By Rev. Fr. John Odey
Fellow Nigerians, I claim to be an impatient enemy of the wrong use of power, of injustice, of the oppression of the less privileged and of the confiscation of the common wealth by the privileged. I have the inclination to express my revulsion against these vices through the power of the pen, which is said to be stronger than the sword. I wonder whether this saying is still anything to go by. Whatever is the case, I have a moral obligation to speak against injustice. Hence, this is an open letter addressed to all patriotic Nigerians, particularly the youths, the hope of our plundered, traumatized and hijacked nation. It is a clarion call that Nigerians should, in a conventional slang, shine their eyes, rise up and take back their country from the pirates in power that have reduced the giant of Africa to the shame of the black race. What I will do in this piece is mainly to recall three instances that are indicative of how Nigeria has been compelled by our corrupt leaders to descend from grace to grass. It is hoped that such will put patriotic Nigerians in a vantage position to choose between allowing the wolves devouring the country and all of us to continue or to intensify their struggle for patriotic, conscientious, capable, competent and humane leaders.
FIRST: While on study leave in Rome, in the last week of June 1991 I travelled to the United States of America on holiday. The journey to Kennedy International Airport, New York, was made via Belgrade in Yugoslavia as at then. I travelled in the company of a fellow priest and friend, Rev. Fr. Matthew Ndagoso, from Jalingo Diocese in Taraba State, who is now the Archbishop of Kaduna Archdiocese. There in Rome, I used to hear fellow Nigerian priests relate their ordeals with security agents any time they travelled out of Italy. We heard stories of how they had to be delayed at the airports and subjected to a Gestapo-type of surveillance each time they travelled as if they were criminals. In the course of the journey, we had a raw deal in the hands of security agents as a result of the fact that our country, Nigeria, has been stigmatized as a den of corruption.
When it happened, I felt in my person the sting of what it means to be feared like a mad dog, dreaded like a criminal, cautiously approached like a dangerous snake and avoided like a leper simply because one comes from a country that is notorious for corrupt practices. I guess the number of passengers on board the double-decker aircraft that took us to America that day could not have been less than 800 persons. And out of the whole lot, only Fr. Ndagoso and I were black. Having discovered that we were Nigerians, as soon as we boarded the plane, a smart-looking, lanky security officer came to us and politely asked for our passports. We gave them to him. The first indication that we had become suspects came when the gentleman took the passports, nodded hysterically and briskly disappeared. We did not see those passports again until the plane landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, about nine hours later.
As the plane cruised, each of us was glued to his seat for a very long time before I opened up to tell Fr. Ndagoso that we were in for a raw deal in the hands of the security men for our “crime” of being Nigerians. Nevertheless, since the plane was all the same heading to the wonder world called America, a country I never dreamt I would ever have the opportunity to set my eyes and feet on, I was more interested in getting there first. Passport or no passport! And that dream became a reality. We landed safely. As usual, everybody jostled his/her way through to collect his/her travelling bag. We joined other passengers to collect our own bags first before going to face the panel of security officers who apparently looked friendly but had nevertheless been told that we are Nigerians and should be handled the way Nigerians are handled in international airports every place in the world. On approaching them after we had got our luggage, we were told to wait in the office where our original captor had dropped our passports and disappeared.
After every other person on board the plane had been set free through routine security checks, we were taken to a remote corner of the massive lounge. There, the real searching began, accompanied by a barrage of questions. One of the questions came this way: “You are Nigerians. Are you sure you are Catholic priests?” Our affirmative response to this question meant nothing to them. From the tone of the questions and the seriousness of the search, you would naturally conclude that they thought we were cocaine pushers or 419 syndicates dressed in clerical garbs to help us swindle their security outfit. But in the end, after some parts of our travelling bags had been ripped open and no cocaine was discovered, our passports were given to us. I cannot easily forget the lesson which that experience taught me. Once you are a Nigerian, you are suspected to be a criminal until you prove yourself otherwise.
SECOND: Rev. Fr. Edward McNamara, an elderly Irish Priest I worked with as a curate after priestly ordination, had written a letter inviting me to Ireland. I booked my flight and travelled to Ireland on September 15, 1993 after I had completed my studies in Rome. On my way to Ireland, I had another raw deal in the hands of security men. We travelled via Heathrow International Airport, London. And as usual, once the plane landed, I made my way with the rest of men and women to collect my luggage first. A few seconds later something quite unusual happened. A smart-looking and neatly dressed gentleman came to me, tapped my shoulder and asked: “Are you a Nigerian?”
One thing that has never happened to me and will never happen is for me to deny my identity as a Nigerian or even to blush for a second for being a Nigerian before admitting that I am a Nigerian anywhere in the world. No matter how bad Nigerians have made Nigeria, I am proud of my nationality. I strongly believe that the giant will rise again someday. And so, I immediately answered the question in the affirmative. There and then, he beckoned to me as if I was a dangerous lunatic trying to cause some havoc in the entire airport. I was the only black man in the plane. That I was dressed in my clerical attire had not meaning for them.
He took me to a little room where a lady was working away on the computer. That little room became the temporary court where I was inundated with a barrage of questions – relevant and mostly irrelevant ones. As usual, the first thing taken from me was my passport. And while still in possession of it, my judges wanted me to give them every detail of what was written in it. I passed that test. After I had answered every question hauled at me, proving that everything I told them about my identity as a Catholic priest and that all the information contained in my passport was true, they decided to make inquiries from Rome. The contacted the security information office and immigration department in Rome through the computer. And from all indications, all the information they got about me tallied with both what was contained in my passport and what I told them. But they would not let me go.
When their questions were exhausted, they started searching my travelling bag which had now been retrieved from the baggage arrivals. Nothing incriminating was discovered in the travelling bag. When they saw a copy of my book, “Mahatma Gandhi: A Profile in Peace, Love and Nonviolence”, in the bag, saw my name and my photograph on the back cover page they asked me if I wrote the book. I told them I wrote it. My book on Gandhi became the saving grace. There and then, they told me to continue my journey to Ireland after I had been detained for more than two hours.
I had just published the book in Rome and I was taking a copy of it to Fr. McNamara. My love for Mahatma Gandhi, a man who was once spitefully described by Winston Churchill as a “naked fakir” but whose name has acquired a halo of respectability and immortality in Churchill’s country, saved me from further molestation. As soon as my panel of judges left and I took my travelling bag to go, the lady on the computer excused herself and tendered a very polite apology on their behalf. She said to me: “Sir, do not be offended. Your people are responsible for all this. We are not. Nigerians are terrible people and they have done terrible things in this country. And we want to stop the rot.”
The reader should recall that it was in the same airport that a Nigerian political fugitive was put in a crate sometime in 1984 to be bundled back to Nigeria. It was through that same airport that a Nigerian State Governor, a man, disguised himself as a woman and escaped from the grips of the law under Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime. The lady needed not to tender any apology. As the old biblical proverb puts it, I understood that the fathers of Nigeria had eaten unripe grapes and that the children’s teeth had been set on edge (Jer.31:29). I was even very lucky that while I was accosted under the old law where innocent children were made to suffer as a result of the sins of their fathers, I was eventually set free under the new law where only those who sinned would suffer on account of their sins. I was not happy that things happened the way they did at both John Kennedy and Heathrow International Airports. But those two incidents taught me all the lesson I would not have learnt in any university about the abysmal harm that corruption has done to us as a people.
THIRD: Walter Carrington is an African-American and former United States Ambassador to Nigeria under General Sani Abacha’s inglorious regime. As a black American who was given the opportunity to serve in the continent of his origin, he had and expressed a very strong and deep love for Nigeria when he was here to serve. For that, he had a running battle with Abacha who became a megalomaniac and wanted to destroy the country and the people to satisfy his greed and lust for power. Abacha had wanted him to remain an armchair ambassador whose job would be to sit in his palatial office and feed his country, the United States, with diplomatic lies about a “wonderful leader” called Sani Abacha and then swell his bank account “for a job well done.” But Carrington proved to him that he had nothing to do with diplomatic finesse and that he was more interested in the welfare of the people he had come to serve. Like the biblical Moses, he chose the war path and assured Abacha that his image laundering mission to America was doomed to fail as long as he was concerned. And it failed.
At the height of the battle between them, Abacha and his cronies called Carrington a National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) ambassador. To crown it all, Abacha and his men made the police to accuse him of having some knowledge of the spate of bomb blasts with which Abacha and his men threatened the nation. Wada Nas, Abacha’s most irresponsible talkative and defender of Abacha’s tyrannical empire, described Carrington’s ambassadorial tenure as being retrogressive for Nigerian-American relations. However, the more they attacked him was the more he bemoaned Nigeria’s many woes under Abacha.
On September 17, 1997, during a lecture at the Island Club, Lagos, he declared that Abacha’s corrupt leadership had brought Nigeria to her knees. He said: “At independence, Nigeria was among the most richly endowed nations of the world in resources…Today, Nigeria is one of the world’s leading oil-producing nations. But like the cobbler whose children often go without shoes, it, frequently, is unable to supply its own people with fuel…in spite of its vast potential, it is today ranked by the United Nations as one of the fifteen poorest countries in the world. Its wealth has been squandered and many of its best and brightest, in frustration and fear, have chosen to live in exile.” Among many others, Prof. Wole Soyinka is one of the best and the brightest Nigerians that were compelled to go on exile at the time.
Out of the three instances reviewed, the first one happened in 1991, the second happened in 1993 while the third happened in 1997. Respectively that will give us 32, 30 and 26 years today. If our country was so badly rated by the world some 32 years ago, one will shudder to imagine what the world thinks of us today, when the only thing that has refused to bow to insecurity, bloodshed, hunger, poverty, misery and despair is corruption.
The adverse effects of this behemoth in the name of institutionalized corruption in the lives of Nigerian youths should bother every patriotic Nigerian. It bothers me, certainly, because it is telling harder on our youths. Because almost every Nigerian goes into politics to get his own share of the cannibalized national cake, our young ones are left wallow hopelessly in their fatherland like sheep without a shepherd.
Let us take education which is the foundation of development for example. In his autobiography, “Long Walk To Freedom”, Nelson Mandela wrote: “Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine; that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.” Though his father died when he was only nine years old, Mandela was able to acquire the type of education that propelled him to become the greatest African of our time.
In his book, “There Was A Country”, Prof Chinua Achebe having described education as “the path to individual and family success”, assures us that he “grew up at a time when colonial educational infrastructure celebrated hard work and high achievement.” Achebe’s achievements are there for the world to see. He gave us the picture of the good old days when Nigerian youths had good reasons to believe in their country and to work hard to pay the country back in her good coins. He said: “After graduation I did not have to worry about where I would go next. The system was so well organized that as we left university most of us were instantly absorbed into civil service, academia, business, or industry. We trusted – I did, anyway – the country and its rulers to provide this preparatory education and then a job to serve my nation. I was not disappointed.” Today, the opposite is the case. The system of education is so thoroughly disorganized that our youths live in perpetual uncertainty and trauma.
Having all that it takes at public expense to send their own children to study overseas, our corrupt politicians have systematically made the majority of our youths to believe that education has no much relevance to the daily struggle. It is a luxury affordable only by those who belong to the chosen class of a plundered Nigeria or the so-called gifted children who incidentally must come from the same chosen class. The children of the poor are never gifted. Their heads are empty. They have no brains and so should retire into frustration and end up as political thugs and assassins. If it is possible our corrupt political leaders will close down all educational institutions to stunt the personal development of our youths and turn them to ready tools for political thuggery. Ours is a generation that has been blessed by God with a superabundance of good things. Yet nothing good is allowed to work. Our corrupt leaders allow only bad things to work. And they work against good people, against honesty, against hard work, against patriotism, against our youths and against ordinary Nigerians.
Let me recall, in 2003 when there was a public outcry that life was becoming a living hell for Nigerians as a result of high cost of living, President Obasanjo replied: “All is well! Those who are complaining of a bad economy are those who no longer make easy money in this government. Almost all the state capitals are congested with cars. There is a primary school whose teachers have six cars. In my own time, when the principal of my secondary school bought a car, the whole school celebrated.”
To this, a concerned Nigerian, Idowu Obasa, fired back. In his article, “The Ordinary Nigerian: A Profile For Mr. President”, Obasa described the status of the ordinary Nigeria. He wrote: “The ordinary Nigerian does not own a car. He or she does not even include a car in his or her prayer list because that would amount to asking too much of God. The ordinary man is the first casualty when fuel prices are increased and factories are forced to retrench. He has a wife who sells pure water. He had five children but only four are left. The eldest, at 14, is an apprentice carpenter, already wizened to the ways of the street. The second child, at 11, is still grappling with the problems of primary four at the nearby public school. She ought to have left primary school, you might say. But she lost time because of the father’s unstable job situation. She is destined never to go beyond primary six. The access of his children to education is a stunted access. The youngest at four years is so malnourished that he looks like a two-year-old. He will grow up feeling inferior to his mates or carrying a grudge against society. Our ordinary Nigerian lives in a ramshackle box of a room made of planks in the densely populated area known as Badia. Very devout, the ordinary Nigerian receives recognition, as a human being only in the Mosque or the Church.”
What caused the brouhaha between the government and the people then was that on June 20, 2003 the federal government raised the price of petrol from N26.00 to N40.00, kerosene from N26.00 to N38.00 and diesel from N26.00 to N38.00 per litre. How much do we buy a litre of each of these products today? Today, many have cars but they cannot afford to put fuel in them. Nigerian youths finish their studies in the universities with first degree, master’s degree and doctorate degree and end up as keke riders or political thugs. Many commit suicide to relieve themselves from the burden of being Nigerians. Many of them have graduated in crimes are ruthlessly fighting the country that has refused to care for them. In an attempt to get out of the hell called Nigeria, many of our youths have been drowned by the Atlantic Ocean while many were eaten by vultures in the desert. As if to say that the bandits ruling us have completely gone crazy with their crazy plan to destroy everything and everybody, they collected people’s money in the name of naira redesign, locked it in banks, and are watching fellow Nigerians suffering and dying in hordes. There is not the slightest indication that they are perturbed by the people’s anguish.
Prof. Mahmood Yakubu is proving to us that the global outcry against the blatant rigging of the presidential election means nothing to him. Saturday, March 18, 2023 is another day. The world is watching. The stolen mandate has been taken to the Supreme Court for custody. The world is watching to see whether it will be released to the man who stole it or to the man from whom it was stolen. On February 28, a young Nigerian studying in Kenya sent the following message to me: “Tinubu is the next resident. The hand writings are clear enough.” I sent the following back to him: “That will not happen. If it happens that will be the greatest prove that the black race is under a curse.” The young man is right. I am also right because by declaring Tinubu the winner of that presidential election, Nigeria is now a disgrace to the world. Must we continue to suffer in the hands of evil politicians? Must we allow a few selfish, greedy, unpatriotic, lawless, irresponsible and religious and ethnic bigots to destroy a country of more than 200 million people to the detriment of our younger generation? These are questions for every Nigerian who believes that something is fundamentally wrong with our political pirates and that they have bitten more than they can chew.
*Fr. Odey is a priest of the Catholic Church
