Loomnie

WHEN BABANGIDA SEIZED POWER ON AUGUST 27, 1985, the country owed $12 billion. The squandering regime raised the national debt to $33 billion in only about six years. When he hijacked power, only N11.8 billion naira was in circulation in Nigeria. At the termination of his misrule, General Babangida, Osoba argues, had injected ‘an intolerably high level of cumulative devaluation and inflation in the national currency and economy’ by increasing the money in circulation through the printing of currency to N100.5 billion.

Even if the answer to the economic crisis surpassed him, Babangida found an answer to the lack of sufficient naira to fund his self-perpetuating project. His regime resorted to what Dr. Osoba described as ‘the sheer orgy of printing of currency notes.’

In a cover story in April 1992, which provoked the Babangida regime to shut down all the media empire, the Concord Press, owned by his friend, Bashorun MKO Abiola, Dapo Olorunyomi, who later became the Chief of Staff to Nuhu Ribadu, noted that Hannibal, who Babangida described as one his two key heroes – the other being Chaka, the Zulu – was ‘brilliant, witty, multilingual and deeply resilient’. However, Olorunyomi added that, Hannibal ‘was capable of the most recondite passion of kindness, but could also show transcendental acts of cruelty, treachery, and avarice.’

However, corruption, and its accompanying vices, non-transparency and non- accountability, survived the Babangida regime.

Even though he instituted a War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC) in an attempt to reclaim the anti-graft stance of the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, Babangida’s successor, General Sani Abacha surpassed the former in graft.

In what would count as one of the many ironies in Nigeria’s history, Abacha set up the Pius Okigbo Panel of Inquiry into the operations of the Central Bank accounts under Babangida. The Okigbo Panel report reportedly implicated Babangida in the disappearance of the $12. 4 billion that accrued to Nigeria from the 1990 Gulf War oil windfall – the matter for which Keeling was deported. However, the report was never publicly released. Abacha must have held it as a weapon to hold his endlessly scheming and dangerously mischievous retired comrade-in-arms on leash.

The Abacha regime also instituted the Failed Banks Tribunal which tried bank executives who had taken liberty with depositors’ and shareholders’ monies. In spite of Abacha’s apparent ‘anti-graft’ measures, his regime was one which a news magazine described as ‘Plundering and Looting Unlimited’. The infantry general, his close officials, family members and cronies ‘turned state power into a weapon for stealing the nation blind’. By the time he gave up the ghost on the laps of Indian prostitutes – as the rumour mills have it – more than US$4.3 billion were traced to 130 banks around the world to Abacha and his family members. Ismaila Gwarzo, Abacha’s National Security Adviser, alone reportedly siphoned US$2.1 billion into coded accounts in foreign countries.

Apart from condemning and acting against corruption and deception under generals Babangida and Abacha, Obasanjo, as president, also pursued with messianic zeal the recovery of Abacha’s loot.

Perhaps it is a cruel irony. But when Chief Sunday Afolabi, President Obasanjo’ssenior in high school and later his minister of internal affairs, in a moment of indiscretion, said his colleague in the cabinet and political rival, Chief Bola Ige, had been called to ‘come and eat’ in the Obasanjo government, he was imposing an epithet on the Obasanjo administration that was similar in its devastating implications to what was imposed on the Babangida regime by Obasanjo – eight years earlier.

For the now late Afolabi, public office in Nigeria was an eatery to which a select people were invited to ‘come and eat’.

R. Wraith and E. Simpkins argue that this culture of ‘come and eat’ has existed in Nigeria – like in the rest of the West coast of Africa – since independence. They contended further that this culture ‘flourishes as luxuriantly as the bush and weeds which it so much resembles, taking the goodness from the soil and suffocating the growth of plants which have been carefully, and expensively bred and tended.’

Alhaji Bashir Tofa, the presidential candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC), who was unofficially defeated by Bashorun Moshood Abiola, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the June 12, 1993 election – eventually annulled by Babangida – said in early 2009 that ‘no Nigerian can fight corruption.’ Tofa argues that corruption ‘will continue as long as the masses depend on corrupt officials to earn their livelihood’. Corruption in Nigeria, said the politician, has gone beyond the ‘issue of greed, it is now a disease. People who steal have no sense of proportion because there is corruption everywhere.’

The perceptive anti-graft musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, had used the metaphor of the intersection at Ojuelegba, on the Lagos Mainland, where there was neither traffic lights, nor a traffic warden, to illustrate the confusion that arises when there are neither rules nor rule-enforcers.

Sings Fela: ‘With this confusion wey e dey, police dey inside well, army dey inside well. Who go come solve dis confusion? …Confusion e breaki bone, nko?’ [‘In the present confusion, the police are implicated, the Army is implicated. Who will then solve the problem? ....Confusion breaks bones, doesn’t it?] In the song, ‘Confusion Break Bone’, Fela concludes with the parable of a corpse which is involved in an automobile accident. His musical verdict was that this translates to ‘double wahala for deadi bodi and the owner of deadi body.’ [‘double trouble for the dead and the relations of the dead.’]

It is a metaphor for his country.

From Wale Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots. 2010. Pp 118 and 119.

This is a synopsis:

Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation that recently celebrated its 50th year of self rule.

Click here to support the project.

A couple of weekends ago we hosted a friend who had just returned from Nigeria. She mentioned that penises were currently being ‘disappeared’ in the country. We smiled, we laughed, and I told the story of how I first learnt about disappearing penises. Like a good, self-respecting, PhD-holding anthropologist, I concluded by insisting that I really couldn’t say much else until someone did an ethnographic study of the topic.

I hadn’t thought about it since then until this evening when Teju Cole, during one of the times he breaks character as a writer of Small Fates, tweeted a link to the closest thing to an ethnographic study of disappearing penis – a Frank Bures article titled A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves. It is a well nuanced piece whose quality does not derive only from the fact that it wounds my Nigerian pride by showing that  we are neither the originators of, nor the exclusive owners of the rights to, disappearing membrum virile.

Much like how a very quick look in the literature, as I was thinking of starting a research project on the study of internet fraud, showed that we cannot claim to have founded – or even be the greatest practioners of – the confidence trick, even though it is now known almost exclusively by its Nigerian name, 419. Bummer.

From the Bures article:

Nigeria was not the first site of mysterious genital disappearance. As with so many other things, its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. The first known reports of “genital retraction” date to around 300 B.C., when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or “shrinking penis,” were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine. Also in China, the first full description of the condition was recorded in 1835, in Pao Siaw-Ow’s collection of medical remedies, which describes suo-yang as a “ying type of fever” (meaning it arises from too much cold) and recommends that the patient get a little “heaty” yang for balance.

Fears of magical penis loss were not limited to the Orient. The Malleus Maleficarum, medieval Europeans’ primary guidebook to witches and their ways, warned that witches could cause one’s membrum virile to vanish, and indeed several chapters were dedicated to this topic. Likewise the Compendium Maleficarum warned that witches had many ways to affect one’s potency, the seventh of which included “a retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals.” (This could be either a temporary or a permanent condition.) Even in the 1960s, there were reports of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland panicking over a loss of virility caused by witchcraft.

Read it all here.

Mao Kaci on NigeriansTalk:

Any time I recall scenes from that video showing security officers of the Nigerian state ferret men, young and old, able and disabled, from behind closed doors in their homes and efficiently shoot them to death in the streets of Maiduguri in 2009, I find myself thinking: If that had been a nightmare, and not an event in actual history, it would still have had the power of occasioning some form of insanity. I ask myself: What manner of people would view such scenes of cold mass murder, executed by agents of the state in the country whose citizens they are, and still carry on as though there were something like human society in Nigeria? But apparently we all did carry on that way—and yes, there is human society in Nigeria; maybe not quite humane, or maybe just humane and inhumane by turns. We all watched that video and expressed our shock—I still feel the bile in my mouth when I think of that old man in crutches, escorted out of his house, made to lie face-down in the street, and finished off with a bullet. We all spat out our shock or held our mouths open in disbelief, and afterwards we carried on as if nothing strange, nothing disturbing, had happened. Perhaps nothing strange, nothing disturbing, indeed, had happened. There had been Ogoni, Odi, Zaki Biam, etc., etc., before Maiduguri. The Nigerian state does not only underwrite our citizenship, it also has the right and power to overrule our life and issue us with death, even on a large scale. That, for you, is the Nigerian state under which we organize what may be taken as Nigerian society.

In 2009, there was genocide in Maiduguri. I am not being sensational in making that claim. I am not even being as ‘sensitive’ as Wole Soyinka or as ‘insensitive’ as OBJ. I am only stating the fact as I saw it captured in that video. I do not recall that the dead in the Maiduguri genocide were ever memorialized in a public ceremony or even much remarked in the media and public discourse. For us, sensitive and insensitive Nigerians alike, life went on. We reduced it all, at most, to the extra-judicial killing of one man—Muhammed Yusuf, the leader—or as I believe—the front or fall guy of the Boko Haram.

Part of the tragedy of the matter is that we were not the only ones to forget the dead in the Maiduguri. They were also forgotten by the Boko Haram, the terrorist group whose attacks on the police and the populace provided the pretext for that murderous police action. The people have never mattered to the Boko Haram. Their wellbeing was never the issue; otherwise such a moneyed and globally networked group like the Boko Haram would have used its resources to establish a socio-economic enclave, an alternative to the Nigerian ‘shitstem’, wherein the people may feel a sense of ownership of and participation in governance. Rather the people themselves are the hostages and victims of the Boko Haram, their human shield and cannon fodder, their pawns and counters in the enterprise and gamble of violence. The Boko Haram have never included the dead in the Maiduguri genocide in their bill of grievances. Rather, they supplanted the massacre of people with the murder of their figurehead, making the latter the only issue that requires reckoning on the part of the police force.

Here.

According to the latest dispatch of cables by wikileaks, the Nigerian envoy told US officials that he was shocked that Zimbabweans spent their time in queues without so much as batting an eyelid.

“They line up for hours to get a few dollars from their bank accounts,” Adenyaju said. “Then they go home and do their chores and come back the next day and line up again. If this was Nigeria we would burn the bank down.”

From The Standard of Zimbabwe.

Dr Okonjo-Iweala, the returning finance minister and new economy Czar (couldn’t resist that one) starts talking at about 4:30. She talks about agriculture, manufacturing, job creation and even Nollywood. I don’t yet have an opinion on her and her new team  -  it is much too early – but in a few months, one should begin to see beyond the platitudinous rhetoric.

… could have been the title of a detailed piece by The Economist on the actions of the Chinese Queensway Syndicate in Africa:

The syndicate is built on links forged during the cold war. It is largely the creation of a man known as Sam Pa. Though he uses several names, he was born Xu Jinghua. After attending a Soviet academy in Baku four decades ago, say people who have looked into his career, he traded with Angola during its civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 2002 and over the years was a proxy battleground for several outside powers, including China, America, Cuba, the Soviet Union and South Africa. Mr Pa is a private and rarely photographed person. His name appears in few syndicate documents. He is believed to exert control through Veronica Fung, who may be a member of his family. She controls 70% of a core company, Newbright International. The two frequently travel in Africa, using the syndicate’s fleet of Airbus jets. They are said sometimes to bypass customs.

They are in Angola, Guinea, and Zimbabwe, but surprisingly not in Nigeria or Sudan. From the information that is available, Chinese involvement in the Nigerian oil sector is fairly minimal, mainly because the industry is mature in Nigeria, and most of the stakes are already owned by European (Shell and Total) and American (Chevron and Exxon-Mobil) companies. It is harder to explain the Sudanese case. Read the whole piece here.

1. Another one strikes black gold (trying desperately to resist using the line from Queen’s popular song)

2. Can stocks be safer than bonds (strange times, right?)

3. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly of World Bank, then of Nigeria’s finance ministry, then of World Bank, returns to take charge of Nigeria’s economy

4.  Commentary on Islamic finance in Nigeria

5. Robert Skidelsky’ – Life after Capitalism (Let me just quote Mark Twain: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated).

Orlando Julius Ekemode sings Ise.

Hat tip to Anengiyefa