It is 20 years since the sage, Chinua Achebe, penned a famous open letter rejecting President Olusegun Obasanjo’s award of the Commander of the Federal Republic.
For those who have forgotten, or who for some reason do not know, here is the full message, which was sent from Annandale-on-Hudson in New York, where the writer lived at the time.
“October 15, 2004
“My Dear President Obasanjo,
“I write this letter with a very heavy heart. For some time now, I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra, where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.
“Forty-three years ago, at the first anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, I was given the first Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. In 1979, I received two further honours – the Nigerian National Order of Merit and the Order of the Federal Republic – and in 1999, the first National Creativity Award.
“I accepted all these honours fully aware that Nigeria was not perfect, but I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples.
“Nigeria’s condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honor awarded me in the 2004 Honors List.”
His beloved Anambra was in turmoil, a product of the machinations of Nigeria’s political elite, led by Obasanjo himself.
Across the country, the menace that is Nigeria today was being sown. Capturing the situation as being “too dangerous for silence,” the famous writer turned down Obasanjo’s offer. Over the years, a few others have done the same.
The Achebe drama was replayed in 2011, when President Goodluck Jonathan, whom Obasanjo had put in place as Vice-President in 2007, again placed him on the Honours list.
The writer expressed impatience, explaining, “The reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed, let alone solved.”
2007 was the year that The Economist, in response to Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” elections, which enabled the PDP to continue his political bloodline after his third-term effort failed, published its famous “Big man, big fraud and big trouble” comment, saying that “the organised vote-rigging and fraud…suggest that Nigeria may be sliding backwards again.”
Obasanjo’s EFCC stalwart, Nuhu Ribadu, enjoying a gleaming international reputation at the time, characterised the concern as being beyond corruption.
“It’s gangsterism. It’s organised crime,” he told the magazine.
But perhaps we were sliding forward, not backwards? Nigeria’s world has certainly turned around, or upside down, since then: Bola Tinubu is now President. Ribadu, who as chairman of the EFCC, was the first to pronounce and denounce the corruption of Mr Bola Tinubu as governor of Lagos State, is now Tinubu’s National Security Adviser
Similarly, President Tinubu’s current Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, turned down his National Honour nomination in 2011, when he was a federal legislator, claiming not only that the honours should not be disbursed as presidential favours but that “we have had many rotten eggs on our honours list.”
That was before he was discovered to have been disbarred in 2007 as a licensed lawyer in the United States, having been found to have stolen money from a client and failed to meet his membership obligations.
But if Ribadu was right about political gangsterism and organised crime in 2007, that is but a juvenile joke today.
If Achebe was alarmed and dismayed by well-connected renegades in one state in 2004 or even in 2011, Nigeria has matured into the “bankrupt and lawless fiefdom” he feared.
It was in 2004 that I characterised the PDP the “Profoundly Decadent Party,” a label I have restated over the years. It was a rotten, unprincipled assemblage of men, just as APC was, and is, except that APC now oozes a stench nobody thought was possible.
As early as late 2013, the warning bells were clanging, leading one to wonder whether APC was any less dangerous, and then to understand that each was the other by a different name.
And then APC took it further, announcing its murder weapon in the words of now-Senator Adams Oshiomhole: “Once you join the APC, your sins are forgiven.”
We have since learned the unstated corollary: “Once you are in the APC, your sins can multiply freely.”
This is why we have experienced 10 years of a political party whose only triumph is in lying and propaganda. Because APC embodies corruption, it cannot combat the menace; in its hands, the anti-corruption agencies shamelessly encourage and nurture it.
Within months in 2015, the APC Manifesto was abandoned, and the party forgot its so-called mission of C-H-A-N-G-E once it had acquired power.
Muhammadu Buhari’s May 2019 announcement that APC would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within 10 years is a hoax the current government does not dignify with any further mention.
In 10 years, APC has rendered meaningless the rule of law as it has the constitutional separation of powers: the legislature and the judiciary now practically belong to the executive.
In APC’s hands, the insecurity in the country mutated from a mouse into a tiger. Consider that Tinubu, finally compelled to visit Benue State last week over the large-scale killings there, expressed surprise (wink!) that no arrests had been made, as if law enforcement matters in Nigeria.
Tinubu treated his Benue visit like a political pilgrimage, with local school children dragged into pouring rain in their uniforms to be violated and victimised all over again. He did not visit the grieving communities, either, only issuing directives to the security agencies as if directives are the same as a strategy.
Nearly two years ago, Tinubu recalled Nigeria’s ambassadors worldwide, claiming he wanted “world-class efficiency and quality.” They have not been replaced, leaving Nigerians abroad naked. Last week in Iran, Nigerians in that country were abandoned.
That is how Nigeria is now governed: with nepotism, narrow- mindedness and self-interest taking the place of public service and ethics.
This is the country in which President Tinubu announced his 101-person 2025 National Honours, allegedly to mark Democracy Day. Some of them in the number among Nigeria’s finest, and I applaud them.
But are they not instead diminished by our hollowed-out realities? Nigeria is a country on the edge: bleeding, nervous, angry and hungry.
Those listed who really deserve to be celebrated but are really just being used to cloak the filthiest should be “emitting smoke from seven orifices,” as the Chinese would say.
Can something moldy be used to disinfect and clean? Can someone, or something, deficient in credibility and integrity define or grant them to another?
I know a few lions who would have growled and roared their disapproval from the tallest tree. As it is said, you must be careful when a naked man offers you a shirt.
Because two people, then, are naked.
Punch
