The Chinua Achebe test of National Honours

If someone close to you is murdered, you endure indescribable pain. If that someone was murdered by the police or the police refused to solve the murder, that pain never subsides.  This is the experience of many in Nigeria. I know this agony well: my older brother was murdered at his own front door four […]

If someone close to you is murdered, you endure indescribable pain.

If that someone was murdered by the police or the police refused to solve the murder, that pain never subsides.  This is the experience of many in Nigeria.

I know this agony well: my older brother was murdered at his own front door four years ago.  But the police would not investigate. They wanted money, and a car.  Or else.

My family considers justice paid for to be injustice, so we took the “or else” option.  The pain inflicted by the Nigeria police, I confirm, is far deeper than that of the murderer.

The family of SaharaReporters publisher Omoyele Sowore suffered a similar experience last year.  Because of his celebrity, the police swore in public that they would bring the murderer to book.

They have not.  Because policing in Nigeria is not, as in other climes, related to the maintenance of law and order for all, but to protect the interests of the rich and the powerful.

That is why, 62 years after independence, our so-called police are principally a protective detail service for the powerful and privileged, doing demeaning and unprofessional household chores.  The rest of the time, they are battering ordinary citizens in the streets.

The powerful and the privileged do return the favour. That is why, this week, security-related figures will receive so-called ‘National Honours’ by the government.  An authority with its reputation deep in sewage will squander scarce resources to dole out questionable symbols of recognition.

But what is honour?  Think about this, for instance: the Buhari administration has promised that it will complete all the projects that were left behind by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.

Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami bragged: “It is a promise of CHANGE made and NEXT LEVEL delivery established.”

Remember: in 2011, Mr. Jonathan’s Presidential Projects Assessment Committee identified a whopping 11,886 in uncompleted projects nationwide.  This is the courageous target of the Buhari administration as it seeks to go out in a blaze of wonder.  [Caveat: last week, the same government announced that the Second Niger Bridge, which it had consistently bragged would be commissioned this month, will wait until 2023].

Recall also that in November 2012, Nasir El-Rufai, now the governor of Kaduna State, wrote a blistering commentary on the Jonathan administration after it emerged that 5 trillion naira ($31bn) had been stolen in just 30 months of his presidency.

Outraged, El-Rufai said, “If the President wants to be regarded with any vestige of respect now or in the future, he must rise up with some spine, face corruption squarely and fight it with sincerity. He must de-emphasize reliance on foreign and domestic borrowings that simply line up the pockets of the lenders and the few unpatriotic Nigerians serving their interests.  He must order the Debt Management Office to publish information on existing loans, tie them to the projects for which they were obtained, and make this information public to all Nigerians on a regular basis.”

Those words now ironically apply far more to Buhari than to Jonathan.  But Nigerians would also recall that when Buhari took over, he never stopped speaking about how the Obasanjo administration had squandered about $16bn in the power sector alone, swearing that he would get every penny back.

Question: Who will complete Buhari’s uncompleted projects and incomplete patriotism?

Curiously, many persons who made the Obasanjo and Jonathan administrations an example of reckless spending and kleptocracy appear set to receive Buhari’s National Honours on Tuesday.

Add to that painful spectre the fact that Buhari’s cure has turned out to be worse than the disease, and it is painful that he now wants to give away hundreds of awards, often to the same lepers who refused to build a leprosarium.

It is therefore an appropriate time for Nigerians to recall what I call the Chinua Achebe test of National Honours.

In 2004, in a letter to President Obasanjo, the man widely regarded as “the father of the African novel,” turned down an offer to receive a ‘Commander of the Federal Republic.’

He drew specific attention to his native Anambra State, 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,” with what appeared to be the connivance of the presidency.

While he had accepted previous awards with a sense of hope, he said, “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.”

In 2011, Mr. Achebe again turned down the efforts of the Jonathan government to give him the same award, “because the reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed let alone solved.”

Bookmarking the depth of his pain, he said, “Twenty-seven years ago I wrote a pamphlet called ‘The Trouble With Nigeria’, which was about corruption. Today matters are worse because they have been allowed to get worse.”

Almost 40 years following that book, matters are now at least 40 times worse, the monster nourished by succeeding governments.

How much worse?  Not only has almost every institution in Nigeria collapsed, and Nigeria itself is on the precipice.  But we honour and celebrate the people responsible for it, and ignore Nigerians, the victims.  Students cannot go to school.  Pensioners starve to death.  Roads have become deathtraps from both criminals and government incompetence.

We continue to be bedeviled by governments borrowing to embezzle, a menace first internationally identified by The Economist in 2001.   In 2016, the same magazine would call Jonathan “an ineffectual buffoon who let politicians and their cronies fill their pockets with impunity.”

Peace in the Buhari Years means that you live in hiding or poverty, cowering from bandits or paying ransoms with borrowed money while the rich send their families abroad.

As a nation, we beg for debt forgiveness alongside new borrowing, and even as we lack the courage to identify our saboteurs and kleptocrats by name.  Should any of them be mistakenly prosecuted, we apologize and send them home.   Our “anti-corruption” is such a ruse that HEDA now publishes a comprehensive annual Compendium of 100 High Profile Corruption Cases.  We are at the same time a testament and an embarrassment to hypocrisy.

We blindly crown or are crowned by political deities with pitifully small minds who can neither generate big ideas nor acknowledge them.  At their shrine, it is corruption is only when the opponent steals, otherwise decay and decadence deserve a hug.

But is it progress because your child can float on dubious funds abroad while his intellectually superior colleague is trapped behind the lecturers’ strike?

You admit that iron rusts and yet worship it?  You are comfortable with people in various stages of suffering and denial?  Who or what have you served?

No, our Achebe would never have acknowledged this award ceremony.  Once again, he would have spat in disgust.

But of course, Achebe did not simply have words.  He had character.  Long live your name, sir.

[I welcome public response, in 100 words or fewer, to this column.]

This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.     

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