Nigeria: What the mirror says…, by Obi Nwakanma

I return to the Orbit column this week, after a sorrowful time. I apologize to my readers for my long silence. I have used this time to ruminate and mourn my brother, Chukwuma, who died suddenly and unexpectedly on November 28, 2023, and we buried him on December 27, 2023.

He was born in Ibadan, studied Communications at the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) Enugu, after trying severally for admissions into Medical School.

But his natural talents were in Engineering. He liked to break things up and fix them, from childhood.

He loved Electronics. He would have made a formidable Engineer. He was very observant, and had a keen sense of detail, thus his love of photography. He would have made a fantastic cricket batsman and wicket keeper, although he chose football – soccer – and was very good at it.

He kept the goals for his High School Football First IX in his time, and for our town’s FC, from which he earned a longstanding reputation. His peers called him “Durango.”

After IMT, he internchild.re at Vanguard, and was a stringer for a while, and then joined the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), where he rose to be Senior Reporter, at their Umuahia station. He drove himself to hospital at the FMC Umuahia on November 28, 2023 with a very high blood pressure.

He did not make it out alive. He died within three hours of bringing himself, not expecting to die, at the hospital, possibly from an aneurysm, the result of a blood pressure that had climbed to 240. He was my “little” brother, the middle child.

In all these, my 85-year-old mother has been the worst hit: she buried her own last brother, whom we brought home to be buried from the United States on December 23, and four days later, she buried her third son, and fourth child.

My brother was clearly careless with his own health, from all I have managed to discern, but he was also a victim of a very poor, primitive health service.

The quality of care at the Federal Medical Center in Umuahia, and the level of professional service is so dubious, and the facilities so primitive, that it clearly led to my brother’s untimely death. There is a great need to overhaul, and reposition these institutions, that are supposed to be frontline, in providing high quality specialized care and top range medical research and service. They exist in names only.

But here is not the place to tell the story of how poor professional handling led to the death of my brother, a Senior News reporter at the Nigerian Television Authority. That story has to wait.  

But here is my way of saying, my brother Chukwuma’s death, mirrors the tragedy of Nigeria, where life is now brutish and short, and this is no longer a matter of platitudes. Nigeria bleeds. Nigerians gnash their teeth like no other time in living memory.

Things have been tough for a long time in Nigeria. But this is now hell.

I saw this, this past Christmas when I came home to bury both my uncle and my younger brother.

I have been too traumatized by these deeply personal deaths to find both the words, and the reserve to talk about it.

But I felt outraged – and I am very sure a lot of Nigerians felt it too – when this Mac Flecknoe character called Femi Adesina, ex-this and that for Buhari, continued to insult Nigerians with the lie of a book called, Working with Buhari: Reflections of a Personal Adviser.

From what I can deduce, having not read that lump of vertiginous self-adulation from what I’ve been told, the book has little depth.

It is mostly anecdotal.

But I saw its launch on Youtube: it was a gathering of vipers. They were trading insider jokes about how they raped and ruined Nigeria; and they were sharing guffaws.

I could not help but pity the former Vice-President, Mr. Yemi Osinbajo, a former Law Professor, and quite clearly one of the most mediocre Vice-Presidents ever produced in this country.

The only image of Yemi Osinbajo which Nigerians will remember forever is of him as a bag-carrier.

He who was sent around the markets, selectively distributing and handing “trader moni” – a form of political “commie” or vote-buying that could have put Tammany Hall to shame– for the government of Buhari.

He was outside, looking in. He was just simply, otherwise, “photo.” That is, he was mostly seen, but never heard on real issues.

That was his choice. His most prominent achievement was to be the “gentle face,” of a very ugly and vicious administration, speaking la-di-da when the occasion called for it. The occasion called again for it three weeks ago, when this tome of infamy, Working with Buhari, by Femi Adesina, was trolled out in a public launch, aimed at celebrating Buhari, and cleaning him up quite some.

Still La-Di-Da-ing, Yemi Osinbajo said, and I’d like to quote him fully: “There have been quite a few books already written about President Buhari, and they cover a lot of detail; a lot of it historical, and of course, several about his numerous achievements since he first came into office in 1983.But the reason why this personal account will be interesting for those who read it, and I have the particular good fortune of having read it before today, is that even after eight years of being president, and so many books written about him, President Buhari still remains an enigma to many Nigerians who want to understand, who really is President Buhari. Not the public persona. But who is he as a person?

“And I think Femi Adesina has done a great job, especially in covering an aspect of the former president that is not so well known, which is his sense of humour, his ability to tell a good joke, and to take a good joke. His ability to laugh at himself. I have a long repertoire of Buhari jokes, and Femi has helped me to add a few more, and one day soon, we will launch a book, this time not “working with Buhari, “ but “laughing with Buhari.”

I see, Mr. Trader Moni! It was all a joke to you all. The thing however is that Nigerians did not find it funny. In any case, Osinbajo cut a very tragic and sorry figure in that hall, for laughing very hard with Buhari already was Tinubu, Osinbajo’s political nemesis.

Enough said on this. What needs be said is that Adesina’s book is already dead on arrival.

It will join the graveyard of inconsequential hagiographies, stuck on the shelves of obscure libraries as a collector’s item, gathering dust, unread, and joining the likes of Chidi Amuta’s Prince of the Niger: a very princely non-event. That is the fate of all hagiographies. Again, enough said on this. But I should say what every Nigerian already knows: Adesina’s attempts to parlay Buhari might earn him his payday, but fact is, Buhari will be a minor figure in Nigerian history, a coma. That is his fate.

He will be thought of as a man who had begged for an opportunity for redemption, but wasted it, fighting shadows.

He will symbolize the tragic failure of a nation. Compared to his generation – Gowon, Murtala, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abacha, Abubakar – Buhari will be seen as an inconsequential, bigoted, provincial, maniacal, non-event who hated Nigerians, and despised anybody south of Daura.

Buhari’s greatest achievement is that he led a failed Jihad against Nigeria, and tried to actively ruin, subdue, and weaken it, in order to make it possible for his Fulani kinsmen coming from all over West Africa to overrun and settle it.

Buhari did not run a Federal Government of Nigeria. He ran a criminal enterprise.

This is the enterprise which Bola Tinubu has inherited, and continues to run. Today, the Naira is in free fall. There is energy crisis, kidnappings and executions all over the place.

A pall of insecurity and listlessness pervades the nation. No one feels safe. Even the pseudo-monarchs are now routinely being abducted and killed in their own homes.

The prices of commodities have upped beyond the reach of regular folk. Nigerians are hungry and they have been turned into beggars. I watched, again on Youtube, just this past week, people throwing yams from a truck, by a mosque in Lagos, at folks scrambling for the yams, and crying, “Ebi npawa wa o!” (we are dying of hunger!).

I shed tears. Nigerians are very dignified people. To reduce these proud dignified people to beggars is a great unforgivable sin. But it is the greatest achievement of Buhari, Osinbajo, and Tinubu’s APC.

I could just imagine, at the book launch on Buhari, seeing Tinubu and Buhari laughing and guffawing together, while Nigerians were outside hemming and hawing from hunger, and going home before their mirror and saying, “Mirror! Mirror on the wall! Who’s the greatest in the land?”

I hope the mirror said exactly what feels very near and yet so far away: the rustle in West Africa. West Africa is in turmoil because no one trusts Nigeria or takes it seriously anymore.

Everyone thinks Nigeria and its leadership, particularly her president, is a joke. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, leaving ECOWAS signifies the end of Nigeria’s regional leadership.

But there is also something else that the mirror says: Young officers in the Nigerian Armed Forces are watching, restless, calculating, and they already have a reason to strike. If they strike, it will be bloodier than January 15, 1966.

Many like me hate this option. But those who think it is impossible, or too far-fetched, do not have the benefit of history. This democracy seems already doomed. What it has delivered to Nigeria is hunger and extreme corruption.