‘Today, Ministers are in scandals…People are stealing millions’
(By Mike Awoyinfa, first published in Sunday Concord Magazine of November 6, 1983)
Even though he was not officially a “roving ambassador” during the Nigerian Civil War, Chinua Achebe was, however, a member of the peace delegation which went to Kenya with the hope of restoring peace. It was at this peace conference that he came in contact with the late PRP leader, Mallam Aminu Kano, who made such a strong impression on the novelist.
•Mike Awoyinfa talking to Chinua Achebe
“I remember very well seeing Aminu Kano, looking so distressed,” Achebe recalled. “This is one of the strongest impressions the man made on me, compared to people like Chief Enahoro who was the leader of the delegation swaggering as conquerors…and even Asika. Aminu Kano seemed to be so different, in fact, he seemed to be looking out of the window. While his colleagues were speaking arrogantly and bent on our surrender, Aminu Kano was calm and in pains.”
The horrendous experiences of the Nigerian Civil War inspired Chinua Achebe to write his first collection of poems titled Beware Soul Brother (1972) which poignantly expresses the agony of the war and its aftermath from the viewpoint of a sensitive writer. The war accounts were further expressed in a collection of short stories titled Girls at War (1972).
In 1972, Achebe felt he needed a change of scene after the years of crisis and years of civil war. So, he left for the United States to take the job of Professor of English offered by the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He was there for three years teaching courses mostly in African literature. In his last year in Amherst, he was offered a very distinguished position in the University of Connecticut as the University Professor of English in succession to Rex Warner, the Classicist. They thought he was going to stay for ten years like Warner, but after a year, Achebe decided to return home to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as a Professor in the English Department.
Feeling that he had done enough of teaching, Professor Achebe resigned his appointment from the University of Nigeria to concentrate on writing full time. He also went straight into active politics from which he was hitherto forbidden at the university. He joined the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), the party of his hero, the late Mallam Aminu Kano and became the Deputy National President of the party.
There were rumours that the late Mallam Aminu Kano even chose him as his successor. Reacting, Chinua Achebe told me he was not interested in leading the PRP or any party for that matter. He said he was “sufficiently realistic to understand that at this stage of our political development, you could not take a southerner to Kano and say he is the successor to Aminu Kano. It is not practicable.”
With his newly found freedom, Achebe devoted his time to travelling and writing. He hardly stayed in one place for too long. A compulsive writer who wrote by day and night, Achebe belonged to a school of writers who didn’t need to wait for inspiration before they started writing.
“You don’t really wait for any time or for inspiration,” he told me. “If you do that, you keep postponing. Writing is arduous. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. So the flesh would be urging you not to get into it.”
I asked him about his dreams for a Nobel Prize in Literature and he said that his dedication to writing does not stem from the desire to win the Nobel or any other prize for that matter. He has been honoured with so many awards and prizes all over the world that he does not feel the need to “keep awake at night wondering what prize I would get next.”
His ultimate goal as a writer, he said, is “just to go on writing and write something that would live, that would be read after I have gone.”
In this Q&A, Achebe tells Mike Awoyinfa why he wrote The Trouble With Nigeria
What prompted the writing of The Trouble With Nigeria?
I have wanted to write a book dealing with the problems of Nigeria and their causes as I saw them—a book that would not be academic, which anybody who was literate could read. I agreed to do this book as far back as four years ago or even more. Whenever I came to do it, I will say let me wait more, there would be new material and this went on and on. And then suddenly, at the end of the first term of the Second Republic, I thought this was a very good time to look at these problems.
How has the Nigerian politician changed from the way you portrayed him in A Man of the People?
I think, if anything, the Nigerian politician has deteriorated. The corruption of Chief Nnanga of A Man of the People was on a minor scale compared with today. Today, we are talking about millions. People are stealing millions. In the days of Chief Nnanga, if they stole ten thousand, it was very bad news. Today, ministers are in business and there are all kinds of scandals. I think the situation is really much worse and this is one of the reasons why one has to come out and really say something that may sound harsh, but, in my estimation, necessary.
How do you see the conduct of the 1983 presidential election?
I did not expect elections to be anything different from what we get in Nigeria. This is our country and nothing works much. We have more or less come to accept the situation of incompetence, indifference and all kinds of other faults. And, therefore, since Nigerians are going to run an election, I expected that there would be mistakes in abundance. I expected that there would be inefficiency. So I didn’t expect a miracle. All the same, I hoped that since we say we are so determined to build a democracy here, that we would go out of the way to try and make this experiment, which is crucial to democracy, work. Even if it doesn’t work, people would say we have tried. What has happened is a wholesale disregard for the rules of election, the rules of fairness. If you don’t have the attitude of fair play, then you cannot have a democratic system. There is no doubt that from the beginning, even before the actual election, the people in power—I don’t mean just the Federal government, I mean those in power all around—did not want anything that would upset them where they are in power. They wanted something that would upset somebody else. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there was wide-scale rigging of results. This is quite clear to me. It is left to those who can analyze it in the law court and all other people to produce the evidence. But the evidence of my eyes and my ears appears that there was widespread rigging of the elections. And what this suggests is that we do not really care for democracy.