[dropcap]U[/dropcap]ntil systems of accountability are installed in Nigeria, we will all continue to make noise until we are exhausted. Nothing will ever happen.
President Muhammadu Buhari is the latest clueless leader to take impunity to impossible levels. He and his party of arrogance and ignorance personified (the APC) are bankrolled by loot and the wall of intellectual halitosis eagerly supplied by willing intellectuals and writers.
Our writers and thinkers have become the problem, helping to loot at night and writing syrupy nonsense in the daytime. Go home, no one cares.
So, stop asking about the $500,000 that “Minister” Rotimi Amaechi spent on a 3-hour dinner for Professor Wole Soyinka. That investigation will not see the light of day.
Amaechi emptied the state’s coffers into Buhari’s ambition, nothing will happen to him.
Stop asking how much was spent each year by Amaechi on the annual Port Harcourt Book festival. We will never know if that was also a front to launder and loot state money because our writers and Ph.Ds do not care about such inconvenient facts. They just want their share.
Stop asking about the $1 million that some powerful writer inserted in Buhari’s budget for the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA), a country club for old writers with no charter, no constitution, no membership, no proof of doing anything tangible for any writer anywhere, not to talk of Nigeria.
I did write to Denja Abdullahi, president of ANA and I was met with rude silence. If you don’t care for the looting of one million dollars, why should you even bother writing books? Why bother being an association of writers if you would not be bothered to respond to simple questions about your affairs? We are taking about public funds here. No one cares.
Mr. Buhari is arresting people up and down the political landscape because he sees personal enemies everywhere, his anti-corruption war is a witch-hunt, otherwise many of his ministers would be in jail or elsewhere. Do our writers and Ph.Ds care? Hell no. They are being paid.
This is my point: African writing is impotent; one struggles to understand the point of its being. Much of the writing does nothing for the continent, save state the obvious. Indeed, it is the case that many times, African writers are the greedy vuvuzelas of Africa’s statesmen turned executioners, loudly and lustily painting lipstick on the rotten corpses of promises. It is easy to understand why many Africans do not read literature. Why bother? What has it done for us lately?
Dear African intellectual: The single story lives because you do nothing about the single story you write about relentlessly. It is really all about you, screw Africa. Literally, yes, screw Africa. Screw you and your silly little novels. Screw you and your silly little “investigations” into the dark side of dark black Africa.
Screw you and your silly little NGOs that empower you in collaboration with silly racist liberals who think creatures like you are cute little pretend humans to be parted on the head and given pocket change.
Screw you. Damn you, screw you!
Ikhide Ikheloa is a writer and literary critic. He is one of The Trent‘s Elite Bloggers. He tweets from @ikhide.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
