A Short Biography of Yesterday

Here is the text of an open letter released by Nigerian Writers in reaction to the current political situation in Nigeria. Over forty writers have currently signed up to the letter which has this morning been released to the media. You can add your own signature, and support, in a comment box beneath.   You can also listen to and download an audio version by clicking on this link:  Audio

We are no Longer at Ease.

An Open Letter from Nigerian Writers

Nigeria’s failure to make the progress commensurate with 50 years of nation-building is not just a failure of leadership. It is first and most catastrophically, a failure of followership.

As ordinary Nigerians, we have failed to create an environment where good leadership can thrive. By glamorising fraud and ineptitude, we have created a country hostile to probity. Our expectation from Government House is mediocrity, so that good government surprises us pleasantly and excellence continues to amaze us. Instead of an environment of accountability, we have fostered sycophancy. We have been content to follow every stripe of leader, from the thief to the buffoon. The consequence is that for months we have been happy to be ruled even in absentia.

Today, we say, no more.

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A Draft Corporate Corruption Bill

The text of a proposed law is not the sexiest subject for a blog, but some laws are capable of a transformative impact on society and they should interest all of us. An example of a law that can completely transform society is one that ends Apartheid.

My proposal for a ‘magic bullet law’ aimed at endemic corruption is potentially transformative not just of Nigerian or even African society. This draft law is scripted for Nigeria, but it is relevant to any society whose public institutions are still nascent.

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Diana Quick's A Tug on the Thread

The most fascinating people in our lives are often our own ‘boring’ parents. Actress Diana Quick made this discovery only after her father died, back when she was still a student in Oxford University.

I met her back in 2008 during the programming of Oxford Playhouse’s  70^th Anniversary. Soon after that, I read her family memoir, A Tug on the Thread, which was in part inspired by her father’s death. She had thought she knew her old man well enough, but he had requested a full-blown Catholic requiem service and she’d had no idea that he had any Catholic roots. Writes Diana,

When  I really thought about his background I realised that all I knew for sure was that he had been born and raised in India and had come to England to be a student at Guy’s Hospital a few years before the Second World War. p.12 Read more »

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The British National Party, chaired by Nick Griffin has a small problem on its hands: it has been required by court order to change its constitution in order to open its membership to Blacks and Asians. One can imagine the consternation of the 14,000 members of the far-right political party which is currently open only to Caucasians, which is against mixed marriage, and which campaigns for Blacks and Asians to be repatriated back to their countries of origin.

As a fringe party, the BNP is not totally irrelevant in British politics. From some 500 votes in the 1987 elections, it has gone up to attracting about 190,000 nationwide in 2005. It won some 5% of the votes in the London-wide vote in 2008 and won a seat in the hallowed London Assembly – with about 56 councillors nationwide.

The white-only membership of the BNP is at the heart of its identity. Its current constitution defines its potential membership with the particularity of an apartheid byelaw:

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Yesterday, Nigeria’s House of Assembly appointed Vice President Goodluck Jonathan the  ‘Acting President’ of the federation under the provisions of S. 145 of the Constitution. They acted to fill the vacuum created when President Yar Adua was rushed to Saudi Arabia on a medical emergency some 78 days ago. They are to be congratulated for finally doing something. Sadly, however, their action has created another constitutional crisis. This is section 145 of the 1999 constitution on which they relied:

145. Whenever the President transmits to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he is proceeding on vacation or that he is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary such functions shall be discharged by the Vice-President as Acting President. Read more »

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(Or Why you need to buy a Subscription of African Writing Magazine).

The most recent edition of The New Yorker contains an Uwem Akpan short story, Baptizing the Gun. It is a vintage Akpan page-turner (or mouse-clicker, for I read it online). In the first line of the story, a woman traveling in a Lagos bus has her ear ripped by an earring thief. As the Reverend narrator of Akpan’s story continues down Lagos’ streets, it does not get much safer for the city’s intrepid commuters. Hair raising stuff.

The Denzel Washington film, Man on Fire, is set in a Mexico City where the children of the rich stay home from school for want of a good bodyguard, where uniformed policemen are members of the kidnap gangs that make the streets the kidnap capital of the world. Denzel Washington plays the American hero who saves the daughter of the American wife of a Mexican tycoon, Samuel (played by American actor, Marc Antony) by shooting and blowing up half the city. It is a 2004 film but I saw it yesterday. Hair raising stuff. Read more »

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(Or How to Hook the Naija Mugu)

A black notebook is discovered in a loo, 20,000 feet above Abuja. It contains political secrets so ‘explosive’ that its owner has to deny it. Here’s the first of ten recently discovered commandments designed for the aspiring politician.

The full PDF is available here and you would be mad not to read it all…

then again, reading it might just drive you mad, or worse… decisions, decisions… anyhow, here’s the first of ten commandment. Read more »

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http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Interview-with-Ngugi-Wa-Thiongo

The current  issue of Granta magazine features an interview with Ngugi Wa Thiongo.

Ellah Allfrey takes the African-language-warrior through his forthcoming memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War. He talks about the phenomenon of the ‘concentration villages’ created by the dislocation of hundred of traditional villages by the colonists. Now, that’s a story I’d like to read. Read more »

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Maurice and The Right to Recall

Okay, so there I was on the other side of the street from the Nigerian Embassy in London. It was 5.30pm on Friday, 15th January, 2010 and our demonstration was just winding down when a few rather more nattily-dressed Nigerians began to arrive on the scene. ‘You are late for the demonstration,’ we told them.

‘We’re all together in the struggle,’ they replied, ‘but we have another demonstration inside the embassy.’ Read more »

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We do live in interesting times.

Yesterday I journeyed to London. The occasion was a protest rally at Parliament Square and a march to the Nigerian Embassy at Northumberland Avenue. The immediate provocations for the protest were a missing president, a constitutional crisis and a slow-burning rage (50 years old this year) at a desperate poverty of leadership in Nigeria. There was also the embarrassing mismatch between our national ambitions and our realities. Read more »

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Good wishes were never going to be enough.

The token gesture, even the heart-felt, sacrificial donation… they were always going to be too little, too late, not for that disaster area an ocean away. Thanks to television, the world suffered with Haiti. But Haiti needed far more than tears. Enter America. Never was military might put to better use. Never did an American imperial presidency respond with greater heart and promptitude to the needs of needy humanity than in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. As in the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami, it is not just the aircraft carriers, ambulance ships, thousands of soldiers or even the pledge of a hundred million dollars that makes the difference. It is also in the raw empathy and generosity of spirit from citizens on the streets (notwithstanding the ever-present lunatic fringe). Read more »

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