Tuesday, August 21, 2007
A few days ago, a friend rang me at home, his voice quavering with apprehension.
"Okey, what’s happening in Port Harcourt?" he asked.
He wasn’t
asking me for details of the bloody events in the bustling address that once prided
itself as Nigeria’s Garden City. He knew what I knew: That the once idyllic
Port Harcourt was now a scarred place, a war zone, a city soaked in blood. He
knew that the city was under siege, thousands of citizens displaced.
He
was aware that its once quiescent boulevards and avenues were now ruled by marauding
militiamen and by the fierce soldiers deployed to dislodge them. He knew that
sudden death by bullet was now a generalized hazard for the city’s trapped,
hapless residents.
Anybody who’s followed Nigerian news for the
last week or two would know that the city abbreviated as P.H. has fallen into
grave sin. It has eaten of the fruit of death, and death stalks its streets. A
headline in one of Nigerian dailies told it all: 4 Task Force Soldiers, 40 Others
Killed in Port Harcourt Shoot-out Thursday.
It was as if, all of a sudden,
Nigeria had got its own homemade Baghdad. Except that it didn’t happen all
of a sudden, but mutated over a long time.
My friend’s question was
not a cry to be filled in on the gory details. He was merely asking that I help
him make sense of it. What’s happening in Port Harcourt?
I gave him
the best retort I could muster. Port Harcourt’s violent convulsion, I suggested,
was sired by all the promissory notes the Nigerian state had failed to redeem.
Port Harcourt is a metaphor for a deeper, more pervasive malaise. Mini-Port Harcourts
are playing themselves out, will play themselves out, in other Nigerian cities,
towns and villages.
With characteristic insouciance, the Nigerian state
has styled the dealers of death in Port Harcourt as cultists. As terms go, this
one is empty, just another shorthand to achieve obfuscation. A friend who lives
in Port Harcourt, one of those who must brave the hell of the city’s streets
each day, offered a version of events that’s remarkably different from the
officially sanctioned one.
He told me something that many residents of
Port Harcourt—and Rivers State in general—believe. He reminded me
that the men publicly associated with militancy in the state—men like Asari
Dokubo, Ateke Tom and the recently slain Soboma George—were first mobilized
in 2003 by politicians desperate to snatch elections. In courting the militants,
the politicians made them grand promises.
They pledged to take care of
the boys once political victory was secured by force of arms.
It is an open
secret that the militants then went to bat for their political sponsors. Coaxed
and goaded by their hirers, the boys hounded their hirers’ political opponents.
They maimed, threatened and killed. They hijacked ballot boxes and stuffed them
for their paymasters. They put their lives on the line to help enthrone their
recruiters by foul and bloody means.
Yet, once ensconced in the comfort
of their swanky offices, the politicians distanced themselves from the boys who
had fought—literally—and often shed their blood—again, literally—to
secure their unearned mandates. Giddy with victory, and seduced by the prospects
of keeping the company of contractors and fellow raiders of the treasury, the
politicians sought to flush away the thugs they’d recruited, armed and pressed
into unholy service.
But the lesson of history is that monsters, once willed
into existence, don’t go away easily. Armed to the teeth, the largely unemployed,
demobilized bunch began a terrifying war for turf. Then they found lucrative business
in abducting expatriate oil company workers for ransom. As their business prospered,
many more unemployed but armed young men gravitated into the abduction industry.
Let’s look at it this way: Human beings must eat. They must eat,
one way or another. Most people, I’m willing to bet, would work for their
food, but if work is not an option—as it is not for a growing number of
Nigerians—then they will steal, kidnap, 419-nize for it. In a polity where
opportunities for legitimate livelihood are few and getting fewer, it requires
little clairvoyance to predict a high crime rate.
Nigerians are a betrayed
people, a people betrayed by their so-called leaders. I’d include in the
bracket of the betrayed those young men (and I imagine young women as well) who’ve
made Port Harcourt ungovernable.
The tragedy of Nigeria is to have at the
helm of its affairs men and women who would scarcely be nastier had they been
zealous officials of a suzerain determined to destroy Nigeria. The examples of
treachery abound everywhere one looks.
The same week Nigerian newspapers
were awash with accounts of the reddening of Port Harcourt, there was a report
in the Tribune to the effect that Patricia Ette, the Speaker of the House of Representatives,
was rallying fellow members to some splurgy location in the American State of
Maryland to mark her 54th birthday. If true, this would have been a most galling,
obscene and insensitive time for such a high-ranking official to frolic. A day
after the report, a member of the house offered a denial and clarification. The
Speaker, he assured, was not in the U.S. to engage in revelry but to keep a date
for medical check-up.
I for one have begun to see this canard of medical
check-up for the insulting arrogation that it is. Some of the best Nigerian doctors,
banished into exile by former military rulers and politicians, are offering first-rate
medical care in Europe, North America, Asia and even in some African countries.
Not one Nigerian politician that I’m aware of has come up with a
plan to entice these extraordinary and well-trained practitioners home. If Madame
Speaker Ette has any legislative vision for providing a semblance of sound medical
care for Nigerians, she must have done an excellent job of keeping it a secret.
But her minders didn’t see the cruelness of flippantly informing us that
she is in the U.S. for medical check-up.
Etteh is, of course, far from
alone. Announcing foreign junkets on medical grounds has graduated into one of
the latest status symbols among the nation’s rulers and parvenu. In the
heat of the last presidential campaigns, Umar Yar’Adua was whisked off to
a German hospital for treatment. His handlers later disclosed that he had gone
to have a common cold attended to. Not to be outdone, Abubakar Atiku contrived
his own medical interlude. Beset by a twisted ankle, he flew abroad to have it
checked out.
In neither case did it occur to both men that it reflects poorly
on the image of the country if its doctors are deemed incapable of treating colds
and sprained ankles.
Disgraced former governor of Bayelsa, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha,
was recently convicted of stealing billions of naira from the state coffers. As
a condition for his light sentence, he agreed to forfeit his illicit hoard. A
few days after his release, the former governor was on the plane to Dubai for
medical treatment. How about the millions of his constituents whose resources
he mindlessly stole? What plan does he have to send each and every one of them
who falls sick to Dubai to enjoy the same marvels of medical care?
Why
should the traitors get away with lavish care and lead sumptuous lives when those
they betray and disinherit are sunk in despair and mired in destitution?
A
joint task force of soldiers and police officers are patrolling Port Harcourt,
charged with the mandate of reclaiming a broken, bloodied city. For the sake of
the innocent residents of the city, one hopes the task force’s mission would
be successful.
Even so, one nurses this sneaking suspicion that armed
reclamation is doomed from the outset. There is an analogy between the task force
and American soldiers patrolling violence-prone Iraqi neighborhoods. Just as so-called
Iraqi insurgents often bring a quality of surprise and sneakiness to their attacks,
the militants of Port Harcourt have the advantage of pre-emption. But this is
only one technical matter.
On a broader note, Port Harcourt must be seen
as a symbol of a deeper ailment. For a long time, life in Nigeria has been brutish,
nasty and short—and getting worse by many indices. Citizens of an oil-producing
nation with a right to expect a measure of social comfort—good roads, potable
water, regular power supply, medical care and sound education—have been
consigned to a denuded, discounted existence. The antidote for the rash outbreaks
in Port Harcourt and elsewhere in Nigeria is for the public sphere to be dramatically
energized with policies calculated to revamp the social environment and make Nigeria
a livable space. If this is not done, the joint task force will labor in vain.