Honour richly undeserved

By 

Okey Ndibe

Titles and honorific adornments are two Nigerians obsessions. For many Nigerian "big men," the frenzy to acquire titles is not only important, it is a cardinal craving. Given that craze, you'd think that those most desperately after the conferment of titles would work hard to earn them. That is by no means the case with Nigerians. We won't spend a minute's sweat to earn something if it is possible to rig things by paying for it. It hardly matters that, by commodifying such a priceless, if ineffable, thing like honour, we also devalue and discount it. What we have cheapened we still with nary a sense of shame.

For us, then, cash-and-carry is not merely a mercantilist concept or the language prostitutes might use to underline the rules of their game. It is a statement par excellence, a philosophical summation of a general compulsion, an article of faith. The Nigerian politician best illustrates this shameless trafficking in hollowness and vanity. You would expect aspirants to political office to give considerable thought to what it means, in concrete terms, they wish to achieve, the direction in which, given the opportunity, they would draw society. But the rigour involved in this elementary exercise is far too complicated for the average Nigerian politician.

Rather than engage his mind in the lofty task of enunciating a vision, the would-be politician's first order of business is to purchase one or two so-called traditional titles. Forget that the titles are of dubious provenance, or that, often, the Emir, Oba or Obi awarding it hardly pauses to discern between the truly distinguished and the monied charlatan. A chieftaincy title has become an end in itself, but akin to a recklessly abused, meaningless, worthless currency. The craze after this chimera has created all kinds of nomenclatural oddities in our country. One has seen supposedly sane men (and women) insisting on being addressed as Chief Alhaji Doctor. Or Doctor Chief Sir. Or some such vain concoction. Apparently, they are unaware that this addiction to titles, divorced from any internal quality of character, appears clownish. If it means anything at all, then Chicago State University's inauguration of a lecture series in honour of Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar was merely a foreign expression of a deeply Nigerian malaise: a tainted endowment. As I suggested last week, Mr. Abubakar is conspicuously undeserving of the honour. I suspect that he, too, is fully aware of that fact. For why else would the man pay cash for this sort of thing? By any objective measure, his intellectual bona fides are suspect. His credentials as a leader were mediocre. Though generally seen as a reluctant dabbler in politics, his administration hardly had much moral muster. Except for the brevity of his reign, his release of some political prisoners and the fact that he kept his pledge to transfer the reins of political office to an elected entity, it is difficult to make a case that his administration was substantially less desultory than IBB's or Abacha's.

The release of Mr. M.K.O. Abiola, the robbed winner of the June 12 election, should have been the top moral priority of Mr. Abubakar's administration. He elected not to do the right thing. In the event, Mr. Abiola died in jail under controversial circumstances. Those who tout Mr. Abubakar as a champion of democracy have a hard task explaining his inaction in this regard. Those who would project Abacha's successor as a self-effacing man would be hard put to it to account for the fact that he bestowed national honours on himself as well as some of the characters who contributed, not to Nigeria's greatness, but its destruction. A man who would dictate which national honour was due him (and Mr. Abubakar gave himself and IBB the highest possible decoration) strikes me neither as admirable nor measured, but self-conceited. Similarly, those who anoint him a reluctant head of state must find some explanation for the fact that he hardly gave selfless service. Under his watch, Nigeria's foreign exchange reserves declined precipitously. In fact, President Olusegun Obasanjo was so shocked at Mr. Abubakar's unrestrained orgy of contract awards that he ordered a broad review of them. It is no surprise that, in retirement, Mr. Abubakar is maintaining an opulent lifestyle. I doubt that any Nigerian public official who respected the inviolability of the public treasury would have had thousands of dollars to bequeath to an American university.

Ordinarily, a man of so slim a portfolio of achievements would not be the first choice for a university shopping for candidates to lend credibility to a lecture series. The story of how Mr. Abubakar managed to clinch the honour is one that buttresses the Nigerian predilection for buying everything, including affection, with cash. The cash nexus, I suggest, not any stature as a man who served the ends of democracy, had everything to do with CSU's decision to associate Abubakar's name with the intellectual series. That said, how does one explain the lack of outrage in Nigeria at that transaction? Mr. Obasanjo who ought to know better, congratulated Mr. Abubakar on the lecture series. Such Nigerian notables as Mr. Abraham Adesanya and Governor Segun Osoba attended the first lecture. Prof. Ali Mazrui, who appears to use the same short spoon whether eating with the devil or an angel, consented to deliver the first lecture.

Left to me, neither Obasanjo's ill-advised adulation, the considerable moral cachet of Mr. Adesanya's presence, nor Mr. Mazrui's intellectual capacity could redeem the travesty in Chicago. Taken to task by some protesting Nigerians, Adesanya said he had decided to attend the lecture because Abubakar kept his word on turning power over to civilians. That was a naive thing to say. The truth is that the General had little choice in the matter. Those Nigerians who put their lives and limbs on the ground to oppose Abacha had ensured that the military could no longer invent any excuse to remain in power. As for Mazrui, it should simply be said that he simply betrayed an exasperating neutrality in the face of an ethical issue.