Yet, it is the community that ultimately lends meaning to Okonkwo’s extraordinary prowess as a wrestler, his valor as a warrior, and his success as a farmer. As Achebe narrates, “As a young man of eighteen [Okonkwo] had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat.” It is a carefully phrased detail, underscoring that Okonkwo’s impressive resume of accomplishments is significant to the extent that it ennobles the community.

Often, students misapprehend the import of that dramatic moment towards the end of Things Fall Apart when Okonkwo beheads a messenger of the white administration, arrives at the shocking understanding that his fellows are in no haste to embrace his precipitate declaration of war, and decides to go off to a quiet place to hang himself. It is all too tempting to view Umuofia’s action in the way that Okonkwo does – as evidence of mass cowardice. Yet, a more careful reading reveals Okonkwo’s reaction as shallow and reductionist, rather like an unthinking man’s rush to a judgment that lacks context and nuance.

Umuofia has a settled protocol for going to war.

That elaborate procedure involves several steps: establishing a consensus among the male citizen that an external provocation rises to a probable cause for war; sending a delegation to the offending community to demand some form of reparation in order to avert war; in the event that the preceding gesture is repudiated, consulting the Oracle of the Hills and Caves, the deity that superintends war affairs to discern whether the impending war is a just, warranted one. In sum, these steps that must precede the declaration of war point to Umuofia’s deep commitment to the ethos of balance and harmony.

It may well be the case that Umuofia’s will to wage war has been dealt a blow by the invading whites. Yet, the community’s reluctance to let Okonkwo’s rash homicidal action stampede them to war is a decisive rebuke of a man so bereft of thought and so deeply obsessed with raw strength as to represent for the people of Umuofia the very embodiment of the horrors of inharmoniousness.

Earlier in the novel, we’d seen Okonkwo contemplate, both to himself as well as in a conversation with his best friend, Obierika, the idea of fighting alone. It is that heretical fantasy that he actualizes by beheading an emissary of the British machinery.

That beheading translates into a brusque summons to the warriors of Umuofia to fight a war that Okonkwo has “personalized.” By balking at that invitation, the people of Umuofia testify to the firmness and rootedness of their ethical code. Umuofia’s institutions are too solid – to say nothing of its citizens’ shared sense of balance – for the community to be easily swayed by the whims of their strongest man.

Part of Okonkwo’s curse is to lack the mental wherewithal to realize how the white man, though outnumbered, has nevertheless radically transformed Umuofia. Achebe’s tragic hero goes to his death without understanding how thoroughly the white man has redrawn Umuofia’s – nay Africa’s – map. Okonkwo has no inkling that his nine villages had become, in effect, the tiniest dot on a much larger map of a space the British would name Nigeria.

The consequences of that colonial redrawing of Africa’s map persist with us today. It was as if Okonkwo went to sleep one night in an autonomous space called Umuofia and awoke the next morning in a nightmare called Nigeria.

A small organic space saw itself swallowed whole, subsumed within a larger, inorganic and incoherent space. And this new larger space was designed, delineated, acquired and named entirely by British fiat.  Nor did the British – or the French, Spaniards or Portuguese – set out to make the territories they annexed in Africa into nations – in the likeness of the colonizing powers.

No, Africa was carved up in a wholly cavalier fashion, with the profit motive figuring as the imperial powers’ motive – never mind their claptrap about the civilizing mission. In his short novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad writes forthrightly about imperialism: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”  How did the colonial powers acquire addresses like Okonkwo’s Umuofia? Let’s take two examples from history, both testimonies from British colonial officials.

Following British and French agreement on the areas of British possession in northern Nigeria, Lord Salisbury triumphantly stated: “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has even trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.”

In similar vein, Sir Claude Macdonald, reflecting on how the British and Germans decided the boundaries of their territories in eastern Nigeria, said that “in those days we just took a blue pencil and a rule and we put it down at Old Calabar and drew that line up to Yola.”  It is no surprise that the new spaces cobbled together by the British – or the French, or the Portuguese – continue to exhibit pathologies of incoherence. Nigeria’s two major writers, Wole Soyinka and Achebe, have argued that Nigeria yet awaits its founding.

The space called Nigeria is otherwise an illusory idea, at best a promissory note awaiting redemption. The African Guardian magazine of November 16, 1992 reported a dramatic exchange at a public lecture: “The atmosphere became charged when [Ken] Saro-Wiwa, an uncompromising champion of minority rights, was called upon to comment on Professor Ade Ajayi’s 17-page lecture titled ‘The National Question in Historical Perspective’. As silence enveloped the entire hall, Saro-Wiwa…caused a stir with his opening remarks: ‘We don’t want Nigeria.’ The audience roared in affirmation. He went on to pour scorn on the current state of affairs in the nation…’

This country as presently defined cannot stand because it is anchored around wicked principles of the subordination of the minorities by the majority.’”      Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s unflattering assessment was made more than twenty years ago. Today, a man from the minority area – and Nigeria’s oil-rich hub as well – occupies the highest political post in Nigeria. Even so, many would argue – count me among them – that Nigeria remains every bit as messy and depressing and as unwanted as when Mr. Saro-Wiwa – hanged by the Nigerian state he once championed but later came to execrate – delivered his jeremiad.

This is the second part of a lecture I delivered at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The concluding part will be published next week.

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Like the British colonial authorities, Okonkwo is in no hurry to argue with any force weaker than himself – or with weakness of any sort, period. When he encounters weakness, especially weakness symbolized in another individual, his first impulse is to kill it, squelch it, erase it. He is a veritable serial killer, armed with various stratagems for killing his nemeses – the weak. When a man named Osugo contradicts him at a meeting, a hectoring Okonkwo reminds the man that “this meeting is for men.” As Achebe informs us, Okonkwo knew “how to kill a man’s spirit.” During the Week of Peace, a period when the earth goddess mandates the absolute absence of rancor, belligerence and violence from the community in exchange for her bequest of a bountiful harvest, an imperious Okonkwo thoughtlessly beats one of his wives.

For me, the one thing that’s even more significant than Okonkwo’s untoward exhibition of rude power is his community’s poise, their possession of the ultimate means to chastise the errant hero, their capacity – in other words – to deal with the threat of a man who appears not to know where his moral boundaries lie. When he defames Osugo, Okonkwo is compelled to apologize. When he breaches the Week of Peace, he scandalizes his community and incurs the wrath of the goddess whose priest makes a brusque, chastening visit to Okonkwo to spell out the fines.

Achebe damningly portrays Okonkwo as a man incapable of thought, a man who reposes too much faith in his physical prowess but puts no store by wisdom. Yet, there are numerous opportunities when the community forces Okonkwo to reckon with the fact that they – to say nothing of their ancestors and gods – are, in the end, more powerful than he. When the strongman foolishly ignores old Ezeudu’s counsel not to have a hand in killing the “doomed lad” called Ikemefuna, it falls to Obierika, Okonkwo’s best friend and an exemplar of the thinking man, to chide the morally repugnant Okonkwo. In a warning that proves prescient, Obierika describes Okonkwo’s participation in the killing of his adoptive son as the kind of act for which “the earth goddess wipes off” an entire family. Okonkwo earns himself a seven-year exile in his maternal home, Mbanta, when his gun discharges accidentally, inadvertently causing the death of a clansman, Ezeudu’s son.

In all of this, the instruction is that the people of Umuofia are able to rein in Okonkwo, a man who has developed a warped and ethically problematic vision of strength as corresponding to virtue. If he could, Okonkwo would gladly have stipulated that he was the only way and the light. He would have insisted that his community’s will be subordinated to his decrees. But Umuofia does not let him. Instead, the community constantly reclaims the ethical ground that Okonkwo wishes to usurp for sheer power.

The culmination of this tussle between the community’s sense of propriety and Okonkwo’s faith in violence arrives towards the end of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The men of Umuofia are holding a meeting to decide an appropriate response to the troubling presence of white men who – to paraphrase Obierika – have put a knife to the things that held the community together, gravely threatening Umuofia’s corporate cohesion. The meeting has hardly taken off when the uniformed messengers of the white intruders appear, with instructions to disband the gathering. Okonkwo confronts the haughty messengers, draws his machete and beheads one of them. In responding in this decisive, “manly” way to the provocations of the white presence, Okonkwo hopes to propel his fellows into war. In effect, he wishes to make a demand on the warriors of Umuofia. He wants them to prove themselves to him, to demonstrate that they deserve to be called warriors still. He wants them to illustrate that they have not become effeminate, wilted cowards.

The men of Umuofia stoutly reject Okonkwo’s precipitate action. They resist the summons to go to war on Okonkwo’s terms. They have a time-tested, settled protocol they must follow before declaring a war. They won’t let a failure at “thinking,” a man whose genius lies exclusively in acting out violently, to determine the nature and timing of their response to the foreign invaders, however egregious and gratuitous the “white” provocation. Rather than join Okonkwo in battle, the men of Umuofia wonder aloud about his awful act. They do not admire his decision to act alone when communal action was meet and mandated. It is, of course, a moment of mutual incomprehension. Okonkwo misreads his community’s refusal to embrace his violent act as final proof of Umuofia’s decline, its descent into paralysis. Convinced in his misapprehension, he leaves the scene of his final murder to go off and hang himself, no doubt viewing himself as a man utterly betrayed by his fellows, a man who sees no alternative other than a final act of separation: suicide.

In death, as in life, Okonkwo is a figure of extreme impulsiveness. Left to his devices, he would sooner force his community to bend to his will. If it were up to him, then even the ancestors and gods of Umuofia must redefine themselves according to Okonkwo’s strictures. In present-day Nigeria, a man like him could very well be an imperial president or governor – and proceed to mistake himself for the totality of his community, his interests and values superseding those of the rest of his people. Yet, Achebe’s first novel reveals how the members of the Umuofia community – ancestors, the living, and deities – work in concert to check Okonkwo’s masculinist excesses and to hold him accountable to the community’s ethical precepts.

The question then arises: What has happened to weaken such faculties of ethical enforcement in contemporary Africa, specifically in the space called Nigeria?

The column is excerpted from a lecture I gave at Brown University on April 29, 2013. The second part will be published next week.

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First, she took food to prisoners at the Nigerian Prisons at old Government Station, Amawbia.

Then, later the same day, she gathered little children at her home and treated them to food and drinks. Eight years ago, when Mother became 80, my siblings and I threw a party to celebrate the woman that’s popularly known as Ngala – a praise name that declares her worthy of pride.

On the occasion, her family, friends and admirers – many of the latter men and women who, decades ago, were her students – came out to eat, drink and reminisce.

One man drew me aside and said, “Listen, your mother never spared the cane when she was my teacher. She flogged and flogged me, almost on a daily basis.” The man paused, his eyes searching mine. I wondered where the confider was going next.

Kakadu, a compelling musical

Uche Nwokedi, a Lagos-based Nigerian lawyer, has written a powerful musical called “Kakadu,” a moving dramatic portrayal of Nigeria’s promise shortly after Independence and an exploration of how that promise dimmed. “Kakadu,” set in a night club of the same name, is brilliant on several levels.

Its main characters are richly complex and marvelously drawn. The richest, most captivating character may well be Kakadu itself, an amalgam of energies, dreams, peoples and narratives.

The writer, Mr. Nwokedi – an attorney who is also a polyglot and true renaissance man – has managed to make this musical’s sociological space come to enthralling life. Lord Lugard, the musician impresario who presides over Kakadu, is a larger-than-life, almost priestly personage who both embodies the hedonistic, idyllic spirit of Kakadu as well as personifies the tragedy of Nigeria.

I admire the flair with which Mr. Nwokedi evokes signal moments of Nigeria’s political biography in the musical. Equally impressive is the deft way he leavens his narrative with major moments in African history – including convulsive events in 1960s Congo and Togo.

He does a superb job of dramatizing the Nigerian attitude that bad things – as happened in places like Togo – won’t happen in Nigeria.

That attitude has since been chastened by experience.  I well remember when Nigerians used to boast that an Eyadema-like dictator could never emerge much less thrive in Nigeria. Then Abacha happened, “worsting” Eyadema in every department that mattered.

And Olusegun Obasanjo soon followed, offering Nigerians another lesson in imperial excess. One of the great achievements of this quintessential Nigerian musical is the incorporation of music and what I’d call different languages (Yoruba, Igbo, pidgin, and formal English) to unfurl the canvas of the play. In some ways, the music is constitutive of a broader narrative.

As the musical enters the Biafran War period, the music becomes more elegiac, thoroughly imbued with dramatic/emotional power. This musical, which premieres on May 9 and runs till May 19th at the Agip Recital Hall, MUSON Centre, deserves a wide audience, in Nigeria and beyond – for it captures something of the unfolding drama of a postcolonial space caught in the seemingly endless, often frustrating and perplexing, throes of realizing itself.

Part of the power of Mr. Nwokedi’s artistic offering is that his musical speaks in a particular and direct fashion to Nigeria’s experience but also opens up, on closer examination, to illuminate the experience of any former colony – be it Kenya or Ghana – that continues to wrestle with the burden of forging a common identity out of a chaos of communities assembled by erstwhile European colonizers.

“Kakadu the Musical” is a courageous work that does not flinch from confronting the sad, tragic compulsions of our history. Yet, I like the overall accent of a stubborn hope that shoots through the performance – a refusal to yield to despair.

I’m deeply impressed that, in the end, the musical surrenders neither to a bleak vision nor to a false optimism. It is a musical that keeps its head without compromising its heart.

The musical is a surpassing contribution to Nigeria’s cultural heritage and political history. Theatre lovers in Nigeria and beyond should be in Mr. Nwokedi’s debt for the considerable artistic powers he has brought to bear on this musical – ambitious in conception, and rousingly achieved.

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Then Mr. Amaechi brought the whole messy deal out in the open by pointedly accusing the president of being after him.  After close to fifteen years of observing and writing about public affairs in Nigeria, I confess to a certain weariness about the predictable turn of Nigerian politics.

It’s frequently about power for the sake of power. It’s seldom about issues or principles. It hardly has anything to do with the vital interests or legitimate aspirations of Nigerians.

In Governor Amaechi’s version of events, it would seem as if the feud with the president was triggered by a vestige of principle.

According to the governor, he had incurred presidential wrath for insisting that fuel subsidy fraud be addressed seriously.

Mr. Jonathan’s proxies have maintained the fiction that the president isn’t aware that he’s in a do-or-die fight with the Rivers’ governor.  News accounts insist that there’s a real state of war between both camps. And they suggest that it all has to do with 2015 elections.

In other words, with power.  There’s little question now that Mr. Jonathan intends to seek reelection. From the look of things, Mr. Amaechi is far from enthusiastic about the president’s plans. In fact, there are speculations that he’s negotiating to be on a ticket to oppose Mr. Jonathan.

The Jonathan-Amaechi tiff exemplifies Nigerian politicians’ governing obsession: the relentless pursuit of power for its own sake.

Hardly does one witness a commensurate interest in bettering society, in using power to make their immediate spaces more livable.  Neither Jonathan nor Amaechi has spelt out a plan for reforming Nigeria’s educational system, a chute that churns out more and more functional illiterates year after year.

Neither man has articulated initiatives to create jobs in large numbers – jobs that hundreds of thousands of unemployed graduates sorely need. If either man has a vision for tackling Nigeria’s climate of festering insecurity, or instituting a healthcare system worthy of human beings, or lifting Nigerians from the lowest rungs of global measurements of living standards, he has kept it a secret.

Read any Nigerian newspaper and the pages are dominated by news of one political quarrel or another. One day, the opposition consortium pledges to sweep the ruling PDP away come 2015. Another day, the PDP restates its determination to (mis)rule for another hundred years. Neither group respects Nigerians enough to factor them into the debate. Neither side takes Nigerians seriously enough to even sketch out a manifesto.

No, we never get from any party or candidate a vision of where they propose to take us, much less a compass or road map for how to get to the destination.  Ask a Nigerian politician why s/he wants political power and you’re likely to get one of three predictable answers.

One: “To move the nation forward.” Two: “God/my pastor/my people asked me to come and serve.” Three: “To deliver the dividends of democracy.” Sadly, nobody ever asks the follow-up question: What exactly does it mean to “move the nation forward,” “to come and serve” or “to deliver the dividends of democracy”?

My suspicion is that the first person who asks would get an incoherent stutter for an answer. Most Nigerian politicians would actually be shocked to learn that there’s more to political power than self-enrichment.

And the individual as well as collective record of Nigeria’s rulers (and one advisedly uses rulers rather than leaders) – the record is dismal. More than fifty years after Nigeria attained flag Independence, its rulers – president, governors and local government chairmen – are still hard put to it to list any significant achievements.

Yet, Nigeria – with its myriad crises and developmental challenges – is tailor-made for great leaders. Again and again, the space called Nigeria yearns for a set of visionary men and women to take up the task of founding a national community within it.

Again and again, the call is ignored, the imperative abdicated in favor of self-aggrandized, self-inflated pursuits.  It all brings us back to the Jonathan-Amaechi face-off. I suspect that Mr. Jonathan and Mr. Amaechi are spending many hours in strategy sessions with their cohorts, hammering out maneuvers to out-duel the other.

The ultimate victims are the Nigerian people. It is their business that is shunted to the side by their overpaid, under-thinking rulers. Their conditions become bleaker by the day; yet, those in the driver seat have the gear in reverse – and on full speed!

If Nigerian rulers devoted some of their waking hours to meditating on ways of making Nigeria a country truly founded on the rule of law; if they thought deeply about raising their country to the level of some of the foreign nations where they, their families and coterie luxuriate; if they gave a thought to the habits of real leaders, not the ways of insatiable slave drivers – then Nigeria would look and feel like an address for dignified human beings.  Instead, Nigerian politicians invest the resources of time, money and mind in power-grasping schemes.

To look into their brinksmanship is to discover how bereft of substance it is. No principle is in play – except, of course, the dud principle that power is an end in itself.  Are there courageous men and women in Jonathan and Amaechi’s inner circles?

If there are, they should remind their respective “oga at the top” that history casts a harsh eye on those who, handed opportunities to become leaders, choose instead to serve themselves and play savage power games.

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That move represented a significant shift in the Jonathan administration’s policy. Before now, Mr. Jonathan had argued that the sectarian militants were faceless – and that he had not figured out the wizardry of negotiating with ghosts.

The administration had contended that, as a fundamental condition, Boko Haram’s rank and file must step out of the shadows and – as it were – introduce themselves and voice their grievances.

Despite that stipulation, some prominent northerners, including the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III, and several governors, have been pressing a case for extending amnesty to Boko Haramists. That advocacy always raised disturbing questions.

One wishes that the Sultan and other leaders had spoken with equal insistence and directedness in condemnation of the carnage caused by Boko Haram. Even if it makes sense to invite the ghostly Boko Haram to a waltz with the government, how do we justify the cold indifference to the victims of the sect’s indiscriminate, cold-blooded slaughter of innocents?

Why arrange an armistice with fiendish, death-causing ghosts but ignore those they’ve killed – as well as the bereaved forever scarred by the cruel loss of loved ones?  President Jonathan’s changed – or at least evolving – stance on the issue of amnesty for Boko Haram has provoked widespread criticism. Some see the matter as a clear-cut criminal affair: a group of misguided suicides out to inflict homicidal horror on society in the alleged name of their faith.

Human Rights Watch, an international body, estimates that 3000 people have perished since 2009 in the whole blow-up. Most of the casualties were victims of Boko Haram’s attacks, but some lost their lives to the government’s reprisals.

My guess is that the casualty figure is on the conservative side.  Any wonder that it’s so difficult to bracket Boko Haram and amnesty in the same sentiment and sentence? Or that some critics, among them the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), tend to view the amnesty option as tantamount to government capitulation?

If Mr. Jonathan was in the past disinclined to negotiate with Boko Haram’s faceless hounds, why is he now hearkening to entreaties to do so? And if members of the sect had preferred to operate in anonymity, what are the odds that, with an amnesty dangled in their faces, they will peel off their masks and show their faces? Is it the case, perhaps, that the Sultan and others championing amnesty have been in conversation with the Haramists?

If so, can the Sultan and other pleaders guarantee that members of the sect will consent to lay down their weapons and integrate themselves into society the moment amnesty is pronounced?  That would be a curious and surprising development, for two reasons.

One is that any person or group that upholds the murder of innocent strangers as a pious act hardly strikes me as possessing the faculty to trade their gruesome pastime for governmental forgiveness.

Two: Boko Haram’s ostensible “justification” is that Western-style education and its baggage of values have wrought the disaster Nigeria has become. The group’s prescription has flowed from that first conclusion: the entrenchment of Islamic values – Boko Haram brand. That, the group has said again and again, was the only antidote to Nigeria’s fetid, festering moral crises.

Given those planks, I don’t see bright prospects for a meaningful exchange between the Nigerian state and Boko Haram. There are two scenarios in which peace would be feasible. One is if the Sultan felt up to persuading Boko Haram that Nigeria is now less tainted by Western influences?

The other is if Boko Haram’s homicidal rage was always less about irrigating a turn to piety than the achievement of political ends. In other words, if the sect was always a tool to wrest certain political carrots from the government, then the terms of the amnesty could be tailored to deliver the desired political goals.

There are several ways of looking at the President Jonathan’s amnesty game. Deep down, one shares popular outrage at the idea that the government say to murderers of thousands of innocent: Go, for your sins have been erased from the ledger. In an ideal situation, the government would insist on prosecuting those who make it their business to terrorize, maim and murder.

But a compelling counter argument can be deployed: the Nigerian state is, in fact, the most ferocious terrorist operating within the Nigerian space.

The instruments of that state – among them the military, police, security agencies and the judiciary – are too often implicated in the commission of grave crimes against Nigerians.  Think of Odi and think of Zaki Biam, two communities leveled by military firepower – therefore, twin metaphors of the Nigerian state’s capacity for inflicting unspeakable horror on its own people.

On a lesser scale, think of the Maiduguri massacre of 2009. It happened shortly after Boko Haram made its first daring confrontation of the state. In response, armed soldiers and police swept through the city of Maiduguri and rounded up men at random, ordered their quarry to lie on the ground, face down, and shot them to death at point blank range. Or consider the macabre parade of corpses found floating down the Ezu River in Anambra.

After some obligatory noises of outrages, everybody moved on, the corpses silenced. Nothing has been heard from the joint committee of the National Assembly that went to “investigate” what happened. Nobody has had the spine to compel the Nigerian police to demonstrate that the corpses were not detainees that they executed extra-judicially – and then dumped in the river.  In fact, one of the greatest crimes of which the Nigerian state is guilty is a failure to take Nigerians seriously.

A government that took its citizens seriously would recognize that its first and primary job is to secure the lives and property of its citizenry. On that score, the Jonathan administration – like its predecessors – has been woeful.

The Nigerian state has mastered the art of ignoring its victims of violent death, acting as if these never lived, as if they never had a right to live out their natural years, as if their lives were not unjustly, brutally abbreviated.

Like its predecessors, this administration’s security acumen seems to start and end with using all the machinery of the state to ensure that certain privileged functionaries have the freedom to loot with neither let nor hindrance.

A state that reckoned with its citizens would long have figured that Boko Haram is but a symptom of a deeper sickness – that sickness being the fact that the space known as Nigeria, as Wole Soyinka has argued, has not been inspirited with a nation. There’s not – nor has there ever been – any content or meaning to Nigerian citizenship.

There’s little recourse, except for grim acceptance that “God is in control,” for any Nigerian killed either by a Boko Haram explosive or by a gun fired by a power-drunk police officer at a road block. There can be no real Nigerian nation when an Igbo girl born and brought up in Yola is still counted an outsider, even a “foreigner,” and a Fulani boy born and bred in Lagos is nevertheless expected to list, say, Sokoto as his state of origin. Nigeria remains a half-hearted sham, a convenient arrangement held together by the joint if tenuous greed of a privileged few guzzling oil.

The truth is that President Jonathan cannot win a war against Boko Haram, any more than a one-legged man can win an ass-kicking contest. And if he cannot vanquish them, he might as well negotiate with them.

Still, Nigerians had better know the context and extent of what’s going on. Even if Boko Haram went for amnesty and ceased fire, there’s no guarantee that peace will reign in Nigeria. An inherently unjust and reflexively violent Nigerian state will inevitably provoke other Boko Haram-like groups into existence.

These groups would have learned – from the Haramists as well as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta – the technology of marshaling its own means of violence in order to force carrots out of the Nigerian state – or to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the loveless construct called Nigeria.

Therein lies the point which the current debate about amnesty for Boko Haram conveniently sidesteps or ignores. A more fundamental debate is called for – a deeper negotiation – and it must be over the terms of our collective membership in a shared nation called Nigeria.

If that negotiation doesn’t take place, Nigeria is condemned to remain a space of perpetual pain and death for its so-called citizens, a dissolution cruelly, needlessly postponed.     Please follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Ezeudu emerged as a sought-after artist, a member of the highly regarded Aka circle of artists whose inaugural exhibition held in 1986. These artists were individually accomplished but they burst as a collective onto the national and international art scene.

Their works gained critical acclaim within and outside Nigeria, and attracted collectors from near and far.

Working in the media of painting and sculptor, Bona soon established a formidable professional reputation. He compiled an impressive dossier of group and individual exhibitions both within Nigeria and several foreign countries.

For a while, it seemed a safe bet that only diminished personal drive could possibly stand between Bona and a soaring career as an artist. Then on September 26 2009, he and his wife, Ngozi, a teacher, received a jolt that no parent should ever have to face.

It was the kidnap of their 19-year-old son, Lotachukwu – Lota, as family and friends called him. A rather bright second-year accountancy student at the University of Nigeria (Enugu campus), Lota was last headed for the home of a Divisional Police Officer, Sam Chukwu.

He and the DPO’s son, Nnaemeka Chukwu, were classmates in secondary school. The two young men often exchanged visits. On the fateful day, Nnaemeka had asked Lota to visit and help look over a computer that one Desmond Chinwuba ostensibly wished to buy. Earlier, Nnaemeka had told Lota and other friends that Desmond as well as one Ernest Okeke were both serving police officers, and his father’s aides. It was a flat lie.

Both Desmond and Ernest, it turned out, were ex-police officers making a living from crime – and under the apparent protection of a senior police officer. Both men had been arrested, charged with armed robbery, and fired by the police. Curiously, the DPO gave shelter in his own home to these two rogue cops.  A skilled young man, Lota boasted a technical flair that enabled him to take a look at a bad computer and fix it.

Yet, when he answered Nnaemeka Chukwu’s invitation to look at a computer that Desmond was reportedly interested in purchasing, he became an apparent victim of entrapment. To this day, his parents Bona and Ngozi quaver as they recall the first time they received a telephone call from Lota’s kidnappers demanding a hefty ransom. Lota’s sisters have been scarred by their only brother’s absence from their lives.

Many sleepless, horrendous nights have been part of the family’s lot. Numerous friends and relatives ran to the Ezeudus’ side, to lighten the weight of their anguish. Even so, the agony still sizzles like a raw sore, the pain often unbearable.

Three and a half years later, Lota has not returned to his family and has not been heard from. One of the suspects has reportedly confessed that Lota was murdered. Ernest Okeke, Nnaemeka Chukwu and several other suspects are in custody, charged with plotting Lota’s kidnap. A court also ordered that the police arrest DPO Sam Chukwu. Mr. Chukwu eluded the police, and has been in hiding for more than a year.

Desmond Chinwuba has been on the run as well. One casualty of Lota’s disappearance was that Bona’s artistic creations ceased. For more than three years, he devoted his time entirely to ensuring that those responsible for harming his son were brought to justice. It became a consuming mission, an unrelenting task. Some friends and relatives as well as investigators implored him to move on, to leave everything in God’s hand.

But Bona refused, as he should. Part of the trouble with Nigeria is precisely that citizens who are needlessly, undeservedly subjected to trauma are all-too often ready to let their tormentors off the hook, willing to stare skyward and say, “God, revenge is yours.”

That kind of abdication does not solve any problems; it perpetuates and compounds them. The criminals in our midst are unconscionable. They thrive – and will continue to thrive – as long as aggrieved persist in throwing up their hands in helpless resignation.

As parents, Bona and Ngozi chose a different path: to invest time and resources into seeing that justice is done by their son and by them. A consummate artist, it was for Bona a huge sacrifice to have to put aside his art in order to focus on holding a set of evil conspirators to account. Art has been Bona’s passion and vocation for years.

We both attended the same secondary school – St. Michaels, Nimo; even in those days, he showed signs of turning into a star artist. I was left awe-struck by his paintings in those days. He was also the cartoonist of our school magazine; his cartoons entertained, inspired, and provoked thought. It was as if, in those early days, he served notice that he would emerge in time as an artist to be reckoned with. He more than fulfilled that promise.

After a stint as a college lecturer, Bona resigned and committed himself wholly to his art – achieving the distinction, rare in any society, of making a living from his creativity. Then the forces of darkness snatched his son away and forced an interruption of his work as a professional artist.

For me, then, it was a great relief to learn that Bona had returned to his art and has a solo exhibition that’s due to open in two days – on Thursday, March 28 – at the prestigious Didi Museum (175 Akin Adesola Street, Victoria Island, Lagos). The exhibition, which opens at 5 p.m., represents something of a major creative resurrection.

The exhibition will run till April 7, 2013. I say, thank God that, after undergoing such an unspeakable personal tragedy as the wicked murder of his son, Bona has come to rediscover his artistic spark.   During a recent visit to Nigeria, I was privileged to visit Bona’s gallery and to see some of the paintings for this upcoming exhibition.

I had anticipated a certain funereal twist to the work, a reflection of the artist’s tormented spirit. Instead I was delighted to see that the paintings are some of the most exuberant and triumphant creations of Bona’s extraordinary career. Indeed, the paintings bear the unmistakable mark of Bona’s artistic signature – a fluid and bold deployment of colors, crisp attentiveness to imagistic details, and an abiding interest in exploring the intersection between the material and immaterial realms of experience.

Clearly, Bona’s current work is a testament to an artist’s insistence that art can serve as an idiom of rebirth. In the current works, Bona celebrates life and offers the ultimate honor to a son whose star was abbreviated far too soon.

Bona reminds us that art can offer humans a means of triumph over pain, tragedy and evil. His art, which was always powerful and resonant, has acquired an accent of urgency, vibrancy and a celebratory air.   Please follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe

In a tweet, US diplomats in Abuja said they were “deeply disappointed” by Mr. Jonathan’s action. The tweet continued: “We see this as a setback in the fight against corruption.”
 The reaction was a rather startling, if refreshing, breach of diplomatic convention. But its premise was also fundamentally misconceived.

Forget about “deep disappointment.” Nobody who has observed the Jonathan administration from the moment of its conception should have been disappointed, period. The government acted altogether in character in pardoning Mr. Alamieyeseigha. It can be said, in fact, that President Jonathan did the job he was “elected” to do – pure and simple.

 For me, the truly baffling thing about the US tweet was the presupposition that Mr. Jonathan was engaged in a “fight against corruption.” Flowing from that profound misperception was the claim that the pardon of Mr. Alamieyeseigha represented “a setback” in that ostensible fight. The US got it wrong. 

Let’s be clear. Mr. Jonathan’s administration has never been in the business of fighting corruption. Yes, it’s invoked the bland rhetoric from time to time. But fighting? No! In fact, there’s no real moral or ethical difference between Mr. Alamieyeseigha and those who presumed to forgive him his trespasses. The two parties, forgiver and forgiven, belong within the same conclave of iniquity. The Jonathan administration reeks of corruption. Since its occupation of the throne in Aso Rock, the government has accumulated a dossier of scandals – from questionable, smelly deals in the oil sector to the hiring of political operatives notorious for their stinky pasts.
 The Nigerian president has been characterised in some quarters as confused and clueless. It’s an unfair – and patently false – charge. Mr. Jonathan is as clear-eyed about his mission as any of his predecessors. And one thing he understands clearly is that he was not put in Aso Rock to fight corruption. He was put in there to “fight” corruption only with speeches whilst maintaining a conspicuous respect for the rights and privileges of Nigeria’s who’s who in the corruption industry.

 Former Governor James Onanefe Ibori of Delta must be regretting the day he fled to Dubai as Jonathan’s security agents hounded him in the creeks of the Niger Delta. Discovered in his Dubai hideout by the ever-alert Interpol, Mr. Ibori was extradited to the UK where he stood trial for money laundering and received a 13-year jail sentence. The British were able to strike the fear of the law in an Ibori, who, in Nigeria, swaggered his way to acquittal on more than 100 counts of corruption and money laundering! In the UK where it’s harder to buy judges, Mr. Ibori ate the humble pie, pleading guilty to avert a more damaging trial.
 Had he given thought to the matter, Mr. Ibori would have stayed back in Nigeria. Indeed, he should have handed himself to officers of Mr. Jonathan’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. The worst prospect would have been his arraignment. He would then have been able to send a delegation of “elders” and “royal fathers” to go and see Mr. Jonathan on his behalf. The peace-building missionaries would have assured the president of ex-governor Ibori’s “total loyalty” and implored him to regard the errant governor as his “political son.” That would have been the end of the matter! Or, not quite: Mr. Ibori might have landed a choice contract or two – or some juicy appointment, to use a favorite Nigerian adjective.

 President Jonathan has a senior special adviser on ethics on his payroll. Yet, anybody who longs to take a measure of the president’s ethical funds has only to look at the shining star of Tony Anenih in the Jonathan firmament. In the last three months, the Presidency appointed Mr. Anenih to chair the board of the Nigerian Ports Authority and then elevated the selfsame Anenih to the post of chairman of the ruling party’s Board of Trustees.
That Mr. Jonathan saw fit to bestow the two posts on Mr. Anenih speaks volumes – about the two men. It says that Mr. Jonathan “knows” what he’s doing, and in particular that he knows how to prepare for and win the 2015 presidential (s)election. In Nigeria’s political circles, Mr. Anenih is called the “Leader” and “Mr. Fix-it.” Yet, the man was a woeful failure at his most prominent past assignment as Nigeria’s works minister. Under his watch, Nigerian roads remained dismal, even though N300 billion had been budgeted for his ministry.

Mr. Anenih’s accolades credit the man’s foxiness, especially his expertise in turning sure losers into certain winners (or vice versa). During the Obasanjo days, Mr. Anenih was the first to announce to the world that there was no vacancy in Aso Rock – before the PDP ran away with wangled landslides. Summoned to Mr. Jonathan’s side, as the 2015 polls draw closer, Nigerians must now take seriously a recent warning from Kema Chikwe that Mr. Jonathan was already virtually re-(s)elected.

 A friend of mine jokingly derided Mr. Anenih as “chairman of the PDP’s board of the tired.” But the matter is too serious to be consigned to a joke. At bottom, the Jonathan-Anenih cosiness reveals something about the president’s vision of where Nigeria is – and where it should be headed. It is a terrifying vision and prospect. It’s also consistent with the president’s temperament, outlook and unimpressive record.

 Not since former president Olusegun Obasanjo personally oversaw the petroleum industry has there been more apprehension about corruption – the absence of transparency – in the sector. Yet, Mr. Jonathan’s body language betrays a man at peace with monumental corruption. For sure, he has never contemplated acting to address the documentation of sleaze in the oil sector.
 Mr. Jonathan has not disappointed me precisely because he has lived up – or down – to my expectations of his presidency. The forces that conspired to enthrone him were not looking for a sure-footed, determined and nimble crusader against corruption. They wanted a certified protector of the interests of the corrupt, in fact, a veritable fertilizer of corruption. He has fit the billing and served the mission.

 Former EFCC chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, was quoted in the New York Times as deploring the pardon granted Mr. Alamieyeseigha. And then he said: “Corruption is our main problem in Nigeria. We don’t need this kind of negative signal. This is a tragedy.” Well, President Jonathan would disagree. For him, corruption is not Nigeria’s main problem; it is Nigeria’s main opportunity. And the clemency to the Alamieyeseighas, seen by Mr. Ribadu as a negative sign and tragedy, may well be Mr. Jonathan’s assurance to the “selectors” of Nigeria’s president that he is ever dead set against rocking the boat.
 Memo to the US government: Mr. Jonathan is doing his job. A central requirement of that job is to NOT fight corruption.
 
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Startled from sleep, I dashed for the phone set, reaching it just too late. I was about to turn back into bed when the phone rang again. My cousin, Sunday Akpagu, was on the other end: in Nigeria. “Is everything okay?”

I asked, somewhat apprehensive.  “Eleti has departed,” he said in an even, terse voice.  “Eleti” was his mother and my aunt – my father’s only sister. She was also the last of her siblings to die, outlasting my father (Christopher Chidebe, otherwise known as C.C.) and two brothers – Uncle Augustine, who was her immediate older, and Uncle Linus, her immediate younger.

“Eleti” was her praise name; her real name Mgbogo. The praise name was short for “Electric,” a metaphor that referred to and celebrated her light-toned, coppery skin, her wide, radiant smile and eyes that sparkled with life. News of Aunty Mgbogo’s death stung me, even though a part of me had known for three or so years that the end for her was awfully close.

She had had a stroke a little more than three years ago and had been bed-ridden since. In a country with little by way of healthcare, she had had to depend on relatives. In fact, two of my cousins, Paulina and Uzoamaka, had devoted themselves full-time to caring for their mother.

My aunt’s other children as well as nephews and nieces had done their bit to help, sometimes with money, always with affection.

Electric was the least lettered among her siblings. In fact, in the custom of her day and circumstance, she had not attended any formal schools. Even so, she easily stepped into the role of my teacher once I began to ask questions about my paternal grandparents.

These grandparents had died long before my parents married in 1958. I was told that my parents and uncles had one or two photographs of their parents. But those prized, irreplaceable photographs went up in smoke when our family home was gutted by a fire set days after the end of the 30-month Biafran War.

One day in the mid-1990s, visiting home from the US, I asked “Eleti” to describe my grandfather, a man who fascinated me the more I heard about his exploits, his mien and mannerisms.

“That’s him there,” Aunty Mgbogo said in Igbo, pointing to my elder brother. “He’s my father come back to life. That’s why I call him Nna.” Of course, I knew that my aunt always addressed my big brother, John – a medical doctor – as Nna, a word that stands for Father.

Yet, I had always imagined it was her quirky way of honoring my brother as a first-born son. No, my aunt insisted; she venerated my brother as her reincarnated father.  “Our father was exactly like your brother,” she continued. “Same height and same build. The only difference is that our father was much lighter in complexion.”  On a different occasion, when a visitor to our home complimented my writing, my aunt said she was not surprised at all about my gifts.

“Your grandfather was the first person from Amawbia to learn the English language.”  Uncle Augustine, who was present, said she was mistaken. Their father, he said, did not speak English as much as he entertained audiences with a smattering of English words. Aunt Mgbogo stood her ground. A jovial, filial debate ensued. “What do you know?” Uncle Augustine teased. “It’s not as if you know ABC yourself.” My aunt responded: “I don’t know but I know that people would gather and beg our father to speak English to them.

And he did.” The truth, I found out, was somewhere along the gradient of their lighthearted disputation. When some British merchants first showed up in Amawbia, my grandfather was one of several youths apparently taken with their promise of great new opportunities. He and these other adventuresome youngsters agreed to venture out with the curious white men into the alien terrain of what’s now called the Niger Delta.

They trekked the distance, more than one hundred miles, by foot. Once in the Warri area, they were engaged as sawers of timber for the Europeans.

It didn’t take long before the youngsters realized they had made a mistake, and wanted nothing better than to return to the rhythm of life they knew in Amawbia. On their appointed departure date, my grandfather was too sick to make the trip. He asked the others to explain his situation, and promised to make the trip home once he regained his health and strength.

When several weeks passed without his return, his relatives surmised that he had died. They arranged a funeral to mourn my grandfather, as was the custom, even for an absentee corpse. They dug a grave and threw a tree stump into it, imploring the earth to accept the log in lieu of their relative’s missing remains. A week or so later, my grandfather, Ndibe, sauntered back into the village.

His people, unaccustomed to the appearance of the “dead” in physical form, were at once astonished and awed by the augury. They summoned a traditional healer, who had to perform rites to expiate the aberrancy and reverse the earlier burial. A new grave was dug and another stump given to the earth, which was entreated to permit the community to reclaim – ritually exhume – the man who had been buried in absentia.

Since my grandfather had spent a longer time with the British merchants, he came equipped with their corruptions of English speech, mostly sharp, scolding expressions. Some evenings, some people would gather around him and ask that he speak the white man’s tongue to them. “Bladder fooloo!” my grandfather would recite, mangling the English “Bloody fool!” Or he’d say, “Sucalawag!” or “Ah deal wid you!”

Thus was born the legend – which “Eleti” embraced but Uncle Augustine found amusing – thus arose the legend that Grandfather was the first in his town to be versed in English.  In December 1988, as I was about to set out to the US in 1988, my aunt made one request.

“Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t marry a white woman.” “Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you think there are some good white women?” She gave the matter a thought, her face lit up with that smile that seemed fixed. “White women are good, very good,” she said. Having disarmed me, she underscored her point: “I want a wife whose tongue I can understand.

And who can understand mine.” I was still wrestling with the fact of Aunty Mgbogo’s death when, last Saturday, an old friend, Mudiaga Ofuoko, rang me with news of another death. This time, the deceased was Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, also known as Peter Alexander Adione-Egom – but I called him, simply, Ashiki. Mudiaga had seen a note on Facebook announcing Ashikiwe’s death.

He immediately called me for two reasons. One, he knew that Ashiki was my colleague at the African Guardian magazine and a dear friend. Two, he’d read my first novel, Arrows of Rain, where an intriguing character named Ashiki – forged out of the real-life copy – makes himself felt.

Ashiki had died after a long battle with cancer. He was a truly remarkable man who once was one of the most fascinating personalities in the character-choked city of Lagos. When I first met him in the mid-1980s, he was a fashion statement personified. He always wore a pair of shorts pulled up to his navel, his white shirt tucked in – and then sported a long pair of socks that often reached his knees. A teetotaler in his last few years, he used to combine a reputation as a rare renaissance man of culture with the image of a reveler who loved his cognac, cigars and women.

A legendary athlete in his days at King’s College, Lagos, he had proceeded to Cambridge University in the UK. There, he raced and beat the novelist Jeffery Archer in an Oxbridge track meet. Ashiki had traveled through much of the world, living for some time in Denmark and serving as trusted economic adviser to former Tanzanian leader, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.

At the Guardian, he self-deprecatingly adopted the name “motor park economist,” but wrote a column on economic affairs that – as the joke went – only a handful of economic theory gurus understood.  Ashiki was a library of dramatic events, some of them deeply painful. An unspeakable tragedy had drawn us close. I arrived at work one day and Ashiki beckoned to me. He was red-eyed, several bottles of beer by his side, but he was trying to write an essay.

He asked if I remembered his sister and nieces who had visited the Guardian just a week before. Of course I did. They had come to see Ashiki on their way back to London where they lived. Proud, Ashiki had showed off his relatives to everybody in the newsroom.

A week later, he came to work and was asked to go to the publisher’s office and take a phone call from the UK. The news was horrid: his sister and the older of her two daughters were dead. Ashiki’s brother-in-law had stabbed them both to death.

All day, I stood by my confused, grieving friend, attentive as he reminisced. Other times, when grief overcame him and he shook with tears, I did my best to speak a comforting word.  Ashiki was once a deeply eccentric figure – as well as a master of a certain kind of mischief. At a time when the military was in power, he was at a general’s 50th birthday party when the then second-in-command walked in.

Everybody else rushed to meet and greet the big man at the door, but Ashiki sat in his spot, attending to his cognac. Amazed, the officer approached him. Barely looking up, Ashiki said, “I don’t like your face, sir. You look like a hippopotamus.” The rest of the shaken party apologized to the stunned officer and – to save Ashiki from grave harm – told the huffing, humiliated man that the economist was crazy. Then they heaved Ashiki out the door, letting him thud to the earth.

He got up, dusted himself off, and staggered away into the night. In recent years, whenever we talked, he seemed wryly amused by all the silly, and often dangerous, things he did when he still lived a hedonist’s existence. But even at the height of his deployment of a lacerating tongue, he was never driven by malice. He merely expressed himself directly, when sobriety might have led to circumspection.

Years later, with drinking consigned to the past, he turned his prodigious mind to writing books that addressed a variety of subjects, including religious themes and global economic inequities.

The last time we met in Lagos – in June 2011 – he’d become visibly slowed by illness. Even so, he retained something of his exuberant, buoyant charm. His stubborn laughter rang in the restaurant where we shared lunch – and many, many stories. A star has departed, and Nigeria is a duller address because Ashikiwe Adione-Egom has danced his last dance and left the stage.

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It means consigning yesterday’s scandals to oblivion, because there are more than enough today – each day – to contend with. On January 19, the people of Amansea in Anambra State went to the banks of the Ezu River to swim, wash, and draw water.

Instead, they found a sight that jangled their spines and made them recoil in horror. Bobbing along in the river were numerous corpses. As to the exact number, we were soon treated to the typical fogginess. According to the police, there were 18 or 19 corpses. But some members of the community insisted there were many more: perhaps more than 50.

In one sense, the number doesn’t matter. One unidentified corpse in a river would be one too many. Yet, in a different sense, it makes all the difference. Each life is sacred and important. And each of those corpses deserves to have its story told. How did so many corpses end up in a river that’s central to the lives of thousands of people? My fear is that, unless enlightened citizens speak up and insist on answers, one of Nigeria’s most horrendous recent scandals will slowly, surely float out of public attention.

That would be tragic. A nation that cannot offer a straight, credible narrative about the gory harvest of corpses in a much trafficked river is, well, a hopeless and frightening nation. These corpses, after all, did not rain down from the sky. Each was somebody’s son, husband, father, or brother. The silence of President Goodluck Jonathan on the matter is outrageous. A government’s first duty is to guarantee the security of lives and property.

A leader worthy of the name would have set up a special crack team to uncover what happened to these hapless, forlorn corpses. To remain silent is to abdicate the most fundamental responsibility of a leader. Governor Peter Obi of Anambra offered N5 million for information about the corpses. I don’t believe anybody has come forward to solve the mystery and claim the cash. One doesn’t think it’s because the cash reward is paltry. Even if the governor quadrupled the offer, I don’t see anything changing.

It all testifies to a society where human lives are so terribly discounted, where people are frequently accounted no more important than cattle. And here’s what most troubling about this ghoulish affair: many believe the corpses were detainees shot by the police and dumped into the river. Several witnesses said as much to a Senate committee that recently visited Anambra and Enugu states.

They testified that the Anambra State Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), based in Awkuzu, routinely engaged in the extrajudicial execution of suspects. In particular, an official of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) accused SARS of killing their members arrested at a rally last year, but neither seen since nor prosecuted.  Last week, the Anambra State Police Commissioner, Bala Nassarawa, denied the allegation.

But it was a most inelegant, uninspiring and disturbing denial. He stressed that MASSOB was a proscribed organization. True as that assertion is, does it justify the slaughter of its members? The commissioner surely knew there was a simple, unimpeachable way to dispel MASSOB’s allegation: he should have presented the MASSOB detainees to reporters.

That Mr. Nassarawa chose to split rhetorical hairs, instead, is far from comforting for those who suspect that the police were responsible for the dastardly act of killing innocents and dumping their bodies in a river. One has used the word innocents advisedly.

Even if some of the dead were crime suspects, they deserved the presumption of innocence until their guilt was established by a court. There’s no legal principle that confers on the police the prerogative of acting as accuser, judge and executioner.  In any decent society, the notion – or even the mere suspicion – that the police engaged in extrajudicial killing would raise alarms. In Nigeria, it’s an open secret that the police frequently murder suspects, and even those arrested for no reason save for the whims of some officer. I wrote about this scandal in a November, 2007 piece titled: “Murder Incorporated”.

In it, I stated: “The Nigerian police have long had a reputation for needless highhandedness and unjustified bloodlust. So embedded is this fearsome reputation in the popular imagination that Nigerians have taken to describing mobile police officers as ‘kill-and-go.’ The picture is of officers quick to draw their guns, take aim at (usually) innocent citizens, and let out a deadly report. Nigerians know that the fear of the police is the beginning – and often the end – of wisdom.” The immediate provocation for that piece was a statement by then Inspector-General of Police, Mike Okiro, that, in a three-month period, the police had killed 785 suspected armed robbers and arrested 1,628 suspects. Human Rights Watch suggested a gorier reality.

It argued that “the true number of people killed by the police since 2000 may exceed 10,000.”Peter Takirambudde, the agency’s Africa director, noted: “It’s stunning that the police killed half as many ‘armed robbery suspects’ as they managed to arrest during Okiro’s first 90 days.”

Then he added: “And it’s scandalous that leading police officials seem to regard the routine killing of Nigerian citizens – criminal suspects or not – as a point of pride.” In that 2007 column, I wrote that the police “had become a mindless and unrestrained killing machine…a human slaughtering enterprise.” Then I proposed that the Nigerian police could be tagged “a business whose corporate name might as well be Murder Incorporated.”

The absence of a professionally sound police force and the collapse of the machinery of criminal prosecution are symptoms of Nigeria’s broader systemic failure. In a country where institutions have become terribly frayed, where the idea of accountability has little or no purchase, where many (if not the majority of) public officials receive rewards for what should be reckoned as grave crimes, where the police and the military are easily commandeered for illicit purposes, including the treasonous rigging of elections – in such a country, it’s both attractive and easy for the police to kill and get away – literally – with murder.

There’s no question that the Nigerian police are professionally degraded. And one doesn’t simply mean the lower ranks who mount ubiquitous roadblocks to extort innocent commuters.

A few years ago, a police commissioner in Ilorin, Kwara State made international waves when he arrested a goat as a robbery suspect. He told the press that the police were about to grab a member of a car-stealing gang when the man turned into a goat! Ridiculed by the local and international media, the officer neither flinched nor retreated from his bizarre narrative. Nor was he fired. More recently, television cameras brought us shocking images of the squalid conditions at a police academy where police recruits receive their training.

The officers that are dehumanized in these academies go forth onto our streets to dehumanize the rest of us. For many of them, the taking of a human life is as easy as ABC.  At minimum, the corpses in Ezu River pose a challenge to all sectors of enlightened Nigerians. That challenge is to get to the root of the horror in Amansea. Those corpses don’t deserve to remain unknown, anonymous. Though dead and mute, all decent Nigerians should seek to give the final honor of having their names known, their stories spoken.

If it turns out that they were killed and dumped by the police, we must have the courage to expose that fact, punish those involved, and use the tragic occasion to rethink who we are, how we must conduct the business of law enforcement, and how to reorient police officers with a different, professional and ethical vision.

For a start, Mr. Jonathan, the Inspector-General of Police, the National Assembly, the Nigerian Bar Association as well as other civic organizations and Nigeria’s clergy should demand that the police in Anambra and Enugu states account for the detainees in their custody, including MASSOB members.

Only if – and after – the police clear their names can they earn the credibility to continue leading the search for answers to the puzzle of the floating corpses.

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It took the effort of enterprising online reporters to inform Nigerians that their president’s wife was sick and that she was undergoing treatment in far-away Germany.  Even so, her spokesman countered – in a facile response – that Mrs. Jonathan was a picture of buoyant health.

She’d traveled back, he said, to rest after the fatigue of hosting a meeting of African First Ladies in Abuja. Of course, the irony of the claim didn’t strike the fibbing spokesman. If the spouse of Nigeria’s president does not find Aso Rock – the most palatial address in Nigeria – conducive to resting, then the country her husband runs must be pure hell for other (by far less fortunate) Nigerians.

During Mrs. Jonathan’s absence, I came to find out how patient and forgiving Nigerians can be. On Facebook, Twitter and other online forums, many wrote that they were praying for their ailing First Lady. Amazed by such gush of generosity, I wrote a column, calling on Mrs. Jonathan, once she recovered and returned to Nigeria, to repay the love nudging her husband to become a responsive, public-spirited leader.

I suggested, for one, that she must impress on Mr. Jonathan that he has a duty to give Nigerians a healthcare system that’s worthy of humans. It’s a scandal that Nigerian officials (as well as the broader class of the well-to-do) now troop to the UK, France, Germany, South Africa, India and the US for medical treatment. Part of the scandal lies in the fact that Nigerians are some of the top doctors in any field of medicine. Given a visionary leader committed to transformation – as opposed to a poseur, who likes to fancy himself a transformational figure – many of these doctors will need little prodding to come home and set up practices. But no: most of our so-called leaders are deaf to the shame of running a country that has no coherent health policy.  Consider this: Nelson Mandela is one of the world’s most revered persons.

Yet, whenever he takes ill, he’s treated in South African hospitals by South African doctors. He’s not flown abroad with the kind of fanfare that Nigerian officials organise, a fanfare that advertises Nigeria as a failed, forlorn state. Consider this, too: when former Ghanaian president, John Atta-Mills, battled a serious ailment, he stayed and was treated in Ghana.

Yes, he died in the end – as all must die – but he made the point that he had confidence in his country’s medical institution. By contrast, no Nigerian official wants to be caught dead or alive in a Nigerian hospital! They know how dismal Nigerian healthcare is; they know because, in the final reckoning, they had a hand in gutting the system.

I’m the first to admit that I had no reason to expect that Mrs. Jonathan would rise to my lofty challenge but I issued it all the same. As Nigerians, we had paid to enable her to receive the best possible treatment from fine German doctors in a hospital with sophisticated diagnostic equipment.

At minimum, she owed it to us to become an advocate for a significantly improved healthcare in Nigeria. It’s since become clear that Mrs. Jonathan is preoccupied with other plans and priorities. Nigerians were stunned to learn that the Federal Capital Territory has asked for N4 billion to construct a huge building for Mrs. Jonathan in Abuja.

There’s no way to euphemise it: the idea is wacky. It’s astonishing that the president, his wife and a bevy of officials around them would allow this project to go beyond conception and make its way into the FCT’s budget proposals.

Does it mean that nobody within that circle has the sense to recognise an outrage? In a country where many workers are yet to receive the minimum monthly wage of N18,000; where roads are a shambles; where hospitals are a mockery; where universities and polytechnics are bereft of equipment and research funds; where generators snarl and rattle because electric power is erratic; where cities have no trash disposal systems; where police training schools are in squalid shape; where many adults are so crushed by hardship they declare their own children witches and wizards – in such a country, how did the ensemble at Aso Rock permit the impunity of a N4 billion building for Mrs. Jonathan to see the light of day? Pray, how?

Such a project makes sense only to that insouciant coterie that inhabits the rooms and corridors of power.  It’s not enough insult to our sensibility that Mr. Jonathan is spending N2 billion to build a larger banquet hall for his feasts.

It’s not enough outrage that billions more has been allocated to build an even grander residence for the vice president – who already lives in one of the grandest homes in Abuja. Now, the First Lady – just recently rescued from sickness by the collective wealth of Nigerians – must add to the list of outrages a project that amplifies a vulgar, self-aggrandising taste.

Last year, Mr. Jonathan and his ministers ramped up the message that Nigeria was virtually broke and that the government could no longer afford subsidising the cost of fuel. Did the president not dial the same message of economic scarcity to his wife? For that matter, did he not internalise the message himself? Why do poor, misgoverned Nigerians get one message of dire economic times but the nation’s spoilt, mediocre officials act in a way that suggests the country has a slush of cash – the only problem being how to spend the damn thing?

How does the First Lady’s N4 billion fantasy “mission house” advance the healthcare of Nigerians? How does it add to the quality of life of a people trapped in conditions that should not exist in the 21st century? The people of the Niger Delta – President Jonathan’s home zone – decry the slow progress in rehabilitating the all-too important East-West Road. Instead of focusing on such people-oriented projects, why does the present administration set its sights on decidedly wasteful, useless projects that merely inflate the egos of a few?

It’s time those closest to Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan told them a few home truths. The country’s first citizens ought to be told that power is transient. Nobody is assessed a great leader on the basis of acts that served his – and/or his wife’s – fantasies of grandeur. If Mrs. Jonathan is incapable of realising how offensive her immoderate N4 billion project is, somebody around her should rise to the occasion and do her the favour of spelling it out. We don’t owe her a N4 billion house; she owes us to be a voice whispering an insistent message into her husband’s ears: Let’s serve, rather than be the served.

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