Democracy and the Dawn of a Police State. Nigeria today is clearly a police state in a democracy where leaders or winners are selected from political drawing tables and executive lists. Under a military regime Nigeria turns into an army sate. Both faces are only distinguishable from the colour of their uniform. In primitiveness, they are the same. It was the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) which gave countries like Nigeria and Ghana the basis for their military take-off. The WAFF soon metamorphosed into the local armies of the former British colonies. If countries like Ghana succeeded in reforming the colonial army and the internal security of the police system, this was not so for Nigeria. The leaders of Nigeria have continued to thrive under the same police corruption and abuse of office that sustained and preserved the colonial status quo. Consequently the police of modern Nigeria are constituted to serve the interest of a corrupt executive, perpetuate the latter's hold on power for as long as the system lasts and use available machinery to quell opposition. Because it is a corrupt and unimaginative institution being run in the monstrous hierarchy of its executive manipulators, its political exploitation was already a forgone conclusion in the successively crooked administrations of the country. When its inefficiency in coping with civil restlessness grows intolerable, the Nigerian army is invited to assist in the objective of subjugating opposition. Having succeeded in returning the presidential chief executive and their state governors to their power stools, the price the nation has to pay is the unbridled corruption of the police rank and file.
The number of police checkpoints on Nigeria's federal highways and local corners with their uncivil conduct, open harassment and extortion attests to the connivance of the highest echelons of the command who benefit from the activities of this morally reprehensible and degenerate assemblage of men in uniform. Four politically emasculated states of the east, namely Enugu and Anambra, Imo and Abia have literally succumbed to police rule which regularly employs state security machinery to intimidate the civil populace and extend the comfort zones of those in power. The federal and state executives of Nigeria's present political structure are aware of the excesses of their police force. But the crimes of Nigeria police are crimes against the civil populace, so the executives look the other way. For instance, nowhere in the history of Nigeria's mendacious governments have the police unmasked crimes perpetrated from echelons of executive office. Two poignant cases out of the plethora of orchestrated assassinations will suffice. The murder of Nigeria's journalist and leader of thought Dele Giwa, in 1987, described by its media as gruesome and barbaric has never been uncovered by the local police even when the instrument of dispatch, a parcel bomb, was traced to military intelligence. The political murder of Nigeria's then justice minister, Bola Ige, described mildly as embarrassing to any government with human sense of decency, has not been uncovered in this present democratic government where the crime took place. This situation is more than an outrage considering the 'anti corruption.' posture of that government. The executive that presides over the nation state does not see this failure as its own. The government appears to carry on even more comfortably in its fortified Aso Rock State house. It is 'business as usual' –a sort of administrative amnesia that precludes any possibility of righting wrongs or learning from past mistakes except where it comes to dispatching their political enemies with the active connivance of state security machinery. In addition to political murders are crimes that take place in the midst of incessant police checkpoints on roads where Nigeria's police have the highest visibility. There the civil populace are subjected daily to police extortion, harassment, brutality and murderous robbery by men supposed to protect them. It is the only country in the world where police kills for mere twenty-Naira bribe. Nigerian writing is replete with gruesome details of police notoriety at checkpoints, an activity that qualifies in civilized societies as banditry.

The police sergeant was dragging her in the direction of a small cluster of round huts not far from the road and surrounded as was common in these parts by a fence of hideously-spiked cactus. He was pulling her by the wrists, his gun slung from his shoulder. A few of the passengers mostly other women were pleading and protesting timorously. But most of the men found it very funny indeed.
She threw herself down on her buttocks in desperation. But the sergeant would not let up. He dragged her along on the seat of her once neat blue dress through clumps of scorched tares and dangers of broken glass.
Chris bounded forward and held the man's hand and ordered him to release the girl at once. As if that was not enough he said, 'I will make a report about this to the Inspector-General of Police.'
'You go report me for where? You de craze! No be you de ask about President just now? If you no commot for my front now I go blow your head to Jericho, craze man.'
'Na you de craze,' said Chris. 'A police officer stealing a load of beer and then abducting a school girl! You are a disgrace to the force.'
The other said nothing more. He unslung his gun, cocked it, narrowed his eyes while confused voices went up all around some asking Chris to run, others the policeman to put the gun away. Chris stood his ground looking straight into the man's face, daring him to shoot. And he did, point blank into the chest presented him.
'My friend, do you realize you have just shot the Commissioner for Information?' asked a man unsteady on his feet and shaking his head from side to side.. The sergeant had dropped his gun and fled into the wild scrubland. (Anthills 215-216)

If the atrocities of their men in uniform can be described as shameful and barbaric, the government's response is usually apologetic and cosmetic. It would proffer occasional military-style raids called ‘task-force,’ (a martial term prevalent even in civil democracy) to bring some culprits to justice. Such military excesses appeal so much to the psyche of the Nigerian masses and their leaders borne from basically backward and unscientific approaches to problem solving. The victims are the unprotected ranks, unprotected, that is, from the nepotism of the godfathers. Nepotism is the rule of the thumb that guarantees any reward or career prospect in Nigeria's entire public organization.

A Bleak Future for the Civil State. Nigeria's postcolonial state is bogged by the fraud that engineered that nation from the beginning. The ingenious British scheme in handing over by a controversial politics of numbers and geography to a northern oligarchy that would be convenient to manipulate had played itself out to the full detriment of the nation state as it was designed.

The colonial powers with the aid of missionary-anthropologists attributed characteristics to different groups that corresponded to their fantastic imagination, classifying some as 'courageous”, “gallant”, “resourceful' and “trustworthy” and others as “cowardly”, “unreliable”, “rebellious”, and “crafty” and setting them on the part of conflictual, zero-sum competition. (codesria 2005)

While the colonial British left behind a security apparatus to enforce its divide-and-rule policy and subjugate the people into compliance with coercive tax, the new locals inherited this concept adding more vicious repertoires of ethnicity and pseudo-nationalistic pretensions. Nigeria's Tafawa Balewa at independence was proud to have the British first as masters, now as friends while the United States in their declaration of independence had preferred to treat their colonial masters as enemies in war:

We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends… we ... reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by through or under them; we utterly dissolve all political connection which may heretofore have subsisted between us and the people or parliament of Great Britain: and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free… (Oxford 11)

But our Nigerian elites at independence simply walked into the office their colonial masters had left behind and acclimatized to the status quo enjoying the benefits of their past masters and subjugating their own people, the difference being only in the degree of their barbarity. For example, during the Aba women's riot (1929 - 1930) troops were called in to help the police in quelling the disturbances and in the process fifty unarmed women were killed (Onwubiko 263) But even the nation's Coal Miners revolt (Enugu) is nothing in cruelty and executive mindlessness with Nigeria's recent example seventy years later in the Odi massacre of 2003. While the colonial police killed fifty unarmed women, president Obasanjo's army decimated a whole village of men, women, children and livestock.
Modern Nigeria's image has subsequently become unflattering to its nationals and tourists the latter who are virtually non-existent. Foreign nationals prefer civilized countries like Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire , or even Cameroon to a nightmarish venture into Nigeria. It has been noted that the single most corrupt institution in the country, second only to its political executive, is its police. It is the only country in the world where senators cart away local currencies in the form of bribe in large leather woven bags unimaginatively dubbed 'Ghana-must-go' a reference to the expulsion of fellow Africans by the second democratic regime in the early 1980s. Ironically today, it is the turn of Nigeria's unemployed youths to migrate to a rehabilitated Ghana as prostitutes and petty criminals. Ghana records success in its clean-up restoration of the nation state and unification of its ethnic nationalities only by exemplary leadership. Nigeria records majestic failure in any rehabilitation efforts due to the serial fraudulence of its leaders. The political lesson it did not learn from Ghana (preferring instead empty boasts by its leaders) was that no leadership could last while it incorporates in its constituents the degenerate mentalities that precipitate its downfall. At the height of the Buhari revolution of 1985, with claims to be an offshoot of the Murtala adventure preceding it, Nigeria's poet Niyi Osundare wrote:

A horeseman gallops to power/ And tyrants of all the world rejoice/ Torture chambers multiply apace/ And the noose thickens, descending
A new horseman/ With guns in the saddle/ One for dissidents at home/ Another for maddening rivals/ In the land of the rising sun
A new horseman/ With trust in might/ He will build arsenals/ In place of barns/ And prod the poor/ To gorge on bullets (Marketplace 45)

This warning is similar to that of other younger poets of a new poetic tradition. A poem on Obasanjo's ascension to the presidency in 1999 ought to haunt Nigeria-watchers by its uncanny ridicule and contempt both for the leadership and the entire political arrangement:

A sluggard has slouched/ His paunches/ On to Aso Rock/ To smear the palace sides/ With his slovenly mirth…It is kakistocracy day/ And he makes klieg lights/ Of minds cracked/ With the disease of road blindness
What future curse of the/ Triangle/ Awaits our children, folks,/ If you let him (Eclipse 12)

Unfortunately however, Nigerian politicians would pitch tents with exactly those elements that precipitate corruption and unleash a running spate of havoc in their national life. One of their popular political slogans is 'Chop I Chop' a euphemistic term for general corruption with which the political elite and their undiscerning followers describe the regime of Ibrahim Babangida whose action in cancelling the only election deemed most free and fair in 1993 nearly embroiled the country in civil war. In a similar vein, non-beneficiaries of the present democracy under Olusegun Obasanjo long ardently for the return of their own man in their coming 2007 elections when they would become the new showcase of power. To them this is almost urgent and imperative considering that they had squandered the wealth they had acquired in the hey-days of previous military exercises in government. Evidently the power-hungry elite does not long for a revolution of society. It knows that Nigerian masses are not cut in the cloak of their counterparts of the French revolution. All they long for is a rehabilitation of their appetite for indulgence through the return of their own man to government, which seems the only fastest avenue for all coveted wealth.
Thus while Nigerian literature has continued to flourish with elegant promises from their brightest minds, the Nigerian society is contrarily positioned as the modern notoriety of Africa thanks to her political leaders from Ibrahim Babangida through Olusegun Obasanjo.
That Nigeria is far from becoming a nation in the millennium is not in doubt. It is a country ruled by illiterate men –illiteracy defined in Fowler's terms, borrowing from the maestro, as 'being not simply one who cannot read and write but one who is unacquainted with good literature.' (Creation 19) A question Nigerian writers have posed to present and past leaders jostling to return and continue the pillage where they left off is what happened to all those promises of 'Health for all by Year 2000,' 'Potable water for all by Year 2000,' 'Housing for all by Year 2000.' It is a question none would vouchsafe an answer. In tourism Nigeria is both the white, and black, man's grave. Its natural endowments, which ought to make it great, are tainted by a lying government, an environment that qualifies as a hazard, and a fraudulent system which main devolution lies in swindling both foreigners and locals alike. Time-priced virtues of human relations such as trust, honour and service are taken as the folly of gullibility; and verbal agreements, even when they are subject to written verification are easily violated because the legal jurisdictions are capable of being bought and corrupted. Nigerian writers did also portray this scenario:
(from beatification)

sanda.…Come, sir. I have an idea. (He takes big man shopper aside.) Yes, sir, you are right, we could go to the police.
big man shopper. Let's do that right away. We've lost too much time already.
sanda. But then again, sir, you know what the police are like.
big man shopper becomes instantly crestfallen.) Yes, sir, I am glad to see you do. He's only small fry, and his real bosses will simply come and bail him out, and that's the last you will see of him, and your missing valuables. The police will take their money and forget you.
big man shopper (sighs). I have documents in that suitcase. Even my passport. The money doesn't matter so much, but I have important business papers...(43)

More of these expressions can be found in the writings of their talented poets and novelists. Their voices trail the frightful carnage of their war, the foolish extravaganzas of the seventies, the miseries of the eighties, the nightmares of the nineties and the present buffoonery of the millennium. Nigerian fiction and non-fiction writers agree with one voice that Nigeria's political future is doomed in the hands of a power elite who refresh themselves in endless rounds of military and civilian mismanagement. Their readiness to buy the last vestige of public conscience is their trump card. Some commentators have posited that government educational policies can only guarantee the production of ignoramuses like their leaders past and present – the quality of their own education being obviously of a high degree of suspicion. A leader like Olusegun Obasanjo has been credited with very little vision for the country's tertiary education beyond flexing muscles with the academic bodies and other perceived enemies for that matter. Senators and legislators, active collaborators in the ruination of the nation, now send their children and wards (since they could afford carting away naira in large fibre-woven bags) to study in neighbouring countries for qualitative education. Evidence of a transition from education for white-collar-jobs to functional literacy, which other African neighbours have sought to achieve, is non-existent in Nigeria. These various levels of degeneration in Nigeria can only lead to the disaster of its democratic experiments. It appears the country will continue to be bedridden in the disease of its own affliction. As a ship with a confraternity of pirates at the helm, Nigeria is set to wobble abysmally like one in darkness until natural cataclysms hasten its disintegration where its degenerate crew would have led it in the first place.
Until then, in the short run perhaps, other Africans may only hope to pray for their big-for-nothing brother along the lines of one of Nigeria's new female poets:
Say to us/ Desolation shall no longer marry this land/ Every ruler-thief shall be/ Burned as fuel for the fire/ My vow shall entwine its roots deep in truth/ And bear a sheltering nest, your great reward/ You'll dare again to nurse the eggs of hope/ Trusting the chicks shall not be scrap metal ( Testimonies 64)



WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua Anthills of the Savannah, Ibadan: Heinemann Books 1988.
– – – Morning Yet on Creation Day, London: Heinemann Books, 1975.
– – – No Longer at Ease, Ibadan: Heinemann Books,1960.
– – – The Trouble with Nigeria, Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1984.
Adewale, Toyin Naked Testimonies, Lagos: Mace Books, 1995
Armah, Ayi Kwei The Beautiful Ones are not Yet Born, London: Heinemann, 1985.
Bassey, Nnimo We Thought it was Oil but it was Blood, Ibadan: Kraftgriots, 2002.
Ce, Chin An African Eclipse, Enugu: Handel Books, 2000.
– – – Children of Koloko, Enugu: Handel Books, 2001.
CODESRIA (The Council for Development of Social Science Research in Africa) MWG, Introduction,2004.
Enekwe, Ossie Broken Pots, Nsukka: Afa Press, 2004.
Osundare, Niyi, Songs of the Market Place, Ibadan: New Horn,1983
Onwubiko, K.B.C. History of West Africa, Onitsha: Africana-Fep, 1973
Peacock, H. L. A History of Modern Europe, London: Heinemann, 1982
Shakespeare, Macbeth, London: Longman, 1979
Soyinka, Wole, The Beatification of an Area Boy, Ibadan: Spectrum 2001.
Trask, David (in Lemay Leo ed.)American Reader, Washington: USIA 1988 .

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Bards and Tyrants: Literature, Leadership and Citizenship Issues of Modern Nigeria is published as a Writer's Travelogue in the Journal of African Literature and Culture, ALJ Edition B5 2005  Comments may be left at the Africa Research Comments Page or sent directly to ircalc@africaresearch.info