22nd June, 2021
The 1985 murder of 26-year old Bernard Ogedengbe by Buhari haunts me. It’s as if I let him down by failing to convince Nigerians that Buhari’s evil and should not be rewarded with the highest office of the land. I cannot get over what happened in 2015. Soyinka’s words haunt me.
“Prominent against these charges was an act that amounted to nothing less than judicial murder, the execution of a citizen under a retroactive decree. Does Decree 20 ring a bell? If not, then, perhaps the names of three youths — Lawal Ojuolape (30), Bernard Ogedengbe (29) and Bartholomew Owoh (26) do. To put it quite plainly, one of those three — Ogedengbe — was executed for a crime that did not carry a capital forfeit at the time it was committed. This was an unconscionable crime, carried out in defiance of the pleas and protests of nearly every sector of the Nigerian and international community — religious, civil rights, political, trade unions etc.”
When Soyinka describes the pain of Ogedengbe’s extrajudicial murder and the hell-days of 1984–1985 under Buhari, his prose rises to a painful decibel that you can taste. Buhari is evil, he has committed crimes against humanity. To forgive his crimes is to taunt our humanity.
As Africans long accustomed to the history of subjugation and erasure, two things should be sacred to us: Human life and narrative. How we treat ourselves and what we say about ourselves define the worth of our humanity. I see myself as a human rights activist who loves to write.
Democracy in Nigeria since 1999 has been a deadly farce. The distinction between the PDP and APC is a distinction without a difference, a pox on all their evil thieving houses. But I wept when intellectuals colluded with thieves to put Buhari in Aso Rock. https://link.medium.com/DSWVb82AVgb
Since 1999, from OBJ to GEJ, Nigerian-style democracy has allowed the worst of us to rule us. But to replace Goodluck Jonathan with Buhari? When you are in a hole, you stop digging. It was inevitable that Nigerians would live to regret their egregious lapse in judgment.
There is a coming reckoning. This “democracy” is not sustainable, Nigeria is reeling under the weight of several cultural and structural dysfunctions and there is going to be national trauma that will reset the national senses. Until then, a deadly farce continues to consume us.
Nigeria is a complex country, but in the hands of inexperienced loud-mouthed toddlers, it is dying slowly. We need more than mere storytellers to run the country. We need good men and women to build the necessary processes and structures for a vibrant Nigeria. Buhari was not it!
Convincing folks that Buhari was a train wreck coming was an impossibility. Like trying to wake up a man pretending to be asleep, they had made up their minds for personal and ethnic reasons. The fate of Nigeria was secondary to their parochial ambitions. That is why we are here.
I appreciate the apologies of some who led Nigerians down this horrid path. In a sense, they were elevated beyond their level of competence and they found out quickly that are mere bit players. Few of them would qualify to be more than mid level managers in a real corporation.
Democracy has served to ruin the credibility and reputation of most Nigerian intellectuals. Now they are seen as mere talking heads, bullshit artists lining their pockets. When a nation loses her thinkers to greed and avarice, the end is near. This is a national security crisis.
Many in the literary community, the civil society, the clan of intellectuals racing to a middle class nirvana have colluded with oppressors to pillage Nigeria. They have sold their voices to thieves and murderers for gain while gaslighting any attempt to hold them accountable.
The only tool of accountability has been the work of young Nigerians using social media as a tool. Without Twitter, these young dreamers, doers and warriors would be enduring suffocating servitude under older writers and intellectuals that enable vagabonds in power! #KeepitOn
I am embarrassed that I spent years trying to convince many Nigerian writers that they shouldn’t be in the company or payroll of those who killed hundreds of Shiites and buried them in unmarked mass graves like goats. These same folks wax lyrical about the death of George Floyd.
To coddle criminal elements like El Rufai and Buhari, to take money from murderers and thieves and go on wasteful literary jamborees, literally reading poetry and prose on the graves of hundreds of victims of genocide, to thus criminalize African literature, that is unforgivable.
My prayer? Let this be the last time that writers and intellectuals will collude with thieves and thugs to rape and pillage Nigeria. Let us hold everyone accountable so that this does not happen again. If we survive this. I am not sure we will. Let us pray.
The only tool of accountability has been the work of young Nigerians using social media as a tool. Without Twitter, these young dreamers, doers and warriors would be enduring suffocating servitude under older writers and intellectuals that enable vagabonds in power! #KeepitOn
I have been quite dogmatic about two things: a principled disgust for those who abuse the civil rights of others, and a principled disgust for those who have compromised African literature, for profit. On those, there shall be no compromise, to my dying day.
Many in the Nigerian literary and political community tried to make me pay for my stubborn opposition to their criminal ways. Technology and privilege saved me. When they expelled me from their institutions I became an institution. *pounds cute chest* I am a warrior. #KeepitOn
I saw the worst of these thinkers and writers, bullies who collaborated with petty thieves and thugs to kill my advocacy through blackmail, shaming and whispering campaigns. They even spammed what they thought was my employer’s Twitter handle asking that I be fired. A whole me!
It was privilege that saved me. I have privilege. Enough to give them the middle finger. Privilege should be a civil right. I was the one reading their books and providing feedback, I was the one taking the time to read and edit their manuscripts for free. I have my receipts!
I was the one giving them my essays to publish for free in their journals because of course they could not afford to pay me. I was the one sometimes quietly giving money to them when their dreams needed support. I have my receipts!
I really don’t need a whole lot of folks at my stage in life, I have no need for money, my pleasures are simple, and so I can afford to give state-sanctioned criminals the middle finger. They don’t feed me. Live within your means and you can afford courage. I have courage. I paid for it.
It is not all gloom and doom. Young writers are fighting back against middle-aged gatekeepers of “African literature” and reclaiming their space with confidence and really good, authentic narrative. Technology has liberated them from literary servitude. There is hope. Keep it up!
My message to young Nigerians? Keep up the good fight, ignore my generation and older, we tend to be risk averse and selfish, we have little to offer you that is good. You are a generation without mentors, without leaders. Keep doing you, you will be just fine. Good night!
Finally, I should stop getting involved in Nigeria’s affairs. I will try to stay away. I am no longer there. Been gone too long, next year, I would have been gone 40 years. Let me face my America, take the knee for my own people. #BlackLivesMatter
*Pa Ikhide is associate professor of Anglophone African literatures at Northeastern Illinois University
*This article was first published in Medium on 13 June