WHEN CAN WE BE EAGLES?

We no longer live and act like a nation, argues

CHIBUEZE DARLINGTON ANUONYE

“Nigeria is a strange place, a country where a corpse can be kidnapped. Please, bury him there in London. Accept my condolences.” Those were the words I heard the moment I entered my doctor’s office. The surgeon, a Nigerian who has been living in the US for almost 40 years, was speaking to someone on the phone. Before they ended the call, the man thanked my doctor for “validating his fears.” I was still imagining the unspoken pain the men struggled to suppress when a friend of mine sent me President Tinubu’s message calling on “Nigerians abroad to return” home because our “nation is rising again.” Two hundred and seven years ago, in a letter to his friend J.H. Reynolds, British poet John Keats asked a question that is essential to our situation: “Why should we kick against Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be Eagles?” Keat was reflecting on the aims of poetry but reading him today gives one impression that he was speaking for us, Nigerians in diaspora.    

On Tuesday August 19, at least 27 people were murdered in Katsina State while worshipping in a mosque. As citizens of a religious nation, Nigerians, for all our political suffering, embraced the idea that if we were in God’s presence we would be safe. But this spiritual consolation has been wantonly taken away from us. Only two years ago, Owo, a town in Ondo State, was the site of a similar massacre involving over 40 worshippers on St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church. Since 2023 villages in Plateau State have been besieged by terrorist groups in an intercommunal conflict. These killers seem to draw strength from the silence of the government. On January 28, 2021, the BCC informed the world that Orlu, a once quiet town in Imo State had been occupied by gunmen. Over four years since the report, Imo, Anambra and Enugu States are still in the clutches of these killers. These might seem like mere statistics to an outsider, but we are talking about human beings dying in a most unfortunate manner and in avoidable circumstances. Recently, a youth corps member was brutalised and stripped naked by an oppressive vigilante network in Anambra. This group lacks both the training and the empathy to function in a civilised society, but it does not matter since they serve the interest of the governor who, despite an impressive resume as a brilliant professor of economics and former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, exemplifies incompetence in his role as governor.    

There is a sense that Tinubu is aware of the growing consensus among critics that Nigeria is a crime scene. How does the president expect us to listen to him and return home? The opening lines of Somali British writer Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’ has been quoted quite often by people around the world who are wrestling with the loss of their homes or grappling with the idea of what a home is; people at the margin of life and those bearing witnessing to how exile can become the final crossing of that irretrievable margin. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” Shire writes. “You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.” The truth the poem expresses is both vulnerable and powerful. It does not seem that the leaders of Nigeria read poetry, so we do not expect them to understand the power of Shire’s work. But do they not know, do they not see, do they not hear that they presiding over the ghost of what used to be a vibrant nation?

When Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, he was thinking about the subliminal way in which colonial power disguised itself as a friendly handshake. We have a more sinister, more treacherous set of colonisers today, who, already living with us, have no need to invade our lives. They are one of us. So, they corrupt our hearts with tribalism. The only thing worse than Buhari’s presidency is that Nigerian elders who knew the man’s precedent repackaged him as a visionary democrat and foisted him on us, the younger generation, who had neither any real sense of the time he ruled in the 1980s as a soldier nor any lesson in history to reveal that time to us. I hope that tomorrow a future generation will not be compelled to think of our present rulers as anything more than politicians who clung on to power with a grandiose sense of entitlement.

I am inclined to rethink my assumption that our politicians corrupt us with their own evil. Perhaps the influence is mutual. Perhaps they are only able to drive us this far into insanity, into violence, into bigotry, because we already have these seeds in us. All they need to do—and have done—is to water the seeds and watch us grow like grass and spread like wildfire. Today, the seed of bigotry has sprouted in Nigeria, and, like the proverbial okra, it is threatening to outgrow its planter. What else explains the politicisation of death in Nigeria? What else justifies the silence of the Northern leaders on the gruesome and publicised murder of Deborah Yakubu in 2022 over the allegation of blasphemy? What about the indifference leaders from South have shown towards the banditry and death long ongoing in the North? We no longer live and act like a nation, and no amount of pretence can hide this reality. If we insist that we are still a nation, should we not be bothered that our ideal of nationality is so fraught, so bigoted, so alienating?

Anuonye is on the editorial board of World Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma