Obi Nwakanma
11 January 2009
opinion
LAST week, famous Nigerian novelist and public servant Elechi Amadi was kidnapped from his home in Aluu village, near Port-Harcourt. The story is that his kidnappers went to his rather modest home in the night and took him while he was having a quiet time with his family.
They abducted the novelist, blindfolded him, and by his own accounts drove him in a Hilux mini-van to some secluded location in the swamps where he was forced to spend a most discomfiting night. As it turned out, his kidnappers wanted money. They demanded N300 million from Amadi before they could release him. Elechi Amadi has told the story in some newspaper accounts about his negotiations with his abductors who found that they indeed had the wrong person.
The novelist, although quite famous, has no money. He had been a distinguished public servant but he did not steal from the public till, and his very modest surroundings bear great testimony to his modesty, or in fact his immodesty, for Amadi's lifestyle advertises a great, profoundly self-confident disdain for crass wealth and possession. I have been to his home in Aluu and the thorough sparseness of Amadi's world ought to have told his abductors that they indeed went to the wrong place.
What Amadi's life simply suggests is that truly self-conscious, highly educated and acute people have confidence in other things more than the carapace of wealth and empty power that shores the inner ruins of hollow men.
He reminds me of my own father's generation of civil servants: modest men and women trained in the finest tradition of service, most of them depended solely on their legitimate means and could never steal from the public or mismanage the public trust or fund. They lived in modesty and forbearance, avoided the liveries and fake ornaments of the arriviste rich, worked with a deep sense of public responsibility, and many of them have felt betrayed by what became of Nigeria, and in their retirements look bleary eyed at the utter failure of the nation and its public space.
In a sense, they too were also guilty for in their self absorbed isolation and righteous disdain for crass, they failed to see the overwhelming rise of crass around them until too late, and rendered powerless, they saw crassness and its purveyors - the jackboot monkeys in power - take over and destroy everything. They became complicit by indirection, for some of the best men in that generation also were recruited, and they served rogue regimes with the same audacity and commitment; the same disinterested loyalty to the "system."
That is the only sin of people like Elechi Amadi. But it was in an attempt indeed to subvert the nation that led the military regimes and their civilian partners and inheritors to destroy the sanctity of that tradition of the public service which had seen Elechi Amadi serve as permanent secretary, commissioner, and now chairman of the Rivers State Scholarship Board, a part time, possibly community service position, yet without any obvious trappings of illicit acquisition around him. He neither has the means nor does he particularly care about flying to Monaco in a private jet for family to have their pictures taken sipping orange juice in Monte Carlo. Aluu it seems is just fine for him.
He did not build a big, sprawling house to fence himself in with a massive gate. As I said, his greatest immodesty is possibly the open, taunting, ascetic lifestyle that so clearly contrasts with the blind, parasitic acquisition and loud living of Nigeria's inferior elite. Although his reputation is well established, and his novels are quite popular and have sold well, copyright piracy possibly has also not allowed him to derive any great, but possibly just a modest benefit from occasional royalties for his famous novels. Nigerian writers are never rich nor are they supported by any form of preferment.
His abductors saw this very convincingly and let him go. They had indeed come to the wrong person. An innocent man, they called him. The great good that will come from this kidnapping and the attempt to get ransom for Amadi by his abductors is that it may finally draw the necessary attention, especially with the international buzz that quickly followed the news of his kidnap, to the stark reality of life in Eastern Nigeria, especially with its sinful level of youth unemployment.
That entire region is gaining international attention as dangerous and unsafe; a zone of crime and death. A place now crawling with fanatics, spies, kidnappers, paid assassins, gun smugglers, sharpers, and a new generation of oil ruffians and pirates. I sat listening with great irritation, shame and disbelief at the bar of the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago last November as some American Researchers on oil and state failure basically described the Niger Delta as the most dangerous place in the world only next to Somalia and the Gulf of Aden. I made a spirited argument pointing out some of the contradictions of that description, but it is equally true that much of that society has collapsed, and life in the East is unsafe and dangerous.
The scenario is indeed dire. Imagine someday, a group of well armed people take over Surulere, establish their authority, and some do the same in Ikeja, Victoria Island, and so on, carving up areas of authority by force. It is the scenario of city militias. A Somalia in the making. There are of course those who will say, it is impossible. "This is Nigeria. E no fit happen." Well, to some of those I will say, wake up and smell the coffee. The kidnappings in the East are the result of blight and the absence of governance.
There is massive youth unemployment. A whole generation of highly educated men and women see no prospect in normal living: they have no jobs, they can not live in dignity; the cannot start families, and the regulatory discipline that comes with that sense of responsibility is absent; young men and women are ripe without a sense of worth; with no prospects; no organizing meaning to their lives.
They see wild and indecent wealth in few concentrated hands; a show of force and power at the level of government that does not reflect in their lives; they have grown increasingly skeptical about law and order because "law and order" does not feed you; does not offer you dignity; indeed it mocks you and renders you powerless.
The social contract is a fraud because it does not include you. These are the increasing ways in which these young men and women are beginning to interpret their society: only the strong, the connected and the daring live. The rest die. That's what Nigeria has taught its youth. Not to build but to steal. The first step is to kidnap.
The next is the rise of well organized urban militias. Let me say this again: Nigeria does not seem to understand the high security implication of keeping a vast number of highly trained young people - scientists, engineers, psychologists, linguists - unoccupied, unhappy and outside the circle of privilege. They are not only free agents subject to recruitment, but they are also human time bombs waiting to explode. These kidnappings are mere opening shots. What some of us will like to see is a massive government programme, a sort of new deal, to absorb these energies.
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