Niyi Osundare: We have been unlucky with the kind of people who have forced themselves on us

Professor Niyi Osundare is a leading African poet, dramatist, linguist, and literary critic.He became the first Anglophone African poet to win the Noma Award (Africa’s most prestigious book award). He was awarded the Fonlon/Nichols Prize for his “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.” In 2014, he was admitted to the National Order of Merit, Nigeria’s highest honour for intellectual distinction and creative achievement. He was also declared the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans. In this interview by KEHINDE OYETIMI, he speaks on the various inanities truncating Nigeria’s progress.

Considering the decades you have spent in the Diaspora, you are referred to as one outside, looking inside. You just returned to the country a short while ago and this coincides with the present Buhari administration’s celebration of six years in government. Also tied to this is the celebration of the June 12 Democracy Day. What is your assessment of this?

Yes, indeed, I have been shuttling between Nigeria and the United States for about 24 years owing to a family emergency. So, I have been “outside”, but I have also been very much “inside” at the same time. People often assume that once you are overseas, you are completely out of Nigeria. Not really so in all cases. The Internet has made things a lot easier now. Our world has become smaller and more connected. Additionally, being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ is basically psychological. I have never lived one moment without thoughts of Nigeria since family issues took me to the US many years ago. This country is so central to my consciousness and the consciousness of my family. Nigeria still remains my root, although my branches are also in different parts of the world now. As I have always observed, exile is a state of mind.

Now, on to Nigeria, our country, the way we take her, the way we judge and appreciate those who have pledged to lead her and to lead us, her abundant possibilities and disappointing failures… Like other Nigerians, I knew President Buhari when he was a military dictator, 1984. I think the coup that brought him to power was announced on December 31, 1983. So by January 1, it was a new dispensation. The Shagari government had been swept from power. It was now Buhari and Idiagbon at the helm. The government they ousted was an infamous one: corrupt and inept. I don’t know if people actually shed any tears for the ouster of the Shagari government. But within a week or two, we were beginning to see dictatorial tendencies in Buhari and Idiagbon. Things became extremely difficult when the new junta began by promulgating Decree 2 that flagrantly stripped Nigerians of their right to liberty and protection from the caprices of tyrannical governance. Nigeria became tighter, really tighter as a pall of fear and trepidation fell on the entire country. Basically, this decree empowered government to arrest citizens, detain them for as long as it pleased, while the victim was denied any resort to legal reprieve.

General Buhari saw the corruption and decay in Nigeria and he felt that he should do something about them. He meant well, no doubt, but his practical demonstration of patriotic leadership was draconian and dismissive of the people’s right to civil liberty. The new strongman was taciturn and distant, and kept most of his motives and intentions behind a wall of imperial silence. The country became really hot, with people complaining of the new tipatipa government. It was in this situation that another military adventurer maneuvered his way to power in August, the following year, 1985. Babangida, the great “Human Rights President”, the consummate pretender who, like his fellow military despots, dumped Nigeria in the pit we are in today.

The point I am making is: President Buhari is not new to the leadership history of this country. I am old enough to be able to compare what he was, 1983-84, with what he is now 2015 to the present. Essentially, what we have is the story of the same man with the same tendencies: austere, taciturn, and impatient with the fine details of democratic governance. This was why his bid for power under a democratic dispensation was greeted with skepticism and incredulity. But, as happened during his first coming, the corruption and ineptitude that necessitated his clarion for ‘change’ in 1984 showed up again as the tragic flaws of the Jonathan government. His campaign presented him as a reformed (if not converted) dictator, and born-again democrat. His agenda resonated with Nigerians: to fight corruption, to make the Nigerian space and Nigerians more secure, improve our international image, make it possible for us to love one another as Nigerians, and make the country more united.

The first four years put the war against corruption on the front pages of Nigeria’s newspapers, with gory revelations, most of which have led to no conviction. Then came the dispiriting embarrassment that the man chosen to lead the war against corruption was/is himself allegedly a victim of that malaise! And you wonder: what kind of background check was done before the appointment of the anti-corruption czar? At work here again is the typical shoddy Nigerian way of doing – or undoing – things, and the resultant inevitability of failure. Then the cabinet and other political and military appointments, and what in the opinion of many has been a persistent violation of ‘federal character’, and what those appointments said about the President who made them. Now, let me enter a caveat here: personally, I am one of those Nigerians, no matter how few we are, who believe that merit, not the accident of geo-ethnic provenance should rule the decision of appointments. But if the ‘federal character’ clause has been worked into Nigeria’s constitution, and one of your campaign  promises is to abide by it, if elected, then you should do that with an earnestness and sincerity of purpose that does not permit the favour of certain parts of the country to the disadvantage of others. By the logic of his appointments and, at times, his pronouncements, President Buhari needs to be more sensitive to the complex diversity and quarrelsome competitiveness of the myriad nations that throng the Nigeria house.  He needs to show in word and practical demonstration that the whole of Nigeria is his ‘ethnic constituency’.

With regard to security, here is one area where the Buhari government has been most insecure, most embarrassingly inept.  Granted, the caliphate dream of Boko Haram has been curtailed, but the terrorist snake has only been scorched, not killed. Their notorious forays still litter our streets with corpses and make short work of our peace of mind. But by far, it is the seemingly interminable spate of kidnappings and abductions that have been rattling the country since the beginning of Buhari’s second term that are shaping up to be the dark, bloody spot of his presidency. The frequency and unchallenged effrontery of these abductions are simply mind-boggling, almost legendary: Dapchi, Kankara, Dandume, Kagara, Jangebe, Afaka, Kassami, BirninYauri. If Chibok was considered one of the major reasons for the fall of the Jonathan government, I wonder what to say about the endless chain of abductions now happening on a weekly basis in this country. Consider the trauma on the mostly young victims of these abductions already branded and blighted by a nation unable to protect them in this vulnerable stage of their lives. Imagine the traumatic afflictions of parents and relations that have been forced to sell all they own in order to provide the ransoms that seem to be increasing with each successful extortion. In the northern part of our country today, it takes an awful lot of courage to send your children to school, considering the various bands of armed terrorists lurking somewhere near the school gate, and the seemingly seamless Sambisas that have sprung up in nearly every state. No doubt, the abductors have found a new lucrative use for whatever is left of our once thriving forests. And then you wonder: what is the President doing about all this? Where are the master plans for arresting this state of anarchy? We have expensive government in place, quite alright, but for goodness sake, where is governance? Where are the rulers who swore to serve and protect us?

Way down south, in the thicker forests, it is kidnapping, murder, rape, arson, extortion, and other terrorist acts by herdsmen who drive their cattle with AK-47 rifle hanging from their shoulders

The battle for whatever is left of our rainforest has turned local farmers and itinerant herdsmen into mortal enemies.  Erstwhile neighbours and friends are at each other’s throats. Thriving farmlands have turned into killing fields, as attacks are followed by more gory reprisals. From the middle belt to the southwest, from the southeast to our lush and nearly lost Delta, there are daily skirmishes between the owners of the land and itinerant herdsmen whose own stocks of wealth trample farmlands and munch the crops that should normally feed the people. The rows between these two groups have resulted in wanton destruction, maiming and murder of the most barbaric kind. Yet, the herders graze their cows virtually anywhere, and any time with an obvious air of impunity and entitlement arising from their belief that their ethnic affinity with the current ‘Oga at the top’ bespeaks a combination of protection and endorsement. The aggrieved farmers are feeling increasingly betrayed by a government whose partiality they are beginning to take for granted.

So right now, Nigeria is taking fire from both sides: in the North you cannot send your child to school because of the fear of abductors; in the South you cannot tend your farms for fear of ‘armed herders’. The former paves the nation’s way to an illiterate future; the latter drives us towards severe famine. Again, I ask: Where are the rulers who swore to serve and protect us? Where is our government’s plan for the solution of the problems? What has President Buhari been saying – and doing?

The question that frequently comes to my mind is: why is the country unraveling in President Buhari’s second term? Did our President hide his true character from us in his first term? Was he waiting for the second term after which he will never need our votes again? If this were his first term, would the security in the country be like this? Would his reaction to the security be the way it is at the moment? Are we seeing the actions of the second-term president who no longer needs our votes, and is therefore free to ride the horse the way he pleases? I have not been able to find an answer. From what I am seeing now, we are living in a country that has a very expensive government but has no governance at all.

Let’s say it the way it is: so far in President Buhari’s second term, Nigeria has become a failed state. There is no need for any prevarication, any euphemism here. Right now, Nigeria is like an old battered jalopy with broken bolts and missing nuts. The economy is in shambles, with the naira nosediving everyday and runaway inflation making an expensive mockery of the national currency. Hunger walks the streets, with a retinue of armed or unarmed robbers and kidnappers. I have never felt so unsafe in this country. Since I came back from the United States a few days ago, every morning people have been telling me ‘oga, don’t come home yet o’. Now when I walk in the streets, I look over my shoulders because you could be kidnapped anywhere. I have kept wondering: where is government? Where are the people that are supposed to make our lives secure? Where is our President? Why is he so content with being absent from our lives, our woes? Two times now, I have been compelled by sheer patriotic necessity to ask him to “say something, to do something”; to be present in our lives. When rulers stage his kind of absence, they put themselves and the nation in danger. When a leader is too silent, he runs the risk of abandoning the field to a slew of conspiracy theories and false ventriloquisms. There is also the lurking possibility of the misreading of his silence.

At the moment, Nigeria is in a parlous state, the type I have never seen before. President Buhari needs to convince us all that he thinks about all of us; that he thinks about this country; that he thinks about his legacy. He needs to make sure that he doesn’t end up in history as Nigeria’s last president. This is very important. Nigeria is in danger the way it is at the moment. I am not used to raising unnecessary alarm, but when the truth is there we have to speak it so as to save ourselves. Nigeria looks very much to me now like a country without governance. A veritable banana republic – except for the fact it cannot produce enough banana to quench its citizens’ hunger.

I am acutely worried at the way we and our rulers have normalised the abnormal. The almost weekly abductions in the northern part of the country have become so routine now that their newspaper reports are beginning to miss the front-page. The President has never said anything of memorable substance about it. The governors look pathetic in their pitiable helplessness. Our brave legislators, Right Honourables all of them, enacted a law that ignored the cause of kidnapping and abduction, but went bravely tough on the payment of ransoms. And then you wonder: why is our politics so full of tragic tomfoolery?

Next, NEPA – or whatever fanciful name it is called now. (I have stuck to its old acronym because of its serendipitous rhyme with “leper”!). Almost routinely these days, you hear of a whole nation being plunged into darkness as a result of the collapse of the national grid. In saner, more thoughtfully governed countries, this is the kind of catastrophe that occurs only in times of war or serious natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and typhoons. But in obodo dike Naijiria, thanks to our rulers, we have normalised the abnormality of that national embarrassment from Aso Rock to the remotest local government area. As my brother Ogoo Okonkwo (alias Dr. Damages) is fond of asking, “Who did this to us” in Nigeria. Why are our rulers so thoughtless? Can it be because they are “elected” by thoughtless people?

What bothers me about the Nigerian situation is the way we have been drifting, even more importantly the way we have got used to it. This is what kills a nation. Nigeria is dying.  It doesn’t make any sense to me at all that we do not have people really coming out and talking about all these problems.

To be sure, Buhari did not create the NEPA problem. But he promised us that he was going to slay that dragon once and for all. But like his predecessors in office, Nigeria’s NEPA nemesis is wrestling him to the ground. In 2021 for goodness sake! Africa’s Delinquent Giant (ADG) cannot light up its people’s nights, illuminate their classrooms and laboratories, and put power to the muscle of their factories! Michael Faraday must be wincing in his grave! Here we are, brave Nigerians, going steadily deaf from the noise of myriad generators. And our rulers are daily praying to foreigners to come over and dump their investments in Nigeria’s impenetrable darkness. I cannot help joining Kunle Ajibade in his patriotic exclamation: “What a Country!”

There have been secessionist tendencies in the various regions of the country. Many are advocating restructuring; others are warning that our unity is not negotiable. Do you see any silver lining should we continue as one country?

In my interview after the2019 NOIPOFEST (Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival) gracefully hosted by the University of Calabar, I averred ruefully that the Nigerian civil war had not ended. A number of respondents chose to disagree with me. But I said no, the scars are still very much there.  “No victor, no vanquished”, declared the young, willowy General Gowon at the end of that war. He was trying to play the Abraham Lincoln of Nigeria. From what we see now, nothing could have been farther from the truth. There was no victor in the Nigerian Civil War because we were/are all losers. But there were countless vanquished. What we are seeing in the South-East today is a continuation of a war that never ended. As psychologists would put it, there has been no closure to the civil war, for the factors that brought it about are still with us.

I remember the military slogan during that war was “To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done”. Yes, indeed, that was the rallying cry. But the ceaselessly inventive Wole Soyinka, himself a prominent political victim of that war, came up with a moral, logical alternative: “To keep Nigeria one, justice must be done”. Soyinka’s statement is even truer, more pertinent now than it was at the time it was made. To keep Nigeria one, justice must be done in all its ramifications. The foundation of the country has to be strong. Nigeria has never had that kind of a foundation but we pretend a lot. We keep deceiving ourselves with meretricious platitudes such as ‘you must love your country; Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable’. Is poverty in Nigeria non-negotiable? Is ethnic imbalance non-negotiable? Is bad governance non-negotiable? Is corruption non-negotiable? These are issues that we are facing now. How can you ‘love’ a country which never loves you? Nigeria doesn’t make her citizens patriotic.

Time our rulers stopped selling the illusion that Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable, even when, every second, they violate the very foundation of that unity with their lack of vision and respect for social justice. Shall we begin, for instance, by preaching national unity to the swelling ranks of bandits who now constitute an alternative government in many parts of the country; or the rampaging herdsmen and local farmers locked in mortal combat over diminishing grazing terrains? Again, let’s ask: why are the herdsmen-farmers’ conflicts so rife, so perilous now in President Buhari’s second term? What is the President’s understanding of the causes of these conflicts? What expert advice has he sought regarding the solutions to the problem? What is it in his public utterances and body language that is fueling the crisis?

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in Ikere-Ekiti, a then rural, agrarian town in the southwest Nigeria. Our family house in Odo-Oja, right in the centre of the town, was/is just a few compounds from the area where Nigerians from the northern parts of the country lived and plied their trade. We celebrated all the Muslim festivals with them, and many of them joined us at Christmas. They also never missed our indigenous/traditional celebrations. In this thriving ‘Cosmopolitan Village’, in this ‘United Nations’ of Nigeria were ‘representatives’ from other ethnic groups: Igbo, Urhobo, Efik, Agatu, Idoma, Ebira, Nupe. And, of course, I grew up listening to stories about wondrous Edo history and culture. Yes, as children we cracked jokes with itinerant Fulani men, singing ‘Agunmumdaadaani’. This is the Nigeria that I knew. All of a sudden, we have now become enemies to one another, thanks to successive visionless leaders and their moral and cognitive deficit! President Buhari, tell me: how long, how deeply have you thought about the causes of this dramatic/tragic transformation? Why are Nigerians so dangerously at each other’s throat under your watch? Ask.  Then do something. For the present cracks in the Nigeria house may end up as the overriding legacy of your presidency.

You lived many years in the United States of America where the population is larger than Nigeria’s and yet they produce beef and have no issues whatsoever like us in cattle rearing for commercial purposes. Why are we unable to adopt same practices which work in such country?

I think I have tackled the basic burden of this question in my February 10, 2021 open letter to President Buhari:  stop open grazing, for it is anachronistic, unwise, uneconomical, and needlessly dangerous for the herders, the cattle, and, as we have found out in recent times, for the very stability of the Nigeria nation. Establish modern, functional ranches with adequate facilities for the cattle and the herders. Herders also need education, social welfare, and human dignity. Let the Nigerian elite who own the cows treat the herdsmen the way they treat their own children by ensuring their access to sound formal education and ‘life more abundant’. Random, peripatetic herding has no place in the 21st century; let no one glamorise that anomaly as a ‘way of life’ for any group of people. Let our rulers make full use of our universities and their faculties of agriculture. Let’s press modern science into service, and banish the incubus of ignorance and backwardness that has always stood between us and progress. Beyond all that, let our rulers as well as the ruled cultivate the staple, indispensable habit of thinking and purposive reflection. Most if not all Nigeria’s problems are caused by a deficit of thought or the habit of acting first and thinking later. This is why our journey to progress has always been a tragic crawl. This is why ours is a country bedeviled by avoidable mistakes. The world is ruled by those who think before they act. Other countries have conquered the moon and are now blazing the trail to Saturn. In Nigeria, our President and his team are busy tracing ancient cattle grazing routes and charging us to join in their heroic effort.

We lost the 20th century. Now, we are on the way to losing the 21st.  Mr. President, who will lead Nigeria out of its millennial slumber?

You referred to our university system earlier. Recent developments have proven to us that the malaise has also extended to our ivory towers. It is becoming increasingly difficult to appoint a vice chancellor what with the infightings. The University of Lagos, the University of Ibadan, the Lagos State University, and many others are pitiable examples of this saddening drift. Are you not worried?

Of course, I am worried, but hardly surprised.  As I said last week at the Graduate Conference organised by University of Ibadan’s Faculty of Arts, when the news reached us abroad regarding the debacle arising from the appointment of a new vice chancellor at the University of Ibadan about six months ago, three colleagues from different African countries told me how terribly disappointed they were. In the opinion of these colleagues whose love and respect for UI have grown over the years, UI, by its age and track record, should be above such a disgraceful impasse.  One of them was actually pained at seeing UI, regarded as one of Africa’s answers to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard, fail so dismally at the election of its own academic leader. Painful but not surprising.

The V.C. appointment debacle is a symptom of the malaise that has gripped our so-called university system in the past three decades or so. As the university degenerated from trailblazer into blaze trailer, the pervasive decay of the larger Nigerian society crashed through the gate of the Ivory Tower, resulting in a foul fusion of the proverbial town and gown. Contest for vice chancellorship is now just like the battle for spots in the political arena. The do-or-die battle has become more desperate and bloody since the emoluments attached to the post went through an astronomical hike a couple of years ago. The V,C., once regarded as primus inter pares, has been catapulted  into a lavishly remunerated “Chief  Executive” as happens in the corporate world.  Like other appointees to public office, V.Cs. now see their appointment as a rare opportunity to climb out of the pit of relative material poverty that is the lot of their not-so-lucky colleagues. Big emoluments, big trouble!

Now, a very important caveat: not all Nigerian vice chancellors are afflicted with this vice. In fact, this country has produced some vice chancellors that could have managed the best universities anywhere in the world. There are also some contestants for the post whose major motivation is the eagerness to serve and the hunger to make a difference. Nigeria surely needs more members of this endangered tribe of patriotic intellectuals in order to bring the lost universe back to its university.

Lastly, let our current office-seekers know that the battle for university autonomy that finally produced the present process for the selection of vice chancellor took the ASUU many years of hard negotiations characterised by incredible sacrifice,  agony, and sundry risks. The present generation must hold and guard this hard-won dispensation and never give the government any excuse for reverting to those sweeping powers of the past that enabled them to appoint, transfer, suspend, vice chancellors without recourse to due process and proper consultation.

Don’t you then find it laughable when you hear our Ministry of Health say that Nigeria can provide a local vaccine for COVID-19? Also you were in the United States when the pandemic broke out.

My heart was thumping with fear and anxiety in the first six months of last year as COVID-9 rampaged all over the world, leaving death and suffering in its wake. It was speculated that Nigeria might lose half of its population, a speculation roundly justified by the country’s rickety healthcare system. The carnage taking place in many parts of the world, even in countries with incredible wealth and first-rate healthcare facilities. I kept a close tab on the situation in Nigeria, and was gratefully surprised that our losses didn’t come as predicted. The Federal Ministry of Health deserves praise, so does the Lagos State government which leveraged proactively on its Ebola experience, and secured the major gateway to Nigeria. But Nigeria has been lucky, astonishingly lucky. We surely need a rigorous scientific research to unravel the cause/reason for this ‘luck’ and preserve it for future use. And, very important, we are not out of the woods yet, for COVID and its protean variants are still on the rampage.

On the other side, it is shocking that the Federal Republic of Nigeria had no viable vaccine plan throughout. As usual, the Giant of Africa was content with begging and borrowing vaccines from other, more organised, countries for its over 200 million human beings. Moreover, what further proof of the Nigerian malaise do we need than the fact that for the first nine months of 2020, when serious, purposeful nations were lavishing funds and care on their universities and research institutes engaged in the search for COVID vaccine, the Nigerian university system was paralysed by a long, avoidable strike. Nigeria still hasn’t mastered the idea and import of the university, though it has them now mushrooming in tenths and dozens. This is why our electrical engineering departments wallow in darkness, while their counterparts in civil engineering don’t know how to make water pump. This is why the more universities we have, the deeper and broader our epidemic of ignorance and illiteracy. Can all this be happening if we are a nation with leaders who think and care and act, and citizens who make sure they do?

What is your take on the clamours for Nigeria’s restructuring?

Here, in brief, is my take on this important issue: If our rulers do not restructure Nigeria, Nigeria will restructure itself. It is already happening.

We have a country made up of randomly assembled ethnicities which for over 100 years have lived more in conflict than cooperation, more in fellow-felling than fellow-feeling. But our rulers live in denial of its parlous state.

Since the civil war, I have never seen Nigeria so divided and so angrily, so defiantly so. There is danger in this anger; possible doom in the defiance. Right now, the country is in a state of undeclared war, a war on many fronts. The signs are visible, even audible to everyone except our rulers.

President Buhari, this is time to talk with the people, not to talk at them. A time for democratic dialogue, not monarchical monologue.  A time to soften up and listen, not to scoff and  scold.

Those who want the country restructured have given their reasons. Let those who do not want it restructured also provide their own reasons. We can then go on from there.

The Nigeria House must not fall, but its very foundation must be re-examined and re-jigged; the in-equity among its constituent parts must be addressed. Its moral structure must be re-engineered. The country just cannot continue in its present state without heading for the rock.

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