Obasanjo’s My Watch and other stories

CHUKS OLUIGBO

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s three-volume memoir, My Watch, presented to the public on Tuesday, 09 December, 2014, has elicited so much reaction, much like Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. That is expected. That is the stuff history books are made of. For those who do not know, history is not shy of controversy. Indeed, history is a controversial subject that thrives in controversy – essentially because there is no shortcut to historical explanation, and “we remember differently”, to quote Chimamanda Adichie’s apt title to her tribute to Achebe at 82. As I wrote in “The Achebe phenomenon” at the peak of the controversy generated by There was a Country, quoting P. Olisanwuche Esedebe, emeritus professor of History at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, “Historical interpretations most times are based on a fraction of the evidence, a part of the whole, but so far as the arguments follow where the available material leads, they are valid. The often seemingly divergent conclusions in historical accounts are due to the different angles from which various historians approached the same episode.”

 

And so, given that various historians [read writers] are wont to approach the same episode from different angles, it presupposes that all major actors in a particular historical event are expected, as a matter of moral obligation and for the benefit of posterity, to document their own versions of the episode detailing, even if from their narrow perspectives, the part they and other actors around them played in the specific event at issue.

That was what Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu partly did in Because I am Involved; that was what Adewale Ademoyega did in Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup; that was what Fola Oyewole did in The Reluctant Rebel; that was what Achebe did in There was a Country; that was what innumerable other Nigerians who have been part of the making of the history of this nation and who have documented their accounts have tried to do; and this is what Obasanjo has also done.

 

Nor has he ever been found wanting in this regard. At intervals Obasanjo has been known to give an account of the roles he played at critical points in Nigeria’s history. To his credit are such personal historical accounts as My Command (1980), Nzeogwu (1987), and Not My Will (1990). Whether these books present the true accounts of the events as they happened or simply represent the veiled antics of a megalomaniac desperately struggling to exonerate himself is for historians to determine. The professional historian, when he eventually goes to work, will find these different accounts useful raw materials. Applying the tools of historiography, he is then able to study, analyse, synthesise, compare notes, filter, interpret, reinterpret and check these materials against other available sources in order, ultimately, to present what comes close to objective history.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago, taking a cue from Robert Skidelsky’s article “Philosopher kings versus philosopher presidents”, I highlighted the benefits that may accrue from the fact of a leader being a reader – and a writer as well. As if to accentuate that point, just few days ago I came upon a new book by Martin Udogie, How to Read More, in which he points to the reading habits of some world leaders – “from Rudi Giulani, who, as New York Mayor during 9-11, finally arrived home at past 2 a.m. on the night of that fateful day and still picked up a book to read, to Barack Obama, who went on a one-week vacation in 2010 with over 2,300 pages of reading, to George W. Bush, whose formula for reading was to enter into a reading contest with his top presidential aide, Karl Rove”.

While voracious reading does not necessarily translate to quality leadership, there is no gainsaying the fact that the leader who reads widely – especially in this knowledge-based economy – will be better placed than the leader who does not. When a leader reads, he assimilates knowledge and wisdom so that when he speaks, he also speaks from the position of knowledge, not ignorance. Then we will eliminate the possibility of having a sitting president allegedly saying on national television that he believes the price of cement in the country will go down “because Dangote said so”, or a presidential candidate saying he would stabilise the price of crude oil in the international market if elected president – when even OPEC has lost market power, with only 30 percent contribution to global oil supply.

And so, any leader who wants to lead well must as a matter of necessity avail himself of the knowledge stored up in books – for how will a leader sidestep his predecessors’ pitfalls if he hadn’t even read about them? How will he avoid repeating the mistakes of history if he doesn’t even know history?

In the heat of the debate generated by There was a Country, Adebayo Kareem, a respected lawyer, wrote an article where he urged Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s wartime military head of state, to write his own memoir in order to present his own personal account of the Nigeria/Biafra Civil War and “put the accounts straight”. And why not? There are too many issues around that war that need explaining. We need to know, for instance, why Gowon would go to Aburi-Ghana and reach certain agreements only to return to Nigeria and sing a different song. And there may be a lot to learn from his 3Rs post-war policy.

In concluding his review of My Watch presented at the launch on December 09, Patrick O. Okigbo III, principal partner at Nextier, wrote: “In all, and most importantly, we must be thankful to President Olusegun Obasanjo for the discipline and commitment it took to put this history on paper. At least, we now have one side of the story. And that side is vicious enough that it should prompt a response from many quarters.”

 

My Watch is as voluminous as they come, at 1,572 pages, a nightmare for a set of people not given to plenty reading. Yet, we expect all those that the former president has accused of wrongdoing – Atiku Abubakar, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Tony Anenih, Nasir El-Rufai, Muhammadu Buhari and the host of them – to not only sit down and do a cover-to-cover reading of the book, but also render their own accounts. Metro 97.7 FM Lagos, Radio Nigeria's first star channel, has a Sunday-Sunday programme it calls “Talk your own”. In my view, Obasanjo has talked his own; let those who feel aggrieved talk their own as well. As Okigbo finely puts it in the review, “This anticipated exchange will help Nigerians connect the dots, see the true picture of what has transpired, and learn whatever lessons there may be from these earlier mistakes.” For El-Rufai, perhaps it is time to write Accidental Public Servant II. Over to you!

Leaders, readers, writers

CHUKS OLUIGBO

Robert Skidelsky, professor emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, member of the British House of Lords and author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, in a recent article ‘Philosopher kings versus philosopher presidents’, shares how, during his recent meeting with Irish President Michael Higgins, he was struck by Higgins’ devotion to thought. Higgins had connected his newly launched “ethics initiative” to a book Skidelsky co-authored with his son, How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life.

“Indeed, engaging with ideas is a passion for Ireland’s poet-president – one that more heads of states should take up,” writes Skidelsky.

He goes on to narrate how, in May, Higgins had told economics students at the University of Chicago that they were studying a deformed discipline, torn from its ethical and philosophical roots. Higgins, as quoted by Skidelsky, had said that “the recent economic and financial upheavals have thrown a glaring light on the shortcomings of the intellectual tools provided by mainstream economics and its key assumptions regarding the sustainability of self-regulating markets”, especially “largely unregulated global financial markets”, and had proposed a “critical examination of some of the core assumptions that underpin economics as it is currently taught in university departments across the world”.

“What other head of state,” asks Skidelsky, “would be able to pinpoint the deficiencies of economics so accurately, buttressing his arguments with quotations not just from Adam Smith, but also from Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, and Jürgen Habermas?”

We can easily domesticate Skidelsky’s observation – and we can extrapolate it beyond just the head of state to include also state governors and all who present themselves as leaders of the people in today’s Nigeria. If we critically and sincerely answer the questions that arise, it will be clear why Nigerian is down on all fours and why it might continue to crawl on its underbelly for a long time to come – except a fundamental change occurs at the level of leadership. Leadership in Nigeria is mostly bereft of ideas, largely because our leaders don’t read. In the present dispensation, for instance, not a few Nigerians have had cause to ask the economic model the country has. On one occasion, someone answered, “Go ask your president.” To which some mischievous fellow retorted, “Does he know?”

In terms of ideas-driven leadership, Nigeria has never had it this bad. This country once produced, at various levels of leadership, globally acclaimed and respected thinkers and men of ideas of the stature of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo. All you needed to do was pick any of the various papers or books written by them or listen to them speak and you would get a clear picture of their thought pattern, ideology, and leadership direction.

Here’s what we mean. “As I watched Obama form his economic team, I drew some inference about his ideology. Obama is an all-American, non-doctrinaire, pragmatist,” writes Chidi G. Osuagwu in a recent article ‘Obamanomics and economics beyond Cambridge’. How many Nigerian political leaders of today can we say the same about? I can count on my fingers.

Nigeria’s politics today is virtually all raw power and no brain. Today’s politician has bartered his thinking cap and, rather than rely on sound strategy and ideas to win him followership, he thinks of how to buy votes and pay thugs to steal ballot boxes. There are hardly any words on marble, even if they are not well-intentioned. Political parties have no clearly-defined ideologies; manifestoes are for the most part totally absent, and where they exist, they are sketchy, lack depth and rigour and are often adaptations of the immediate post-independence party manifestoes; instead of issue-based debates among aspirants to political offices, all we have are mudslinging, name-calling, thuggery, etc – in short, everything is tending towards blind men leading fellow blind men, and the country totters on the edge of a huge chasm.

“Higgins’ experience as an academic and his status as an acclaimed poet,” Skidelsky further writes, “undoubtedly give him an advantage over other heads of state, enabling him to hold his own with top thinkers in a way that few others can. More important, however, is his recognition that a political leader should also be a leader of thought and culture for his or her country – and the world.”

He refers to Ecclesiasticus 44:4, which says: “Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent are their instructions.” “This is particularly important today, when public discourse in democracies is relentlessly demotic and academic work is increasingly specialized,” he adds.

In order to ascend to the plane of “philosopher leader”, therefore, in order to become, in the words of Skidelsky, “open-minded, culturally literate, and ideas-oriented”, a political leader must necessarily be an avid reader, for unquantifiable is the knowledge that is buried deep in books. And some go ahead to become writers – in order, as is desirable, to translate their ideas in black and white and leave a legacy for oncoming generations.

A handful of political leaders in the country have shown how ahead of peers an ideas-oriented leader can be. In the past seven-and-a-half years of his stewardship in Lagos, for instance, Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola’s high intellectual acumen has reflected in the kind of leadership that he has provided in managing a complex socio-economic environment like Lagos. His broad exposure to issues beyond the narrow prism of his legal profession is evident everywhere in his clear understanding of leadership issues and his pattern of administration – and in his numerous paper presentations, especially his budget speeches since 2007. But it has not been all words and no do – pious pronouncements have often been backed by positive actions.

Similarly, as governor of Imo State from 2007-2011, Ikedi Godson Ohakim’s public speeches, whether they were written or ex tempore, showed a man who has been exposed to the world of thought and ideas through wide reading. He would eventually, in 2009, publish three books – Pushing the Limits, which describes his personal career and political philosophy; and The Courage to Challenge and Challenging New Frontiers, which are collections of speeches. He had earlier in 1994, a year after he served as commissioner for commerce, industry and tourism in Imo State under Governor Evan Enwerem (1992-1993), published The Marketing Imperative for Rural Industrialization. Why this broad exposure did not translate into better leadership for Imo State is a topic for another day.

In the meantime, as the 2015 general elections draw closer, and as Nigerians elect their leaders at the various levels of government, the concluding words of Skidelsky must provide a guide: “Democratic countries need symbols of the extraordinary if they are not to sink into permanent mediocrity.”

The labours of our heroes past...

CHUKS OLUIGBO

This is Our Chance by James Ene Henshaw was the first ever book of literature by a Nigerian that I encountered as a schoolboy. It was one of the recommended texts in my Junior Secondary School. I don’t know what obtains now, but at that time Literature was properly separated from English Language – in my school at least – and the guy who was brought in to take us, a young man named Evuleocha, made the subject very interesting.

Subsequently, we would read such other recommended works as Eze Goes to School by Onuora Nzekwu and Michael Crowther, One Week, One Trouble by Anezi Okoro, Without A Silver Spoon by Eddie Iroh, The Bottled Leopard by Chukwuemeka Ike, Wedlock of the Gods and The Wizard of Law by Nigeria’s first female playwright, Zulu Sofola, The Incorruptible Judge by D. Olu Olagoke, An African Night’s Entertainment and The Rainmaker and Other Stories by Cyprian Ekwensi, Unoma at College by Teresa Meniru, among others.

There is an unforgettable quote I took away from Henshaw’s This is Our Chance, by a character named Bambulu who likes to speak big, big grammar: “This is the child of my brain, the product of my endeavour, and the materialisation of my inventive genius. It is an anti-snake-bite vaccine. Western science has not succeeded in producing anything so potent. But I, Bambulu, have, without laboratories, without any help, produced this medicine from the herbs of this village.”

In the realm of poetry, West African Verse, an anthology of poems selected and annotated by Donatus I. Nwoga, brought us into contact with some earliest Nigerian poets, such as Dennis Chukude Osadebay, but it was in A Selection of African Poetry edited by K. E. Senanu and T. Vincent that one really discovered great minds like Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, JP Clark, Gabriel Okara and the host of them.

The interest had developed. And when, in JSS 3, I was appointed assistant school librarian, I descended on the other titles and with gusto began to devour as many as the little time I squeezed out of other school activities permitted. That was when I discovered The Pacesetters Series. Crossfire by Kalu Okpi, Evbu My Love by Helen Ovbiagele, Bloodbath at Lobster Close by Dickson Ighavini, Desert Storm by Hope Dube, Director by Agbo Areo, Something to Hide by Rosina Umelo, The Betrayer by Sam A. Adewoye, The Black Temple by Mohamed T. Garba, and The Extortionist by Chuma Nwokolo are a few of the titles I still recall. It was then that I also read Twilight and the Tortoise by Kunle Akinsemoyin, and many other titles that I do not readily recall their authors.

In the Senior Secondary School, I discovered African Writers Series, especially the works of Chinua Achebe, John Munonye and Elechi Amadi. Then I came in contact with Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel and The Jero Plays (The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis) and other works such as Zainab Alkali’s The Stillborn.

But it was in the university – in the introductory courses on fiction, poetry, and drama and theatre, as well as in the follow-up courses like African Poetry, African Fiction, African Drama, Studies in Poetry, Studies in Fiction, Studies in Drama, Modern Comedy: Moliere to Soyinka, among others – that the floodgates were thrown open and I beheld Nigerian literary giants in their majesty. There were Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard; Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, Death and the King’s Horseman, Kongi’s Harvest, The Strong Breed, The Interpreters, etc; JP Clark’s Song of A Goat; Efuru and Iduu by Flora Nwapa, Nigeria’s first female novelist; Second Class Citizen and The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta; Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, and the collection of poems Beware, Soul Brother by Chinua Achebe; The Voice by Gabriel Okara; Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame; Zulu Sofola’s Old Wines Are Tasty; John Munonye’s The Only Son, Obi, The Oil Man of Obange, A Wreath for the Maidens, and A Dancer of Fortunes, and so many others. And the poems of Okigbo, Soyinka, Okara, Clark, Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare, Ossie Enekwe, Pol Ndu, Nnamdi Olebara, Mamman Vatsa, etc.

There were also other early authors whose works were not on the curriculum at the time. They included T. M. Aluko (One Man, One Wife, Chief the Honourable Minister, Wrong Ones in the Dock, One Man, One Machete, etc), Onuora Nzekwu (Wand of Noble Wood and Blade Among the Boys), INC Aniebo (Anonymity of Sacrifice, The Journey Within, Of Wives, Talismans and the Dead, and Rearguard Actions), Chukwuemeka Ike (Toads for Supper and Naked Gods), and, of course, Ken Saro Wiwa. The list is by no means exhaustive.

The works of these great minds were a bottomless fountain from which I and those of my generation and later generations who cared drank freely, and they helped to shape our minds for the better. But as I write this, one question lingers on my mind: what happened to these literary greats of yonder days? Apart from a few that we know their whereabouts, the rest might as well have gone into oblivion – unsung, uncelebrated, unremembered. Apart from the Wole Soyinka Centre, an annual poetry prize and an investigative journalism prize in honour of Soyinka, I doubt if there is much else. Cyprian Ekwensi has an arts and culture centre in Garki, Abuja named after him. Achebe, Tutuola, Aluko, Munonye, Enekwe, Nwapa, Henshaw and others who have joined their ancestors, what about them? These heroes and heroines of literature may have brought more fame and good image to this country than all the politicians we’ve had since independence put together. Unfortunately, they do not have the powers and the wherewithal to name streets and national monuments after themselves.

It was heartening to discover, recently, that there is a foundation set up in honour of James Ene Henshaw, who died in 2007. Henshaw also wrote Enough Is Enough, Children of the Goddess, Jewels of the Shrine, A Man of Character, among others. In its mission statement, which I found online, the foundation says it is “a charitable organisation set up to maintain and promote the literary legacy of James Ene Henshaw, a pioneer and one of the foremost playwrights to have emerged from the African continent”. Part of what it has elected to do in order to keep Henshaw’s legacy alive include to promote the understanding of African culture through literature and drama, encourage inter-cultural dialogue and literary debate, promote emerging African writers, and initiate, and support projects where young people can engage in creative activities.

That’s the way to go. If the government cannot honour these giants, it behoves us, as beneficiaries of their creative ingenuity, to begin to do something, however little, to immortalise them. It’s only then we can beat our chest and say, truly, the labours of our heroes past shall never be in vain.