An Open Letter to our Seven Presidential Candidates

An Open Letter to our Seven Presidential Candidates


January 2010

Dear Sirs,

I will like to congratulate all of you contesting as presidential candidates on various party platforms: President Goodluck Jonathan, General Mohammed Buhari, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, Alhaji Ibrahim Shekarau, Chief Dele Momodu, Dr. Pat Utomi and Mr. John Dara. Well done so far and I wish you all good luck in the upcoming elections.

I will not go into analysing your chances at the polls. Some of you are well known more than others. Some of you are in parties that have the resources to prosecute elections in a country like Nigeria. All of you claim to have Nigeria’s interests at heart. We do not sincerely know the reasons why you are all contesting despite whatever you might tell us. Some people have suggested that some of you may be better off in the Senate. You all have your supporters and detractors. All said and done, I hope the best man for the job wins.

We are however interested in what plans you have for solving specific intractable problems in our great country Nigeria. We do not want you to tell us that power supply will be available within 12 months. How will you go about it? Be specific. You are all so busy right now planning for your campaigns and the elections that you barely have time for other things. Have you put together some sort of economic and strategy team? By now I will expect you to have done so. Is it after you win the elections that you will start thinking of your cabinet members? A word of advice sirs, while for the sake of political expediency, you will be expected to give out some slots to your party, contributors and different constituencies here and there; it will be advisable to let everyone know some ministries are non-negotiable namely Defence, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Power, Education, Petroleum Resources and Health. A tall order? I know. Getting the right people into these ministries can however make a lot of difference. And yes, Works, so that all those roads can be repaired quickly.

Now to the brass tacks. How do you intend to tackle some of the following issues? We do not want complex, high fallutin reports. In simple lay man’s terms, kindly explain to us what you will do. These things as they say are not rocket science. It will be nice if your government is not business as usual. We are not asking for miracles (maybe we are!); we just want to see that basic things get done. That brings me to another advice for your Excellencies in waiting. Please on no condition, under no circumstances must you go and commission a borehole, a school building or even a road. It is an insult to our collective intelligence. These are things that any country more so, one like Nigeria should have in abundance. I can however forgive you when you commission a brand new power station with a capacity for 3000 – 5000 Megawatts. That will be the day!

Now please kindly keep the following in mind:

Fuel Subsidy/Petroleum Refining - How do you intend to continue to subsidise fuel while simultaneously encouraging private sector participation in the downstream sector? What plans do you have for revamping of our refineries? Removing subsidy is definitely politically incorrect and morally odious.

Power Supply - Powerful unions and interest groups are making privitisation and commercialisation of PHCN difficult. If PHCN works, several companies involved in generators and diesel supply will go out of business. People are ready to pay for power supply if it is available. Power plants however don't come up overnight. It takes four to five years. How do you intend to address these issues?

Transport, Road Construction and Maintenance - Gone are the days when our rail system was very efficient and used for moving goods and services from one place to another. Now, we all depend on moving from one place to another by vehicular transport, which due to the bad state of our roads has become very risky business. How sirs, do you intend to tackle this issue?

Education - Can tertiary education continue to be free? If yes, how does your government intend to fund it? Should the government continue to be involved in the running of secondary schools (the Unity Schools) without compromising standards and quality? How do you plan to motivate teachers, attract funding for more schools, libraries and teaching training?

Cost of Governance/The Civil Service - In view of the stance taken by the Presidential Advisory Council that the present government is too large and in view of the CBN's governor statement that 25% of our budget is used to service the government machinery, how do you intend to keep the costs of running your government low? Is your government going to have 42 ministers just for the sake of federal character? We honestly do not need 42 ministers and you all know it but how are you going to handle all the godfathers, hangers on, political associates, party members, governors and other acolytes? What about the fact that our civil service is too large and bureaucratic. The NLC will not allow you to sack people. How will you convince them that government does not necessarily have to be the largest employer of labour?

These are just a few items that I think myself and other Nigerians may be interested in. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to read this and I look forward to your prompt response. God bless you and God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.



Yours faithfully,

Ayodeji Jeremiah
Your faithful and loyal Citizen

At Farafina Book Review, You Feel How True (and Powerful) A Story Is

By Adeleke “Mai Nasara” Adeyemi

Frodo: “I’m all right.”
Sam: “No, no you’re not all right. You’re exhausted…It’s that thing around your neck.”

The invitation to attend avant-garde Nigerian publishing house Farafina’s monthly Book Review, called for 2008 MacArthur “genius” Grant Fellow Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck brought wafting to mind a snatch of cinematic conversation from “Lord of the Rings.”

The dialogue is from the last in the trilogy—“The Return of the King”—a work most ominous from ladlefuls of interminable intrigue, something within the clutch of the writer of Thing. The potluck parallel is pertinent: a Review participant would assert that, from his reading, though “highly literary, Chimamanda seems to write with film in mind as well.”

The terse and weary exchange came at a make-or-mar juncture for humanity, at least in the vision of the book writer J.R.R. Tolkien; for his Frodo, pop culture icon, the “thing around your neck” is the Ring of Power.

For Chimamanda (readers and subjects will have only to the first name of the rising literary queen), the audience of December 4, 2010 at Terra Kulture, on Victoria Island, Lagos (in partnership), would say ‘Ring of Power’ is a symbol of how well-rounded the award-winning nouveau niche storyteller—easily the most accomplished Nigerian female writer—succeeded at making her first short story collection, published in 2009.

It came after two roaring book successes, a winning colourful streak that started with the coming-of-age Purple Hibiscus (2003) and carried on with the vicariously cathartic Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).

The present 12-piece collection (all previously published apiece) is an array of stories spun from strong human feelings and foibles, taking on sundry demons, from religious extremism to immigrant headaches, haunted history and pungent familial relationships seething with sibling shenanigans.

They come imbued with the power to engross; but does each story really ring true as a powerful enough statement on how the New African Life is lived, at home and in the Diaspora?

That was the task set for the conclave of bookworms. And came they did, prepared to “carry it for a while” (to echo Frodo’s Sam), regardless of their own exhaustion from having waltzed through Lagos’ legendary traffic. Or perhaps they were showing up to relieve fatigue from the tedium of clichés cluttering their lives, to communally dip into a book by a writer universally attested to be refreshing.

Their leader was the unassumingly cerebral Victor Ehikhamenor: literary connoisseur, visual artist and columnist with Nigeria’s avant-garde award-winning newspaper, NEXT. To set the ball rolling he read the first in line, “Cell One,” on the tragedy triggered by a mother’s smouldering love, is set where the writer grew up, the university town of Nsukka, in Nigeria’s southeast. Many agreed it bears out the age-long aphorisms: “Charity begins at home” and “You reap what you sow”.

The lead reviewer was ready with his verdict on why that story (and indeed every other in the collection) had to be written: “As a society, we tend to live in denial.” In keeping with the straightforward mission of Farafina, his is a clarion call on all to step up the ante of “telling our own stories”—but first to ourselves, to see come true Hispanic American literary theorist Barry L. Lopez’s prediction: “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them.”Farafina was founded on the vision of bringing the writer of the day (and her kind) to the attention of her native Africa.

Proceedings were moderated by budding literary activist Wana Udobang of Inspiration FM. She would apologise for the weak-strong character of the collection; the writing, she explained, was both pre- and post-Purple Hibiscus, the author’s debut.

The free-of-charge (locals say ‘F.O.C’) event, “organised to boost Nigeria’s reading culture” was, as always was open to all book lovers. For those yet to get a copy of the book before the review, Farafina put up its blurb on their blog and website.

Spicing up the interlude of the day, Dolapo Martin, with stage name D-Tune, came with a string of ballads doled out to his own accompaniment on acoustic guitar; the crooner enjoyed singing as much as his audience relished every strain and turn of lyrics that told the story of sheltered and frustrated love and a father’s unwillingness to let go and let boy.

The gathering returned to grapple, among others, with the searching question: who does Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie write for? Especially given the short story that lent its title to the collection, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” set in Connecticut, in the land of the author’s sojourn and rise to power.

There was also the question of whether Nigerian, nay African, Diaspora stories were not being “churned out” to pander to Western demands for them. (The lead reviewer of the day has ‘been there’ and, says he, won’t be deterred from “writing up my own, too, for consumption by all!”)

Perhaps the touchiest issue of the day was “whether Chimamanda can be accused of ‘agenda writing’,” a question stirred up by a story in the collection, “The Shivering,” set on the campus of Princeton University, which seemed to demand that the writer bend over backwards to make the protagonist extremely likeable.

Someone wondered if it’s “all a bid to sell his kind to us”—later revealed to be homosexual—“to tell the world we have also ‘arrived’ as a tolerant people, able to handle red-hot buttons with a grin!”

The Farafina Book Review takes a break in January, to resume February 2011; book for the day will be brought to the attention of fans and patrons in the blogosphere, as well as announced in traditional media for the benefit of the general public, well in advance.

Impressively well-attended, the gathering yielded a fistful of insights, despite (perhaps because of) its feistiness. Adjourned, it will reconvene; hopefully bigger, around the promise of—that which rings true and powerful—a story.