Who will own the moon in the next half a century?

Bukola,

The Americans have just celebrated fifty years of visiting the moon. I can only imagine what the euphoria was like when the first man was catapulted into that alien space in search of another life there, or to find out if there were other governments, or if God lived there with his angels. This moon affair no doubt consolidated America’s influence on the global stage at a time when she was keeping malice with Russia after an international divorce nicknamed the Cold War.

Russia, like a jilted ex-wife trying to prove to her runaway husband that she was better and stronger alone than in that abusive marriage, also launched herself into that alien space first desecrated by America’s lack of respect for anything mysterious (yes, because while many people worshipped the moon and never contemplated what was in the orbit of their god, the only way the Americans could worship it was by first reducing its mystery). Was it not John Donne who asked God to rape him so that he could be chaste?

But it is not the bickering between America and Russia that interests me in this moon affair. It was the declaration made by America about the ownership of the moon that baffles me. In America’s unique magnanimity, like a father who brags about his sacrifices for his children, they declared that the moon belongs to everyone on earth and that whatever resources is found there will be used for the development of mankind. Don’t you just admire the American generosity? Their propensity to share the resources found in the moon with people of distant lands like my grandmother in far off Imbise is very staggering.

But what America didn’t say and didn’t need to say was that whoever has the power to reach the moon owns the moon. So if the Americans had found something in the moon who would have asked her to share it equitably? Would it have been like the Nigerian federal allocation style where all nations would travel to America to collect their monthly allocation of the moon wealth?

Bukola, I am worried. Not worried about the Americans now, but for Nigeria in the next 50 years if we survive as a nation. I am worried because while the world is busy ensuring that all children learn to code so that the future would not be determined by this form of American generosity, we are talking about Fulani herdsmen and Ruga settlements. I feel sad. Sad because while J.F Kennedy conjured up the vision of landing in the moon with that famous inaugural speech of his and backed by action, we have a president that cannot even pick his ministers months after winning an election.

While the world is coding, we are building mega-churches and mosques and forcing our children to recite verses of the holy books. Don’t bring up the argument about science without humanity, because religion cannot be equated to humanity.

With our current run of backwardness, can Nigeria own the moon with America and Russia in the next 50 years?

Is every Nigerian man not guilty of rape?

Rape in Nigeria didn’t start with Bosula Dakola- there have been daily reports of this cringe worthy act on a daily basis. Rape of minors, poor and helpless women daily plaster the pages of newspapers and blogs. But Busola’s story has given voice to these cases that we have grown agreeable to, ignoring, dismissing or shouting about it, but for only a short while. But don’t get too excited, for Nigeria’s outrage has a very short lifespan. I won’t be surprised if the outrage dies a natural death just the same way the aeroplane conversation involving brother Wole Soyinka took the aisle seat so that Busola’s outrage could occupy the window seat of our social media attention.

This Busola-Fatoyinbo rape story has got me thinking about the way we handle women in Nigeria. My editor will strike the word ‘handle’ and replace it with the word ‘treat’. She will argue that handle is a word that presupposes and encourages women subjugation. But in this case, I will probably win the argument for which word should stay in my essay. Women in Nigeria are not treated fairly, I would argue. They are therefore handled in worse ways than how most of us would hold our fragile china.  Unlike the western culture, which we ape ceaselessly but end up with a bad imitation each time, the culture of chivalry makes the man to stoop to conquer (chivalry is another word Bukola would gladly strike out, it makes dolls of women, she would say). Nigerian men do not stoop or understand the meaning of stooping to conquer (Oliver Goldsmith will be turning somewhere). It seems the kingdom of konji suffereth violence, and Nigerian men taketh it by force. Date rape. Marital rape, Gang rape.  And the most unthinkable on the list, but increasingly reported by the day, the rape of minors.

On social media, the responses by some men (I am trying hard not to call them morons) to this floodgate of accusations shows that this is a generational problem that has no intention of leaving us any time soon.

So I will like to quickly ask, is rape part of our culture?

First we have to revisit how we raise our children, and by this, the male child. Any Tom, Dick and Harry (not mine) thinks that when he pursues a girl and the girl is proving too hard to get that she is probably acting the opposite.  Like when she says she doesn’t want something that she’s exactly saying the opposite of what she wants. This dangerously passed on idea has become one of the most popular tips on wooing a girl. I looked into the good books of my religion, and Things Fall Apart has a song about how a girl says no when you ask her out, but when you put your hand across her waist, she pretends not to notice (I think I once tried this and she broke that hand, and it is yet to heal sufficiently).  

As I noted earlier, it is a good thing that rape victims are speaking out, even though one old writer recently called a middleclass conspiracy, because the cases of the poor, everyday victim had been far too ignored. But in ten to fifteen years from now, if we want a saner society, one where my daughters won’t have to fear spending time out with friends or walking home alone, then we have to start teaching our boys to learn to respect when a girl says No. We have to teach them that this No is the most important No they should pay attention to in life. And this is not going to be the death of romance.

We have to tell them that dressing indecently is not a call for sexual assault. That meeting her in the elevator alone is not a cause to rape her. That spending a night in your room is not a call to rape her. That we as men should be held to a higher code than animals in the jungle (this would be seen as insults by some well-behaved animals).

We have to tell them that it is normal for a lady to mean it when she says that she doesn’t want to date you, no matter how muscular, rich or handsome you may be. We have to let them know that even when a lady is dating you, it is rape if you take it when she isn’t willing or ready to give you.

One damage we have done to the male child is to let him grow up with  no rules and regulations. We unleash him unto the society and women like it’s open season. The bandied idea that he’s not a man yet if he has not sowed his wild oats on every girl that catches his fancy is wrong. So we see little boys yet to buy their first boxers trying to sow their wild oats.

We can remake this culture, if at all it is our culture.

I know by the time Bukola picks this for her regular forensics on my grammar, sentence structure, she will accuse me of trying to recuse myself from the flood of accusations that will come at me after the women that were forced to receive brother Biodun’s holy sperm are done with him. This is not my confession, I assure you all. But I wish I knew most of these things before now. At least, for the sake of that hand that I put across that girl’s waist.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Love

Bukola,

You may think this is a grey area for me. But I have known love, too. It is the sacrifice made by parents who would rather go hungry than see their children naked. It is the effortless laughter and fast chattering of siblings packed in a small space. I have enjoyed these and many more.

In the intervening years between leaving and returning home, I have come back to the taste of this love again and again as a refuge against life’s vicissitudes. But when I finally left home the last time, taking with me the bricks and mortar for the foundations of my independence, I found love in unusual places. It was an accommodation offered to me by a stranger some minutes after learning that I was stranded in a new state. This man became my landlord for the two weeks it took me to advance my plans for an independent life.

It is the kindness of undying friendship that I have received from that very small constituency of people I have come to regard as friends. Not the ones that I have a nodding acquaintance with in various chat rooms, but those who have showed repeatedly, through words and deeds, prayers and actions, that man, we rise and fall together as one.

So I have seen love, Bukola. I have seen it in the stares of a young lady that I fell foolishly in love with. I have beheld love in the immortal eyes of this lady that was like a summons to all my foolish blood and wandering thoughts. Loving her was the closest I came to having a religion; it was the closest I came to having faith in God.

I once stood with her for three hours at a park, chattering like the birds perched on unsteady stalks; it was as if we had forgotten all the words for seat in our mental toolbox. I later told her it was like a scene from a Raymond Carver story collection that ends thus: ‘I could hear my heart beating; I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.’

I have found love in Literature. It is the abundance of writers who risked their lives to write dangerously because they knew that one day, I will crawl on bent knees to find healing in the intensive care units of their words and sentences. To take refuge, seek humanity, faith, and silence from this noise that the world has become. Bukola, this is what I talk about when I talk about love.

Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Body and the American Dream

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates brings up for conversation once more the danger suffered by the black body and the futility of the American Dream; only this time, this conversation is not friendly as many previous discussions. Seen as a fitting heir to James Baldwin’s thought-provoking essay, The Fire Next Time, addressed to his nephew, Mr. Coates’ essay takes the form of a letter to his son about how the American state is poised to plunder, destroy and vandalize his body.

In a period that has marked the murder of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many more, Mr. Coates reminds his son of how quickly his body can be extinguished without justice. He takes no prisoners as both black and white officers are blamed for the demolition of the black body. He recalls the murder of his friend whom he met at Howard University, Prince Jones and how class and educational pedigree do not exempt his son from the death sentence passed on his body from decades of injustice.  

Mr. Coates raises many questions but gives few answers. He also raises age-long arguments about the right path to salvation for the black body. He pitches his tent with Malcolm X whom he sees as uncompromising, unapologetic and pragmatic. “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their façade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of the dreamers. …Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard.  He was unconcerned with making people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry he said so…He would not turn the other cheek for you.“

He throws in some spanners in the works of those who believe in the American Dream, calling it a dream for the whites alone, built on oppression, deceit, and violence against the black body: “and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”

“America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists…I propose to take our country’s claim of American exceptionalism seriously… I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much”

Between the World and Me also presents a paradox of the black neighborhood. The streets are dangerous for the black body in the same way the school is dangerous to the black mind. While many may see the school as a way to escape the brutality of the streets, Mr. Coates disagrees and even calls it a faithful partner in the oppression of the black body. “ I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates’s approach to the issues at stake is more combative than James Baldwin’s. While Baldwin is hopeful that the world could still be made a better place, “if we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world,’’ Between the World and Me does not pursue this idea one bit. Mr. Coates clearly instructs his son that the task of making the world a better place is ‘not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise.’’

On the exclusivity of Western Civilization, Mr. Coates tackles this question: Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? This was a question posed by Saul Bellow. Mr. Coates believes that the same Tolstoy can be shared by both civilizations and it is inappropriate to think that Africans should be excluded. This is similar to James Baldwin’s assertion during a debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University about America’s racial ambiguities. Baldwin noted that Western civilization will either be opened for all to enter or face the prospect of being demolished by those excluded.

His generalization of the American police and firefighters as forces of evil, even the first responders at the September 11 attack makes him come off as an anarchist. He states that there is no difference between the terrorists and the police who have superintended years of violence against the black body.

Sometimes, the cynicism in Mr. Coates’ meditation does not only rain; it pours even when he claims not to be a pessimist. ‘’I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world’’ he writes to Samori his son, ‘’But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.’’ His tone in this 2015 book does not give much credit to the changes that have taken place since the birth of the civil rights movement down to the first African-American president of the United States. For all we know, he may be saying that more structural and institutional changes should have taken place between the 1960s and 2015, but his despair in the power of America to remake itself suffocates any suggestions that he believes things will ever change. But what he fails to get in optimism, he gains in his tight prose and careful and beautiful turn of phrases.  

Known and Strange Things 1

There is fatalistic disappointment that comes with seeing life as a race to the finish line, only to be beaten to the lesson again and again that there is never truly a finish line. There are times when we are at a fix and we think that this is the end of it, or when we are in the wraps of a certain excitement and we think that this is the end of all our troubles.

I had one of these moments recently- I always have these moments when life comes tumbling and it seems like I should raise the white flag of surrender, and I also have those moments when I get my way with life and I feel like years of inner darkness are over. There is this friend I haven’t seen for years and recently we got talking online, chatting from Instagram where we first hooked up again after almost ten years down to Whatsapp where we made the first voice call. It was as if there was a lot to catch up on and we will never stop talking. S. said she would be flying into Nigeria and would like us to hang out. Then the chatting continued ceaselessly with taunts and teasing over past events that now seem very awkward to remember. Like when S. misread my affections for her friend and thought she was the one I was hitting on each time I tried to impress the group, until I blurted it out and it almost caused a storm between them.

S. came to Lagos; and after two or three times of meeting up, small talks started becoming conversationally delicate, and because we frequented many bars in the course of the bonding, the chatting started feeling like a flat beer that won’t go down any further because either of us was already full.

My time with S. reminds me of many things I have rushed into in life, especially the many conclusions of pure bliss or eternal disaster. It also reminds me of Barack Obama. In 2008 when the Obama fever was high, when the possibility of a first black American president reached its highest crescendo of reality, many people thought this would be the end of all the racism in America. The references to Martin Luther King Jr prophetic speeches were intoxicating. Obamania was what it was called and people lined up to elect him and wish that it would vanish years of racial tension. But did it?

Surprisingly, America baked in the heat of racial tensions during his administration that many question if truly this was the messiah or they should wait for another.  Trayvon Martin happened under him and many more like him and he failed to mention race as a factor in these killings until towards the end of his second term. This man turned Libya upside down.

Another scenario is the Trump ascendancy. Because of his vulgarity and his indecency, many painted his walk to the White House as both political and economic doom for the nation.  A particular case in point is Paul Krugman, a political economist who wrote tirelessly about the negative economic effects of a Trump presidency. I read almost everything he wrote on Trump, admired the clarity of his arguments and how he could explain complicated economic terms to an outsider like me. While the jury is not yet out on the political doom, Americans have seen more jobs created in the Trump era that CNN and the New York Times are finding it hard to report.

But it’s not the ambiguities that bestride the American politics that is of particular concern to me as much as how this applies to humans personally. We often see life in terms of finish lines; let me graduate and I will rest. But the rest never comes, and soon it is the time for job-hunting and when the great job comes, the rest is also put on hold as the stress of the job sets in.  

Most times, a personal upheaval that threatens to milk our joy away sets in and we trouble ourselves to death that this is the end, this is the period when the river stops flowing or the sun stops shining because of this embarrassment.  It could be another rejection, job loss, bad investment, the most unexpected betrayal or even the loss of a loved one to sickness or death. The truth is that just like the happy and sad feelings that came with Obama and Trump or even Buhari, or more personally, with S., there is truly no finish line. The river will flow the next morning in the same gait it has flowed for years; the sun will rise and fall when it is time; the clouds will chase after each other at night while the stars watch in sparkling silence. Do not lose a minute’s sleep. There is always a morning after.

The Quiet Violence in Senator Godswill Akpabio’s Poland Allusion

At a funeral Mass attended recently by Senator Godswill Akpabio, the former governor used the morbid atmosphere to paint a macabre picture of what would come in his state in the next general election. The senator who has fallen out with his godson, Governor Udom Emmanuel, and just decamped to the All Progressives Congress invoked the Nazi invasion of Poland to underscore the preparedness of his new party to win Akwa Ibom State from the Peoples Democratic Party.

In his words, “Recently, I had an occasion in Akwa Ibom State and this is what happened: I went just to make a floor declaration; others do it in the social media, others just sit in their offices, some do it by text messages that they have changed platform, what we call party. But in my own, I just decided to do it in an uncommon way because they call me uncommon transformer. It was watched in 59 countries and somebody asked what happened there, and I said just how it happened in Poland.

Wait for it: “When they asked Hitler’s minister for information how was the war in Poland? He said Warsaw saw war and war saw Warsaw. I will say that in the Ikot-Ekpene arena, when I stepped out, this is my first function after that, Warsaw saw war and war saw Warsaw. We can’t talk politics in the church but in 2019 Warsaw shall see war and war shall see Warsaw. The return will be victory. May God grant us all victory.”

While his knowledge of military history will be greatly useful in strategic studies classes, drawing such comparisons between a historical nightmare and a democratic process that is renowned for massive violence in this part of the world is totally unconscionable. For those who are unaware of the background of this historical allusion, the invasion of Poland by Adolf Hitler claimed thousands of civilian lives and ushered in one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in the history of mankind. Sometimes called the September Invasion, it saw Adolf Hitler’s troops decimate Polish citizens on an alarming scale in 1939 and this was the prelude to what was feared would be mankind’s final war.

Using Lebensraum (living space) as a pretext for the invasion, Adolf Hitler pursued his plans of territorial expansion in Poland and did not rule out the possibility of violence. In an address to his generals in May 1939 before the invasion, he clearly outlined the means to an end in the war, stating that, “with minor exceptions German national unification has been achieved. Further successes cannot be achieved without bloodshed. Poland will always be on the side of our adversaries.”

About ten days before the attack, a war-hungry Hitler delivered a speech to his military commanders at the Obersalzberg; he emphasized his mission of invading Poland in these few words: “the object of the war is … physically to destroy the enemy. That is why I have prepared, for the moment only in the East, my 'Death's Head' formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need.”

Nigeria’s heterogeneity has earned it its own share of violence through the utterances of men as high and mighty in the society like Senator Akpabio. Like Hitler, all they need to do is to stretch the rod of violence towards a particular direction and watch men and women who have benefitted from their generosity march forward to unleash a red sea of violence and destruction on their enemies. This has been the story in much post-election violence so far recorded in the country. The post-election mayhem that greeted the 2011 general election is still fresh in mind; it was a case where the cynicism of a particular candidate in the electoral process sparked violence in many states of the North after results were announced. Also, the widespread violence that characterised the First Republic electioneering process, codenamed Operation We-ti-e was one of the reasons the military gave for truncating the civilian rule. The violence was like cancer and spread fast through the Western Region following the disputed 1964/65 general election; prominent politicians and their supporters lost both lives and property from the ensuing mayhem that disgruntled politicians and their supporters unleashed. All that was needed for the spirit of death to visit your doorstep was for the other side to know you belong to the opposing camp.

A repeat of these mindless killings in the power tussle between Akin Omoboriowo and Governor Adekunle Ajasin in the old Ondo State will again form another reason for the termination of the Second Republic. Nigeria has so far survived many more of these insensate electoral violence that one should hope that today they will serve as one of those chilling ‘never again’ reminders in the toolbox of our collective national memory; but the reverse seems to be the case as each generation struggles to outdo the previous in the cycle of despicable bloodletting. 

The destruction of electoral materials in the recently canceled constituency election in Rivers State and the death of two people in the August 11 bye-election to fill the vacant position of Lokoja/Koton-Karfe Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives are reminders that these nightmares are once again upon us all. Therefore, rather than seeing political power as a do-or-die affair, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo once described it –he even used terms like “capture” to describe his party’s victory in elections-, politicians and the general public should remind themselves that it is about service to the nation and nothing more. Likewise, there is no better time for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the National Orientation Agency (NOA), and civil societies to reinvigorate their message of non-violence than now that politicians have started equating electoral victory to mass murder. The clock is ticking fast.

Segun Adeniyi's Against the run of play: the past in this present

Reading is sometimes the only way to make sense of a national disaster. Nigeria, as it is today, is a disaster and I try to escape this daily affliction of my senses by reading a book. Only this time, the book was not a source of refuge but a confirmation of what is not working with this country: its leaders.

The said book that refused to act as a source of escape for me was Segun Adeniyi’s Against a run of play which chronicles how the first incumbent in Nigeria lost an election. I had put off reading this book for over two years now- each time I begin, I never get past the first chapter, and sometimes, I move around sentences in a paragraph with the same gait the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, only it didn’t take me forty years. The author had previously chronicled a turbulent period in the life of our nascent democracy, focusing on the death of former President Yara’dua and the vultures that hovered over Aso Rock to prevent a constitutional transmission of power. So my lack of interest in his second political blockbuster book was not against his craft but rather because I read reviews which presented the book as a series of interviews with the myrmidons of darkness- this I later discovered was partly true.

But the book is relevant today more than ever before because of the series of political events playing out in the country that bear striking resemblance to the reasons presented in the book for the defeat of former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015.

Among other things, President’s Jonathan seeming tolerance for corrupt officials in his cabinet, his personal vendetta with Rotimi Amaechi and some other Peoples Democratic Party governors, insecurity in the country and his fixation in the illusory idea that his party will survive the defections that marred it are some of the reasons that the book explores. Missing crude oil proceeds involving former Petroleum minister, Allison Madueke, and the Stella Oduah bulletproof cars scandal writ large in his hubris. But the most poignant of all is his loyalty to these accused ministers. The opposition party then was battle ready at all times to play the foibles of Jonathan’s ministers on the screen of public conscience at all times.  Do not add the impropriety of his wife to the pile.

However, there is a replay of some of the flaws that led to the fall of Jonathan. First, the nation is witnessing another era where party in-fighting is taking the centre stage instead of good governance. The Bukola Saraki face-off with the All Progressive Congress and the President Buhari silent involvement in attempts to ensure his impeachment is a chilling reminder of how the federal might was used to ensure that Rotimi Amaechi didn’t get it easy in Rivers State after the fallout with President Jonathan. Under President Buhari, the Nigerian Police has exercised unconstitutional powers by barricading the Assembly Complex to prevent the Senate President from performing his constitutional duties. At the same time, the Police have been accused of also preventing the free movement of the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu who is seen as a staunch loyalty to his boss.  As if this wasn’t enough affront on the rule of law, the Department of State Security wasted no time in showing who was making the calls when they decided to station masked uniformed men to prevent senators from sitting- another case of preventing a constitutional duty. But for the intervention of the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, the DSS menace would have gone unhindered.

Likewise, the Buhari administration has not been free from the corruption it has tirelessly claimed to fight. Babachar Lawal, Kemi Adeosun, Abubakar Malaima, and the DG of the National Health Insurance Scheme are people who have been placed on red alert for sharp practices but are still holding their positions or have not been prosecuted. These cases have turned his great fight against corruption into a deodorised bullshit. What we are left with is the pursuit of defected governors from the ruling party by the anti-corruption agency- the same governors who before their defection were not considered corrupt.

What about his promise to combat insecurity? This has almost become a pipedream as under the current administration, BokoHaram has not only continued to thrive but another terror wing has been added to it. The herdsmen crisis has become more than a concern. No other bunch of bandits has committed gross atrocities against the Nigerian state with reckless abandon as much as the herdsmen. It is hard for many not to see them as carrying out their crimes under the state’s protection.

Maybe Segun Adeniyi should consider writing a sequel to his book.