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Perspectives on
Time to Reclaim Nigeria:
Foreword
By Prof. Harry
Garuba*
Time to Reclaim Nigeria :a
preface By
Professor Biko Agozino
Time to
Reclaim Nigeria :An introduction By Kwesi Pratt Jnr
When I received the soft copy of the galleys of this book in the
short interval between committee meetings, I was so captivated
by the title that I immediately started reading and had to be
reminded by phone that the second session had begun. The idea of
reclaiming Nigeria struck a deep chord in me as I recalled the
many incidents of tortured delay at airports as soon as I
produce my passport. Or the moments of discomfort and
dissimulation when someone notices your decidedly non-local
accent and asks the inevitable question- where do you come from?
– and, instead of proudly proclaiming your Nigerianness, you
pause and then answer with your own question – why do you want
to know?
These incidents that take place either in transit or outside the
country are mirrored within the country by the anecdotes you
hear all the time about the impact of corruption and
inefficiency on everyday life. The frustration is palpable.
Every Nigerian can tell you their own tale of woe about the
state of the country, from stories about the frequency of the
petty roadside bribe to the brazen looting of public resources;
tales about the deadly infrastructure of roads and the
inefficiencies of public utilities. But what most of us do not
know is that we can reclaim the country from the corrupt and
inept leaders who have turned it into a vast moral desert, a
place where nothing works and where there is no conception of
the public good. This is precisely what this book admonishes us
to do: to reclaim the country from those who have brought us to
our knees. As you go through this book, you cannot but agree
with the author that it is truly time to do so.
This book provides us with a historical record of wrongdoing
spanning roughly the just-over-one decade of the return to
democracy in Nigeria.
It brings together the many columns written by one
journalist over the years in different newspapers and magazines
commenting on the state of the nation and its leaders, showing
us the many wrong turns we have taken on the road. The 65 pieces
collected here serve to remind us of the disparities of opulence
and poverty that mark Nigeria, the plunder of its resources by
an avaricious elite, the venality and chicanery of politicians,
the utter disregard for the niceties of governance and
accountability, and the list of odiousness continues without
let. The repetitive folly the book details is only alleviated by
the logic and lucidity of Onumah’s prose which compels you to
keep reading.
Every year end, I often find myself rereading old newspapers –
before I thrash them - to relive the fury and the frenzy of
commentary on the topical issues that dominated the news that
year and assess which of these have faded into oblivion or
diminished into inconsequence. Reading through Chido Onumah’s
pieces brought that feeling of perspicacity that hindsight
provides, except that the catalogue of malfeasance neither
seemed to have faded nor diminished; it was like returning to an
old wound that simply refuses to heal or be cauterised no matter
how you try. In spite of the relentless bleakness of the
landscape of turpitude it maps, it is important to note that the
anchoring premise of this book is that surely, this recurring
nightmare has to stop. It’s time for us to dare to dream.
Home, they say, is where the hurt is; but home is also where
hope nests. Time to
Reclaim Nigeria takes us through the hurt to the home of
hope. If you are still reading this, it’s time to embark on this
journey from hurt to hope with Chido Onumah’s book as guide and
compass.
*Harry Garuba
is the Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Centre
for African Studies,
University of Cape Town, South Africa. He
has a joint appointment with the English Department. His
teaching interests include: African Literature; Postcolonial
Theory and Criticism; African Modernities; and
Intellectuals/Intellectual Traditions of African Nationalist
Writing.
In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the
editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series
and one of the editors of the newly established electronic
journal Postcolonial Text. He has an active interest in African
and postcolonial literatures and has published a volume of
poetry Shadow and Dream & Other Poems, and has edited another
Voices from the Fringe.
His recent publications have explored questions of mapping,
space and subjectivity within a colonial and postcolonial
context and issues of modernity and local agency, especially the
nature and form of African inflections of the modern.
Th
This is the document referred to in the Witness
Statement on Oath of Clifford O. Kokogho as
“Exhibit
COK.2”
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