Having read the open letter written by one Chimamanda Adichie, a lady who hails from the same state as the defeated Mr Peter Obi, one is forced to disagree with her on many fronts, but I will prefer to stick to some salient positives that arose from the 2023 elections in Nigeria rather than follow in her tirade against her country and seek to make Nigeria an appendage of another sovereignty.
First it is heartwarming to note that this lady is as influential as this to the extent of advising/warning the almighty U.S president from congratulating a duly elected president in Africa, and yet her region of southeastern Nigerian has been ravaged by self-styled agitators under the name of ‘IPOB’ and never have I read anywhere or on record that she ever condemned their actions or drew the attention of the international community to help the Nigerian government with police or military assistance to arrest the situation that has led to the death of many of her brothers and sisters.
Secondly, the 2023 Nigerian elections are not as flawed to the extent that a ‘full-fledged Nigerian citizen will write such a very insulting and condescending note to the United States President when the data and statistics from the election speaks to the contrary. This is the most competitive election since Nigeria returned to democratic rule in 1999. For instance, the winner won in 12 states, the second runner-up won in 12 states while Mr Obi won in 11 states including the FCT, Mr Bola Tinubu was declared the winner on simple majority votes having satisfied all other constitutional requirements. Was Mr Tinubu’s results uploaded by INEC while Mr Obi’s result were left out?
For the Labour party that is adjudged to be a ‘small’ party within the Nigerian context, their performance threw up a lot of surprises and that is thanks to the electoral commission for the efficiency in the result collation and transparency, they got 6 senate seats, 34 members of the House of Representatives, this is a remarkable feat in the 16 years history of the Labour Party in Nigeria, this is a testament to the improvement in the electoral process as well. We had a 25 years old young lady winning a House of Assembly seat in Kwara state, we had a commercial motorbike rider winning a seat in the Federal House of Representatives in northwest Nigeria, Labour party won albeit with a small margin in a state such as Lagos and many other remarkable outcomes during the elections such as Atiku winning in a southwestern state of Osun deep in Yoruba land while the entire five states in the eastern region returned Obi with an average of 98% votes cast, this is unusual in Nigerian politics and elections but that is the reality at the moment.
I am dumbfounded, to say the least that a self-styled intellectual of Chimamanda standing will rely on 3rd party accounts to conclude on an issue as weighty as this that warrants her writing an open letter to Mr Joe Biden of the United States of America. This is an exercise you didn’t deem fit and deserves your precious time to travel all the way to Africa to participate in, this to me is an indictment on your commitment to the ‘OBIDIENT’ cause because it is the millions of online, but absentee supporters of Obi like you that deprived him of his so-called ‘expected’ victory and not INEC. By the way you accused the INEC chairman of receiving bribe, I hope you will be able to defend these rather pedestrian and unsubstantiated allegations when the libel suit is filed against you. Prof Yakubu won’t take this lightly with you.
You alluded that the opinions polls favoured Mr Obi to win the elections, but you forgot to inform Mr Biden that there were several other polls leading to that election and some were also in favour of the PDP candidate, Mr Abubakar Atiku while others were in favour of the eventual winner, Mr Bola Tinubu. Your reliance on the disputed favourable polls is perhaps uncharitable and a cut below the belt for your personality. I am not surprised at this because you said in one of your lectures at Harvard in 2018 that you ‘routinely lie. This is on the internet for everyone to listen to.
Chimamanda, there is nothing wrong or unusual in associating with your deep Ibo race/root after all you rejected Nigerian national honours and accepted a chieftaincy title in your native eastern Nigerian, your book Half of a Yellow Sun and other work of yours betrays your emotions to the tribe of the eastern Nigerian, you have never really considered yourself to be a Nigerian citizen and yet you have that right, but you cannot in all good conscience attempt to throw a country, millions of people consider their only country ‘under the bus’ because of your hatred for a particular ethnic group or your love for an individual.
Alluding to Obi’s rallies as usually attended by huge crowds is a confirmation that you never, really and truly had a good report about the campaigns leading to the elections as Peter Obi’s rally was the least attended of all the rallies organized by the major parties, a simple google search will show you how scantly attended his rallies were in Rivers, Kano, Kogi, Kaduna, Gombe, Zamfara and other parts of Nigeria compared to that of the PDP and the APC. Relying on attendance at his stronghold in the east to come to such an unscientific conclusion is laughable.
For you to be a truly respected woman of international status, you must grow above your ethnic and primordial sentiments, you must realize that as long as the eastern Nigerian continue to be part of the Nigerian state, it is in our collective interest for the Nigerian state to be strong and progressive and by extension, the regions, without this dream coming to fruition, the eastern Nigeria which you so much passionately love will continue to be an appendage of a slowly unprogressive Nigeria.
Having realized how you could be influential in writing to world leaders on issues pertaining to democracy and development, I do hope to see you dedicating more of your time to writing more letters to draw their attention to the sit-at-home situation in the southeast orchestrated by the outlawed Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) a situation that has paralyzed the economy of the eastern region with attendant violence, death and collapse of the civic space.
We hope to see you drawing the attention of the international community to the embarrassing Out of school children crisis we have in some parts of Nigeria (with 65% of them girls under the age of 10) and how to seek support for the government to address and arrest the situation once and for all.
I hope to see you been in the forefront of the campaign to end the age-long marginalization of women in your part of Nigeria where they are denied/deprived of their rights to inherit assets left behind by their late parents, we hope to see you call for investment in roads and bridges, private capital and other economic activities for the eastern region that will spur employment opportunities for young people who daily throng to other parts of Nigeria seeking for greener pastures and worsening the sanitary, housing and infrastructure conditions of these places.
These are the letters we hope to see you write not this self-serving, greedy, and one-sided letter that is laced with third-party accounts and fictional stories and one that seeks to further the political ambition of your fellow townsman. For me and many others, the Nigerian larger condition deserves more than the attitude of an ostrich.
Thank you
Taiwo Akerele,
Wrote on the margins of the Spring meetings at the IMF and the World Bank,
Washington DC, United States of America, 08/04/2023.
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