Why '76 is Definitely Worth Watching

That Izu Ojukwu’s excellent film, ’76 clinched five awards at the 2017 Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards a week ago – notably earning laurels for best movie and best director – is just reward for one of the most ambitious projects to emerge from Nollywood recently. Starring Ramsey Nouah and Rita Dominic and working off a screenplay by Emmanuel Okomanyi, with a $3 million budget, ’76 was a gamble that paid off and bodes well for the prospects of new generation film makers.

The movie’s strongest point is its rigorous attention to historical detail. It adroitly simulates the sights and sounds of the mid 1970s, through an uncommon diligence in assimilating the right period props and an intelligent use of historical footage. The viewer is transported back in time to an era now increasingly dim in the national memory. By the time, the movie ended to the strings of Bongos Ikwue’s Cockcrow at Dawn, I was positively nostalgic. Part political thriller, part romantic drama, it is the story of a military intelligence officer, Captain Joseph Dewah (Nouah) who is drawn into the conspiracy to topple the Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed.

A key subplot involves his relationship with Suzie (Rita Dominic). As an Igbo, her family, represented by her incensed father and a pesky younger brother, are opposed to her relationship with Dewah, a Middle Belter, who fought on the other side during the civil war and for whom she is now pregnant. Their relationship, fraught with filial mistrust, and burdened by Dewah’s own thoroughbred dedication to duty and his compulsive secrecy, is also a metaphor for the nation’s post-war reconciliation. It is a microcosmic human experiment interrogating the possibility that love can surmount the constant pressure of bitter memories and inter-ethnic antipathies harvested from the grim experience of the civil war.

Shot on location in Mokola Barracks, Ibadan, ’76 realistically portrays the sometimes claustrophobic nature of life in the army barracks; the altercations and rivalries that flare up from having too many alpha male egos in close proximity and the ease with which enemies are made in such circumstances. It also accurately captures the atmospheric dread, mutual paranoia and recrimination that pervade the barracks when a coup plot has been uncovered and its terrible impact on families, especially women – wives, sisters, lovers – who pay a price for the (mis)adventures of the men they love.

In one poignant scene, a fellow army wife tells Suzie that marrying a soldier is akin to accepting to serve the nation along with him. The costs and consequences of the call of duty are shared by the spouses. This is a truth I have seen seared into the eyes of widows that lost their husbands to the lethal inquisitions that followed abortive coups during the military era.  

As one whose family carries the stamp of the failed 1976 coup d’état, I can testify that the movie masterfully projects the thin line between conspiratorial involvement and being in the wrong place and the right time; how the utter caprice of circumstantial evidence and an official vengeful disregard for establishing guilt beyond all reasonable doubt could mean either death by firing squad or an eleventh hour reprieve. In this sense, ’76 is a reminder of a sad chapter of our history when good soldiers were lost not to wars but to insidious vendettas and miscarriages of military justice.

The era of military rule was a bloody episode of Nigeria’s odyssey not just because of the costly civil war but because of the cycle of coups that inevitably followed the military’s incursion into politics. We lost some of our best and brightest in the vortex of violence sprung open by the vaulting ambitions of soldiers who often saw themselves as messianic revolutionaries. The military itself arguably was the institution that was most subverted by its political adventurism. As ’76 shows, treasonous conspiracies destroyed the camaraderie between soldiers and ripped families asunder. Warriors who had fought side by side in wartime, ironically, became enemies because of the intrigues of peace-time coup-plotting.

’76 is not a political thriller in the order of Eddie Ugbomah’s 1983 film, The Death of a Black President which focuses on the political, ideological and mythic significance of Murtala. If Ugbomah’s film deals with the allegedly grand imperialist conspiracy that ultimately consumed the Head of State, Izu Ojukwu’s take deals with the dramatic consequences of such plots on the lives of those further down the totem pole. These are the people who are often unremembered and anonymous. They are the unknown soldiers and nameless civilians and the collateral damage consumed by the internecine coup-plotting and conspiratorial subversion that defined the military era. ’76 is a political thriller told from a compellingly human angle.   

The success of ’76 heralds fresh cinematic possibilities for this generation. Much of our history is uncharted territory and the urgent task of acquainting Nigerians with their own antiquity cannot be left to educationists alone. Film makers can wield their craft and use pop-culture at large as a vital history teaching aid. ’76 also showed what is possible when the government and armed forces collaborate with the creative sectors of civil society. There are many stories that should be told and such collaboration bodes well for the industry. This does not, of course, mean that Nollywood should reduce itself to the propaganda arm of the state. But it does mean film makers have a role to play in the all-encompassing enterprise of nation-building and the government should give them all the support they need

Finally, ’76 marks the coming of age of a cinematic movement that might be described as Nollywood 2.0. Its first shots were fired by Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine and October 1^st. Movies like Steve Gukas’s 93 Days which deal with serious subject matter are on the same creative arc. We have come a long way from the pioneering days of Living in Bondage. A new generation of film makers is now moving away from the tropes, clichés and stereotypes that have long inhibited Nollywood. They are positively obsessed with high production values, and intent on playing for higher stakes and on grander stages, is keen to push the boundaries of storytelling. It has been long in coming.        

Images sourced from 

reportsafrique.com

pulse.ng

guardian.ng  

Who is Responsible for this Mess?

It is true that time changes things. Hindsight has a way of doctoring our recollections. History is often kinder to political reputations than contemporary news cycles but none of this justifies the sort of amnesia that we habitually display. The list of honourees from the Centenary celebrations reflects the dangers of short memories. Let us leave aside the absurd acclamation of the racist Frederick Lugard and his consort Flora Shaw, or the irrationality of a free people feting their erstwhile colonial overlord or the fact that a civil war that claimed over a million casualties cannot really throw up “heroes.” It is the rendition of recent history that is of concern.

The list was a startlingly incongruent mishmash that purported to honour the human rights advocate, Gani Fawehinmi and the two men, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, who did the most to abbreviate his life through ceaseless persecution and incarceration. Was the Kuti clan supposed to be grateful to share honours with the men who killed their matriarch and serially jailed Fela and Beko?

MKO Abiola, the winner of the annulled 1993 election, was honoured as well as Babangida who annulled the election, Abacha who jailed him and murdered his wife, Kudirat, and Abdulsalam Abubakar on whose watch he died mysteriously. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua is honoured along with his murderer, Abacha. The list reconciled Olusegun Obasanjo with Abacha who jailed him on trumped-up charges of coup-plotting. Ernest Shonekan, who continues to parade himself as a former head of government even though a court declared his regime illegal, makes the list. It was under his watch that Abacha as minister of defence ordered troops to mow down scores of demonstrators protesting the annulment of June 12 and the imposition of Shonekan’s regime.  

With the list, Abacha’s rehabilitation is almost complete. In June 2008, Babangida, Abdulsalam and Muhammadu Buhari claimed that contrary to widespread belief, the begoggled dictator was not a thief. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of his demise, the inspiration, apparently a case of solidarity among despots. It was a bizarre claim, not least because only a week earlier, the Swiss government had returned $505 million of Abacha’s loot stashed in Swiss banks. It was Abdulsalam himself who had initiated investigations into Abacha’s thievery and launched efforts to recover his hidden loot. Moreover, as head of state, Abacha had set up an inquiry headed by Pius Okigbo which indicted Babangida for the theft of $12.3 billion of oil revenue. As for Buhari, his loyalty to a former employer clearly belied his reputation as an honest truth-teller who says it like it is.

According to Richard Joseph, under Babangida and Abacha, Nigeria shifted from mere Prebendalism – the appropriation of state resources under the cover of legal rules and procedures – to outright confiscation in which government officials simply seize public assets without bothering to camouflage their larcenies with rules or procedures. Abacha’s prodigious kleptomania placed him in the ignominious company of Africa’s most notorious plundering potentates such as Mobutu and Bokassa. The general and his associates stole over $2 billion amounting to more than a million dollars for every day Abacha was in office, including weekends.

One of President Goodluck Jonathan’s favourite ripostes to his critics is that he inherited a mess from his derelict predecessors. The honours list begs the question: who is responsible for the mess? How does a country so universally acknowledged to be scarred by bad leadership constantly fete a dazzling array of supposedly exemplary leaders? Strangely, Abacha’s son, Mohammed is currently facing federal prosecution for being in possession of federal property stolen by the late dictator. What does it tell us that Mohammed was also part of a delegation of Northwestern leaders to Aso Rock this past January, an occasion on which Jonathan claimed that his administration had performed better than any other in Nigerian history?

If Abacha was truly responsible for an economic miracle, as his citation read, then the implication is that his successors, Abdulsalam and Obasanjo, in particular, destroyed that legacy. Thus, neither of them should have been on the list. Historical revisionists are obviously trying to burnish putrid reputations. Abacha left Nigeria as the world’s 13^th poorest country, a pariah nation with a $30 billion debt and a wretched income per head of $345. Oddly, while Jonathan was exonerating Abacha, Nigeria was paralyzed by fuel scarcity – a legacy of the tyrant’s era along with failed refineries and toxic fuel imports.

The irony is that Abacha and Babangida seem retrospectively tolerable only in the light of the inadequacies of their successors including the current administration. Not long ago, we were treated to Obasanjo and Babangida publicly accusing each other of running the country’s most corrupt regimes. The celebration of these former leaders raises questions about how we define accomplishment and heroism in these parts. Already, upon their assumption of office, Nigerian heads of state and presidents are decorated with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, the nation’s highest honour, for little more than successfully staging coups and rigging elections. It is a system that rewards the attainment of office by any means rather than what is actually achieved while in office. 

The singular message of the centennial honours list is that might is right and that power is its own justification. Where in our algorithm of hero-making does the sanctity of life fit in? Babangida and Abacha led two of Nigeria’s most murderous regimes. Honouring them airbrushes a grim and bloody chapter of our history that was marked by coup plots and state violence. Does anyone now remember the massacre of protesting students at Ahmadu Bello University in 1986? Dele Giwa, Bagauda Kaltho, Alfred Rewane, Ken Saro-Wiwa and many others would obviously have had very different perspectives on the list.

Obasanjo visited death and destruction on Odi and Zaki Biam. Unsurprisingly, T.Y. Danjuma who as his defence minister oversaw those military assaults made the list. Courts have since recognized those expeditions as crimes and awarded a multi-billion compensation package to the two communities – a clear indictment of both Obasanjo and Danjuma. In 2012, Jonathan deployed troops to suppress Occupy Nigeria protests in which close to 20 Nigerians were killed nationwide despite the protests being essentially peaceful.

Leaders that casually terminate their citizens either by commission or omission, negligence or intent, are not heroes regardless of what economic miracles they perform. They can be simultaneously applauded for their dexterity and censured for their brutality. At a time when there is much handwringing over Boko Haram’s atrocities, it should not be forgotten that bomb attacks were actually pioneered by Abacha’s security establishment in the mid 1990s. The disregard for human life that we see today is the latest iteration of a culture of violence authored by the political figures that are now uncritically festooned with national honours. No amount of hagiographical detergent can whitewash the bloodstained legacies of these men.

We are now paying a high price for being too forgiving of the sins of the powerful and too forgetful of their victims. We need to regain a sense of history for memory is our shield against perpetual oppression and posterity is a harsh judge of the forgetful.  

(All images sourced online)     

It's Time to Reimagine Nigeria

 (Text of my speech at the commemorative national centenary edition of the Abuja Literary Society’s Night of the Spoken Word on Friday, January 24, 2014)

The idea at the heart of this nation’s birth was racial redemption. At the beginning of the 20^th century, race was the barrier that divided the world. The colour line split humanity into an allegedly superior white race and a supposedly inferior black race. The generation of agitators that formed the nationalist movement saw Nigeria as an opportunity to register the black man’s presence in the modern world. They wanted to show that Africans could build a pinnacle civilization of their own. Nigeria was to be a showpiece state and an exemplary nation – incontrovertible proof that blacks had something positive to offer humanity.

In order to achieve this, our founding patriarchs had to have a certain kind of faith. They believed in a cosmic sovereign will operating in history. They believed that this being had impelled diverse communities from far-flung places to migrate over the course of centuries and eventually congregate in this space that would one day be christened Nigeria. They also believed that a force greater than Frederick Lugard’s penmanship had ordained the nation’s existence. Consequently, they did not see Nigeria as a whim of the British Empire but as the will of providence.

Now, the patriarchs were usually fractious on many issues but they were of remarkable agreement on one matter: Nigeria was unique and exceptional. Thus Nnamdi Azikiwe declared that Nigeria would be “a country of consequence” and “a force in world affairs.” As he took office as Nigeria’s first indigenous Governor-General in 1960, Azikiwe declared that Nigeria had a duty to “revive the stature of man in Africa and restore the dignity of man in the world.” Adegoke Adelabu described Nigeria’s independence as “a cosmological imperative.” Ahmadu Bello, who at one point famously described the nascent Nigerian nation as a mistake, predicted that with independence she would rise to become “first among equals in Africa.” Chinua Achebe once described Nigeria as a nation favoured by providence and burdened with a historic purpose that no other nation can fulfill

This belief in Nigeria’s manifest destiny energized the nationalist struggle and earned us independence from the British in 1960. This ended the first chapter of our national odyssey.

Our learning curve as a nation since that time has been steep. We have since learned that liberation is different from nation-building. It is one thing to achieve freedom from colonial bondage; it is another thing to seize control of the post-colonial Promised Land. The journey from servitude to sovereignty has been very challenging. We have been through so many traumas – the fall of the First Republic and the abortion of the heady promise of independence, the civil war, the cycle of coups and counter-coups, the oil boom that gave us more wealth than we knew how to usefully spend, the subsequent era of recession and austerity, the age of SAP, the structural adjustment programme, decades of military dictatorship, chronic ethno-religious violence, terrorism – through all of these plagues, we have survived resiliently against the odds. We are still here. And that fact alone gives us the impetus to face the future boldly.

Here are three lessons from our national odyssey that we must take to heart.

1. Nations are not transformed in electoral cycles but in generational cycles. It took a generation of nationalists to earn our independence from colonialists. It took another generation of nationalist pro-democracy activists to confront military despots and win us democracy. And now it falls on another generation, ours, to expand the borders of the freedom that we have now. For democracy means more than just the right to vote. Ultimately, it must mean that everyone has the means to live their dreams and be makers of their own destiny.

For our purposes, a generation is not defined by the coincidence of belonging to the same age bracket. A generation is defined by shared values. So however young or old you are, if you believe that this land can and should be better and will work for its progress, then we belong to the same generation.

2. We live in a society that constantly reminds us of our differences – distinctions of creed, clan, tribe and language. ‘Divide and rule’ was a weapon that the British used against the nationalists and delinquent political elites have long used it against the Nigerian people. But the fact is that from Talata Mafara to Brass, Shendam to Oshogbo, Nigerians want the same things. They want to dwell in peace and raise their children in safety. They believe that no condition is permanent; that tomorrow’s harvest will exceed today’s; and that the stars are ever in their favour. They believe in ‘Live and Let Live.’

We should certainly understand our differences, such as they are, but they need not define us or limit us. There is a meeting of hearts and minds that transcends geography and genetics. The diehard nativists and tribal fundamentalists may insist that blood is thicker than water but a nation is much more than a bloodline. It is as Edward Renan said “a spiritual principle” and “a moral consciousness”. We do not have to be kin to be kindred spirits bearing the burden of a common destiny. The fact that we do not speak the same language does not mean that cannot find solidarity in our suffering.

Throughout our history, our finest moments as a nation have occurred whenever we transcended these so-called differences. All our transformational struggles – the struggle for independence from colonialists and the struggle against military tyranny for democracy – were waged and won by movements that transcended our differences. These movements triumphed by welding northerners and southerners, Muslims and Christians, humanists and agnostics, the faithful and the faithless together in the patriotic agony of shared purpose. This is what we must do in our time.     

3. Thirdly, Nation-building is an act of constant imagination and re-imagination; of constant invention and reinvention. The soul of a nation is forged in the crucible of its imagination. It is poetry and prophecy, prose and propaganda; it is faith and praxis. We are all moved by the majestic proclamation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But when these words were written, these truths were not at all self-evident. The Declaration had fifty-six signatories, all white males. There were no African-Americans. At the time, blacks were considered less than human and fit only for slavery. Indeed, some of the signatories were themselves slave-owners. There were no Native Americans. The Native American civilization had been virtually wiped out. And, of course, there were no women. Now, we can look at this contradiction as an act of high-sounding hypocrisy on the part of those who wrote the declaration. But I suggest it was something more. When those men wrote those words, they were reimagining their nation and reaching for an ideal that could inspire generations after them.

It is possible for us, as a generation, to re-imagine our social, political and economic realities. It is within our powers to declare new possibilities and to reach for new ideals that will shape the next one hundred years. The future will not come until we become it; in our words, creativity and craft, in our activism, in our politics, in the narratives we are producing about ourselves and the examples we are setting for our children. Franz Fanon said that each generation must discover its calling and either betray it or fulfill it. Tonight our calling is clear. One hundred years after Lugard’s amalgamation, fifty-four years after independence and fifteen years into the Fourth Republic, it is time to re-imagine Nigeria. Thank you.      

 

There is a Country

Chinua Achebe’s much anticipated civil war memoir, There was a Country, has been released to much acclaim and indignation in some quarters. I pass no judgment on the book because I have not read it yet save for serialized excerpts. At this time, I am more interested in the reactions to the book which have predictably corresponded with the default mode of public discourse in Nigeria – the ready, enthusiastic and often blind defence of one’s ethnic group and ethnic heroes. Old habits die hard. In response to Achebe’s book, the tribal troops have been rallied. Many public figures have dived into ethnic trenches and public debate for the next few weeks will be choreographed along sectarian lines. But the context of this debate and its audience are remarkable.

Seventy percent of Nigerians are under 35 years. This means that most Nigerians were born after the civil war and have no memory of that era. For Achebe and his generation, understandably, the civil war was a defining event that forever coloured their view of Nigeria and her possibilities.

For us, the post-civil war generation, it is not. We are defined by a different set of events – the 1970s oil boom and its long recessionary aftermath, the repressive military dictatorships of the 1980s and 1990s, the Structural Adjustment Program, the virtual decimation of public services ranging from healthcare to education, chronic suburban sectarian conflicts and the ascent of a hyper-individualistic ethos that has made our society more Machiavellian and cruel.  Above all, we are haunted by the refusal of previous generations to inter their antipathies, and risk becoming prisoners of inherited animosities.

As one born after the civil war, it is simply impossible to speak with the raw passion of participants and veterans about an event that I, like most of my compatriots, did not experience. What concerns me is that despite the demographic dominance of the post-civil war generation, public discourse is still framed by the issues, terms and experiences of those who fought the war. These warriors have been dubbed “the class of 1966”; they are the generation that came of age as the First Republic collapsed with the heady promise of Independence and degenerated into war. National issues are still largely discussed through civil war blinkers and coloured by long, deeply held prejudices in ways that suggest that Nigeria has not moved on since 1970. Assuredly, it has, for despite its obvious challenges, this is not the same nation that was convulsed by internecine hostilities in the 1960s.

But the conception of Nigeria as a nation in fragments is obdurately promoted by the class of 1966 and its acolytes in the media fossilizing public discourse in the amber of antiquity. Even worse, young Nigerians who have enough contemporary troubles to address are subtly and overtly recruited to re-fight the battles of long ago. 90 percent of Nigerians on Facebook and Twitter belong to the post-civil war generation yet these social media platforms risk becoming battlegrounds where the ignorant, the misguided and the bigoted will duel as tribal pugilists vicariously re-enacting the past.  

The danger is that we are wasting our own epoch, blinded by the bequest of tribal antagonisms, we are ignoring the moral imperatives of our own time and risk passing to our children an even more chaotic mess of a country than our parents left us.

The temptation to reincarnate historical perspectives and to assume the mutually antagonistic roles seemingly ordained for us by fate and history is understandable. Young Nigerians live in a country where the political leadership has overwhelmingly failed to present an overarching transcendent vision of our national destiny. With no portrait of the future to engage us emotionally, we have responded in two ways.

Some of us have adopted a vision of personal success that damns the society at large while emphasizing a privatized prosperity despite the surrounding dysfunction and anomie. This is a philosophy so individualistic that it is no more than a narcissistic nihilism and it is tragically the core of our popular theology.

For others, the absence of a vision of a shared future has prompted refuge in a sectarian past. Given the debilities of our education sector, history is simply a dark blank canvas to most Nigerians. In most of our schools, where history is taught at all, it is essentially the colonial narrative of Mungo Park discovering the River Niger and of Nigeria as an infernal patchwork of perpetually feuding tribes. Despite the immense work of great historians like J.F. Ade-Ajayi, Bala Usman, Elizabeth Isichei and J.C. Anene among other intellectuals, we are yet to domesticate our own history and as Bala Usman proposed, “decolonize perceptions” of our past.

The bid to reclaim the “settled” past rather than inherit an uncertain future drives religious extremists who revel in the pristine and thoroughly mythical visions of 7^th century Arabia or tribal fundamentalists who celebrate the nativist and xenophobic ecstasies of long dead kingdoms or simply fabricate ethno-racial identities that never even existed.

Where there is no intelligent and active imagination of tomorrow, the future becomes hell and the past becomes paradise. This is why young Nigerians are so easily recruited to fight for the presumed certainties of a past that they never experienced – oddly enough, by the same elites who have aborted their future – thereby deepening divisions and damning the unborn with a heritage of discord and strife.

I am not, for one moment, advocating amnesia. By all means, we should revisit our history but we should do so knowing that human experience is often subjectively perceived and that war, that most acute of experiences, is even more subjectively perceived. There are many sides, many angles and many perspectives belonging to victors, victims and innocent and guilty bystanders. The wise inquisitor finds safety in a multitude of narratives understanding them to be a symphony of inflamed passions. To accurately interrogate our nation’s history, we must accept that the ties that bind us to our ethnic kin often become lies that blind us to their sins as well as to the sufferings of others.

History is like the elephant and we are like the blind men, feeling and groping in the dark to define it and give it coherence, yet each achieving only a limited perspective. Of all the dimensions of reality, history is where we are most liable to look through a glass darkly. As Chimamanda Adichie has perceptively observed, “A single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.” No single narrative can capture the complexities and ambiguities of ours or any nation’s dramas.

Four decades after the civil war should give us an emotional distance that enables a clinical inquest into the past. But this seems beyond too many of our leading public voices who are all too often inclined to mangle public conversation with pre-programmed primal responses in defence of their tribes and tribal icons. The jaundiced portrayals of our founding fathers – Azikiwe, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello – have long prevented us from appropriating the lessons of their lives and times. Our need for absolute saints and absolute villains has reduced them to caricatures whose names are casually invoked but who have been so canonized and demonized as to be unreal.

As Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa once said, “No man is wholly evil.” Like all of us, the patriarchs were complex, conflicted and flawed; by turns, weak and strong, cowardly and courageous, petty and charitable. They were capable of both noble and ignoble acts. In short, they were simply and terrifyingly human. If they were all angels then Nigeria would be a paradise and if they were all devils then there would be no Nigeria today. They were as limited by their times as they shaped it. I recommend Dike Chukwumerije’s book One Nigeria as a superbly clinical and empathic examination of these patriarchs and their legacy.

All nations write their history in blood, sweat and tears and in the syntax of tragedy, joy and hope. Nigeria is no different. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu wrote, “The civil war in Nigeria was not a cataclysmic conflict between St. Michael and Lucifer. Rather, it was an inevitable milestone in our journey to nationhood.” The civil war was a tragic chapter in our national odyssey but there have been other chapters and yet more will be written. At some point, we must let the dead bury their dead.

In the end, when this fog of mutual recrimination clears, (and when the class of 1966 is gone) we, Nigeria’s children of deferred hope, will still be left with a country of such immense potential yet wounded by its heirs, a land scarred by low deeds in high places awaiting the redemption that our generation can and must begin to deliver. The question that should animate our pursuits is not what our ancestors did, should have done or would do in our situation. Their circumstances were theirs even as our time is ours. The question that should possess us now is what sort of country we will leave for our children. 

All Images sourced online.