Ayomide
There really is no running away from Nigeria. In all my years of travel around our very lovely world, Nigeria has a way of troubling one’s consciousness. It is permanent hope deferred and an annoying adolescence refusing to grow up to vaunted potentials. Nothing illustrates that feeling better than travelling in other parts of our continent, but especially in West Africa. Here in Guinea, where I have been over the past week, a backdrop of the inability of Nigeria to rise up to a ‘manifest destiny’ conveyed by its population and precociousness; the vast resourcefulness of nature in our national space and the determination of our people face the world with boundless optimism. In the hands of a band of serial rapists of its hopes and resources, who masquerade as a ruling class, Nigeria has come to resemble the Lagos mole bus: rickety, worn, threatening to drop into the lagoon, with shapeless passengers of alienated citizens!
Every time l travel, here is therefore an unstated under1ininghope to get the opportunity to enjoy the sanity which humans created indifferent climes, no matter how-fleetJngly. There is however a tempering of enjoyment, by that realization that we could have taken definitive taps in the construction of a significant space of sanity in Nigeria too, given a different set of circumstances, in our leadership recruitment; in the understanding which such a leadership possesses in terms of the potentials of our country; its sense of patriotism and commitment to the national weal and the mobilization of the citizenry to commit to the construction of a country which works for all. What we have harvested is a retiling class of bandits dedicated to a level of spoliation of the nation that beggars belief. Hobbesian state has been foisted on the people, who in turn survive anyhow.
Politics is warfare by other means, since the authoritative allocation of values. cannot be achieved without struggle for power. This fact underscores politics in all human society and explains why the negative and positive are often conscripted to attain power. In Nigeria, the ruling elite has constructed a terminus around the fault lines of identity and negatively deploy same together with the manipulation of the desperate poverty in the land to keep intact a pernicious hegemony of ever deepening banditry and an unproductive prebendaries. Unless we deceive ourselves, the ten years of civil rule have merely given the democratic process a bad name and left the Nigerian people in quandary: okay military dictatorship was ruinous; but what difference has having civilian bandits in control made to the fate of the country and its people?
It was against the backdrop of this train of thought, that I paid my first visit to the Nigerian Embassy in Conakry, last Tuesday.It was also my first meeting with the Ambassador, Dr Gambo Laraba Abdullahi; you could hardly meet a more dedicated officer and a genuinely humane individual. She deploys much effusiveness about what she does here in Guinea, to represent Nigeria, which is quite infectious. As it turned out, I visited on a day that the embassy was attempting to assist in the resolution of a crisis which arose within the Nigerian community organization in Conakry. She invited me to join the meeting, and wesat through a tedious process of recriminations which reproduced the worst aspect of politicking, the Nigerian way. The Yoruba community threatened to secede from the association, because the Igbo leadership was said to be running the association like a cabal which was exclusively Igbo; the Arewa group will not attend meetings in a church while the Edo/Delta community was urging restraint. The scenario was almost like what happened during the crisis of the nineteen sixties in our country. It took over three and a half hours to broker an acceptable compromise, a process which taxed the conciliatory abilities of the Ambassador and her team; but in that episode Nigeria asserted itself, almost with vengeance!
This is the sense in which Isaid that we cannot escape Nigeria, wherever we go to; the politics of a community association in Guinea reproduces the worst aspect of ruling class politics at home: crude ethnic divisiveness; lack of respect for the interest of the other compatriot and a tendency towards a corrupt and abusive use of power. The resulting response is for people to reinforce the laager mentality. Malam Abba Kyaritold me the other dayjust how absurd our situation has become; instead of a ruling elite that attempts to build an inclusive country and determinedly fight against poverty, it bungles it all the way, with its banditry. In response, some are talking of issuing a Biafran passport in the East; others are engaged in low. intensity warfare against the state in the Niger Delta; ethnic chauvinism is ratcheting up in the South West while the regime at the centre has been progressively provincialized.
In all these responses, there is nothing for the Nigerian people; North or South; Muslim or Christian, who all long to live in a country which provides the decency within which they can achieve their dreams.
I have not allowed the depressing state of our homeland to take away the epiphany of the Futa Djallon. I think this is one of the most picturesque and lovely sites on the African continent! Rolling hills watered by heavy rains; those hills smoke in the morning and evening like a wise old man with a pipe! Then the cattle- the Indama breed, which roam around village homesteads like sheep and goats do in Nigeria. I have travelled to towns that one used to encounter only in history books: Mammou; Timbo; Sokotoro; Pita; Labe and Dalaba, where I ani writing these lines. I have spoken with the historians of the Puta and learned a bit more about the emigrational history of the Fulbe people and in the process, there is an incredible coming to terms with some of the most remarkable chapters of African history. The stories I collected will be told subsequently on the pages of this newspaper. But one I can readily tell is the visit I made this morning to the residence which Miriam Makeba occupied during her long years of exile in this country. Even in partial ruin, the lovelyhouse retains the aura of art and cosmopolitan loving which must have suffused it, when Mama Africa lived init. There was still a picture of the grand old woman on the wall, the beddings, a shelf of books she read; even the kitchen seemed frozen in time, with the container of spices still intact!
The Futa Djallon is a treasure house of culture, history and superb natural surroundings. I am continuing my trips here for a few more days, including a trip to Dinguiraye, the homestead of El-Hadji Oumar Tall, the great Islamic scholar who passed through Sokoto and married a daughter of Sheikh Usmanu Dan Fodiyo.Sheis buried there. Guinea is one of the richest countries in Africa, but its people are poor. Transnational corporations of imperialism cart away its resources to feed fat in Europe and America; it isjust like everywhere else in Africa!
