Garbage Cans of Innuendoes

“The Nigerian press cried out throughout the period that Shagari ran Nigeria … It is good for General Buhari to take note that the Nigerian press will watch him and his government for as long as the military remains in power.”

Revisionists are at work, rewriting or unwriting the unfolding history of Nigeria, even as we are all watching. These high-sounding revisionists, because they are white or because they live abroad, behaves as though we read two different sets of books – they, one; and we another. But this is sheer nosense. Those of us who took the long journeys to various overseas universities beat many of them repeatedly in the use of their language, mostly English, and outsmarted them even in the understanding of their histories and culture. But for the likes of Shehu Shagari who turned our days into nights, this much abused Nigeria has produced some of the best physicians and physicists in the history of mankind, and many others who have chosen the humanities have shown the ability to out-think these western revisionists. When it is convenient for the American and the English – the latter is deteriorating fast in the sciences and the humanitiea – they will claim to know what is the problem with us more than we do. This is absolutely unacceptable. Those Nigerians who have access to the media have done a good work of outlining the problems with Nigeria: Peter Enahoro did a long time ago in the How to be a Nigerian; Chihua Achebe did recently in The trouble with Nigeria; Wole Soyinka did in The Season of Anomie, ages before the term became a vogue; and countless other journalists have done a million columns on what ails Nigeria.

The only problem was that the country was cursed with a set of opportunists and mid-day robbers who had no idea on what a government was all about. They were deaf and blind, and they spoke in strange tongues. If they had listened and understood, the military would stay locked up behind their barracks, doing the bidding of the civilians like tin-gods who thought the world of Nigeria would always belong to them and failed to hear the wise words being spoken to them by patriots. The Shagari class of politicians killed the democratic ideals of this country, and not the soldiers who came practically in response to the yearning of Nigerians who cried to them to save Nigeria from the slow death to which it was being subjected by the Wayas and the Dikkos and the Adewusis among us. For the West Africa magazine and the Economist magazine to write their patronizing garbage cans of innuendoes about what they call the death of democracy in Nigeria is to miss the point. If the military had not srtuck, many thinking Nigerians, as I wrote my column titled Next week is 1984, would have become capital criminals. Then it would have suited the West Africas and the Economists of the world to cry for Nigeria as writers, academics and journalists are arrested and whisked away to mysterious deaths.

I invited the reader to read this sentence from West Africa of January 9: “There has been surprise that the coup took place after Shagari had shown, in his clean sweep of ministers and other actions that he had some awareness of the need of change, and had introduced a high-powered economic team that included experience men from the private sector, who were not really given the chance to show what they could or colud not do. But it was not enough.” Aside from this sort of nonsense, West Africa said that Shehu Shagari was a nice, clean guy who was onfortunately surrounded by nasty, bad fellows. Nigerians have since realized that this sort of fates are meant for fools. And since Nigerians are no fools, they don’t buy this sort of phantasmagoria. Have the editors of West Africa ever heard of a purposeful and honest man surrounding himself with kleptomaniacs? We are all waiting for the military to find out and tell us the truth about Shagari, whether it is true as being widely speculated that Shagari was collecting skims on the nation’s petroleum sales. The military should find out and tell us whether Shagari didn’t know that Dikko had build up immense wealth his skimming of the funds and through his methods of operation of the huge presidential rice task force. Until we get this answer, the revisionists at the West Africa should please shut and stop patronizing up.

The West Africa even asked a rather incredibly naive question when it said: “One may ask, hypothetically, would the military have intervened if the overthrown government was completely and nationally acceptable as having come in as result of elections that were seen to be fully free and fair?” That question came after the West Africa itself has said the reason for the coup was economic mismanagement. One should then ask the funny editors of West Africa: Would a thinking populace vote for a regime that had so manifestly mismanaged the economy of a nation the way Shagari did in the four years of his administration? As for the Economist, what it had to say in its January 7 issue amounted to nothing less than racial abuses against Nigeria in its frenzy to absolve Shehu Shagari. It said that Muhammadu Buhari, the head of state, when he was minister of petroleum, “was in charge if a national oil corporation where theft and blundering were of comic enormity.” The magazine even described Buhari as “simplistic” and self-aggrandizing, and concluded that the military left the government left the government in 1979 “partly because it knew well what a mess its men were making of the job.”

The rest of the article on Nigeria in these two magazines went in the tones described above: patronizing and condescending. One could not help being angry, for they know, if they want to tell the truth, that Nigeria would have died, democratically and economically, within six months if Shagari and his friends were allowed to continue in government. At least the Nigerian press cried out throughout the period that Shagari ran Nigeria. It is good for General Buhari to take note that the Nigerian press will watch him and his government for as long as the military remains in power. The press intends to forestall a situation that will confirm the evil predictions of western press.

©Sunday Concord, January 15, 1984
(Pp.237-239)