INTRODUCTION
Tragedy as Joke By Wale Adebanwi
I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in…. – Michel de Montaigne
Two modest proposals – and this collection of essays implicitly presents us with this twin perspectives on how to approach Nigeria.
First, let us take Nigeria as a joke – as most of her citizens and the rest of the world often take her. 1
As the popular, but instructive, humour by a member of the new generation of Nigerian stand-up comedians has it, President Olusegun Obasanjo dies and goes to Hell where he meets US President George W. Bush and the British Queen Elizabeth II. In the middle of their punishment by the celestial bodies for their sins of omission and commission while on this side of the divide, the Queen asks the Devil to be allowed to make a call to England to ask how her former subjects were fairing. She was charged £500, 000 for the five minutes call – which she promptly paid. Then, Bush asked to do same. The US is assumedly as far from Hell as the UK, so Bush was asked to pay $1 million dollars.
Not to be left out in the business of hellish surveillance of the state of the earth, Obasanjo also stlso eps forward to demand his turn at the telephone. He wanted to know how his favoured “Umoru”, President Yar’Adua, and Nigerians were faring. The Devil told him that his would be a toll-free call. As you can imagine, the Queen and President Bush –
1 To take something as a joke is not to suggest that it be treated with levity. On the contrary, as Ebenezer Obadare has argued, in postcolonial contexts, jokes, far from being a laughing matter, are often the most reliable guides to the dominant constellations of power. See his “The Uses of Ridicule: Humour, ‘Infrapolitics’ and Civil Society in Nigeria”, African Affairs, 108/431, 241-261, 2009.
and perhaps others, say Josef Stalin, “Papa Doc”, “Baby Doc”, etc., who had paid through their noses to call the earthlings, protested the Devil’s “nepotism”. But the Devil shot back at them, “You all made long- distance calls. Obasanjo’s call is a local call. It’s from one part of Hell to another”….
Now, let us take Nigeria seriously. At any rate, as they say, a joke is a serious thing.
It would soon be fifty years since a territory cobbled together principally by the British colonial enterprise was granted independence and unleashed on her ‘citizens’ – and, to a lesser extent, the world. There is hardly a sharper territorial contradiction in recent human history than Nigeria. From different climatic conditions, through cultural-religious polarities to incongruous lifeworlds rooted in seemingly irreconcilable approaches to modern human and national possibilities, Nigeria seems fundamentally rigged against the very idea of a workable polity. The originary resolve by the metropolitan power that invented and consolidated Nigeria to ensure that she remained a perpetual territorial prank which leads to the regular and endless recruitment of the incompetent and the embarrassing as the core of its leadership has also provoked commentators, local and foreign, scholarly and lay, to impose all sorts of abstract descriptions on Nigeria.
One such commentator, a foreign scholar, Professor Richard Joseph, formerly of the University of Ibadan and now the John Evans Professor of Political Science at the Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, US, had emphasized how “prebendal politics” constituted the bane of a polity, Nigeria, that ought to lead the continent towards racial glory. During a public lecture held in Nigeria many years after publishing his famous book on the Rise and Fall of the Second Republic – and a few years after describing the country as one that was in a “dismal tunnel” – Joseph was again reiterating why Nigeria must not fail, and why she must not fail the black race, when, a la Sam Mbakwe, he broke down in tears. Professorial tears are not droplets that are often witnessed in public.
Joseph, like many others, foreigners and citizens, could not fathom how a country so rich in human and natural resources could be so destitute of (elite) yearning and (popular) capacity to unleash these resources in the service of the creation of an egalitarian society.
In this book, Mr. Tunde Fagbenle brings together the everydayness of the comedy of errors and the tragedy that (re)produces them in an effort to illuminate our understanding of why Nigeria is both a joke and a tragedy – and why, despite this, she inherently possesses an unsurpassable capacity to be neither a joke nor a tragedy.
If there were a peculiarly Nigerian dictionary (indeed, there is one in the everydayness of popular culture), you could check the meaning of “contradiction”, and the example you will get will be no other than “Nigeria”. Contradictions constitute the very tragedy of Nigeria. But, ironically, these same contradictions constitute the energy of Nigeria – and her very possibilities.
Nigeria has been described as “a mere geographical expression”; she has been derided as “the mistake of 1914”. The late 20th century militariat hijacked her, as if she were an unremorseful prostitute domiciled in a motel in a dark alley, and sucked life out of her – without paying a dime. The politicians, many of them practising criminals in starched attires, seized Nigeria and laundered her dry. From Boko Haram through Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) to the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF), enraged youths, turning into crimes of all sorts, including picking up arms against the (un)systematized roguery that is called “government” in the country (creaming-off, in the process, what they [the youths] can also lick) have fired many shots at the heart of Nigeria. The name of one of the militants even constitutes a metaphor for the reality in the Delta: he is called Government Ekpemulopo. For many months, Government was wanted by government – before the one supposedly surrendered his arms in return for a small portion of the cash assumedly stolen by the other! In case you are provoked to laughter by this narrative, please recall the title of Fagbenle’s earlier collection: This is my country, damn it!
But in all this, ask even the worst pessimist about Nigeria’s fate in the future; ask those who have predicted the eventual collapse of the petulant “union”; ask those in the Delta, whose environment is a constant reminder of the need to dissolve the “union”; ask those jokesters, the intellectual props of the “custodians” or the “owners” of Nigeria; wouldn’t we all rather have a country that works – one about which we can all proudly proclaim our membership?
Which leads me to another contradiction that is peculiarly Nigerian? Often, it is those who are most guilty of attempting to drive everyone else out (both literally and metaphorically) of the comic–tragedy called Nigeria that are most vociferous about why we must all remain within the union. But the contradiction of this class of nation-destroyers is even less significant. It constitutes an errant class whose aberrant, though consolidated, folly can be solved alongside the geometry of structural changes.
The most significant contradiction perhaps is this: For a “nation” whose unenviable history, it is predicted, would come to a tragic end soon, Nigeria remains a possibility that can reshape not only Africa, but the destiny of the entire black race. As the greatest, the arguably most gifted, and the most numerous concentration of black people in the world, in Nigeria resides the very prospects of racial transformation. IF you ask – Fagbenle and his numerous readers over the years – this is why the sick joke must end, and why the tragedy must be terminated.
As I have had occasion to argue in the past while reviewing Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen2, as a nation, Nigeria is an aspiration. Aspirations cling to life stubbornly, even when assailed by endless contradictions. They are not immutable, but they take a long time to mutate. And within that historical process of what members of the French Annales School of history called “longue duree” (long term) lies the possibility of the transformation of Nigeria. Rather than contradict the multifarious challenges to what Professor Wole Soyinka describes as “the fraudulent preamble of the current [1999] constitution”, the Nigerian aspiration points to the future articulated by that finest of human minds [W.S.] through his question: “Is it not time that ‘we the people’ indeed came together and agreed, in full freedom, on the conditions that will make us indeed, ‘we, the people’ – that is, without the plural ‘s’?”
From “The Sense and Nonsense of Wada Nas”, which flags the section, “Case for Restructuring”, through to “National Maladies” signified, in one case, by “Nigeria, a Country Undeserving of A Patriot”; and, under “State of The Nation” which asks, in one instance, “Yar’Adua: How Did We Come to This Pass?” – a question that packs the history and geography of power into the basket of incompetent rule and sick, sickening and irresponsible leadership – while examining, “Ibadan – In the Throes of Amala”, Fagbenle’s Nigeria! … A Thousand Laughs …A Thousand Cries is an enthralling tour of the contemporary contours of national paralysis. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had anticipated the lasting commentary on this paralysis which he lyrically theorised as “chaos”. Sings the musician of conscience on the consequences of the violent and violating politics of the Nigerian leadership: “dem lif sorrow, tears, and blood… dem regular trade mark”. Yet, in all of these, Fela was forced to “looku, looku, looku, lafu, lafu, lafu” (Look and Laugh).
Whether in “Whither Nigeria?” or in “Goodluck’s Assets Are Yar’Adua’s Liabilities”, Fagbenle calibrates the actions and inactions of political leaders in the ledger of national embarrassment. What are assets in a nation of unending liabilities? The “chaos” and “liabilities” which Fagbenle contends with in this book, in a sense, are also constituted as what Professor Wole Soyinka, in one of his musical projects, succinctly named the “Unlimited Liability Company” where the singer proclaims: “I love my country, I no go lie. ”
Fagbenle devotes a whole section of the book to his essays on President Olusegun Obasanjo – who featured earlier in the “joke” at the opening of this introduction. Quite fitting that a man who might end up in the footnotes of a greater history of Nigeria gets such a dominate space in the contemporary history of the nation’s crisis. In “The Obasanjos’ Scandal: Shame of a Nation”, Fagbenle asks, “What manner of a man is Obasanjo?” But in the earlier essay, he had declared unequivocally, “Forever etched on our wall of history would be the words: Mathew Olusegun Aremu Okikiola Obasanjo was here!” That is premised on the essayist assumption that Obasanjo’s role in the “history” would let a “wall”, let alone a “here” exist in the future. Indeed, inherent in the tragic paradox that is Obasanjo is a critical account of why Nigeria is what it is.
Whether you embrace an exclusively negative or exclusive positive or even an eclectic account of Obasanjo’s role in the tragic history of Nigeria, you cannot but grant the man the fact that history has beckoned on him more than any other of his contemporaries. When the Civil War was as much as won by the federal forces but for the wild antics of some strategically placed army generals, it was to an otherwise unaccomplished Obasanjo, who had hitherto played not much of a significant role in that war, that history handed victory. Towards the end of the 1970s, the bloody history of military rule again handed the not- particularly ambitious Egba General the headship of the Nigerian state. He, again, it was, despite the imperfections of the system, who eventually handed over power to civilians in 1979 – the first time such a handover was accomplished in Nigeria’s history. Owing to this, for a long time, he became the world’s favourite African statesman. But when the system that Obasanjo had spent his life to nurture came to a contradictory historical intersection in the late 1990s, he failed to see the seriousness of the challenge. History was to use the dark-goggled General Sani Abacha to teach the dominant conservative elite in Nigeria who recruited, nurtured and promoted General Obasanjo that a society in which “a dog kills a tiger” is not safe for everyone. Abacha humbled the civil war hero and almost had him tied to the stake and shot like a common mutineer.
But by the time General Obasanjo pitifully emerged from Abacha’s gulag, the man and the system of props that sustained him had learnt all the lessons of postcolonial peril, yet, promptly forgot all the lessons. The war-hero that was supposed to lead the Nigerian renaissance in 1999 threw himself and the nation further into that all-too-familiar hole. In the end, anyone who lacks the patience to read a treatise on the Nigerian tragedy, can read the abridged version which is Obasanjo’s public life. In this book, Fagbenle captures the various ambivalences and valences of the (in)significant public life of Obasanjo – which also tells the contemporary story of Nigeria.
When “joking” about the now departed President Umaru Yar’Adua – while he was still living – in “A Beer Parlour Banter”, or when mourning the sad passing of the man who personified the struggle for justice, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, or, Dr. Tahir Ibrahim, one of the most gifted Nigerians that ever lived, but who was a great reflection of postcolonial crisis, Fagbenle instructs us about how tragedy penetrates humour and how jokes respond to tragedy.
Fagbenle’s compelling collection of essays reminds us again that if she were not such a tragic polity, Nigeria would have been a cruel joke. But the essence of the collection is a struggle, a wish, an attempt to join in that self-sacrificing enterprise, against all odds; to add one’s voice and humble effort to the (re-) creation of an egalitarian polity in the heart of Africa. That word, essay, in its etymological journey from French to English, is, in itself, a reflection of this struggle. It derives from the French infinitive, “essayer”, meaning “to try”, or, “to attempt”. The French writer and thinker, Michel de Montaigne (15331592), who was the first to describe his work as “essays” (“essais”) stated that his goal was to describe mankind (humankind) – and perhaps the society “with utter frankness”.
So it is with Fagbenle.
(Wale Adebanwi (PhD Ibadan, Phd Cantab) teaches at the University of California-Davis, USA)