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 the south eastern 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 condemn 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 blown’ Nigerian citizen will write such a very insulting and condescending note to the United states President when the data and statistics from the election speak to the contrary. This is the most competitive election since Nigeria returned to democratic rule. 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 Tinubu was declared the winner on simple majority votes having satisfied all other constitutional requirements.
For the Labour party that is adjudged to be a ‘small’ party in local Nigerian parlance, their performance threw up a lot of surprises and that is thanks to the electoral commission for the efficiency in the result collation, they got 6 senate seat and 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 transparency of the elections. We had a 25 years old young lady winning a house of assembly seat in Kwara state, we had a commercial motor bike rider winning a seat in the Federal House of representatives in north west Nigeria, we had Labour party wining a state such as Lagos and many other remarkable outcomes during the elections such as Atiku winning in a south western 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. That is it.
I am dumbfounded to say the least that a self-styled intellectual of Chimamanda standing will rely on 3rd party accounts to come to a conclusion on an issue as weighty as this that warrant so to speak to the extent of writing an open letter to Mr Joe Biden of the United States of America. This is an exercise you didn’t deem fit deserves your almighty time to travel all the way to Africa to participate in, this is to me is an indictment on your commitment to this cause beecause it is the millions of online, but absentee supporters of Obi like you that actually 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 allegations when the libel suit is filed against you? Prof Yakubu wont take this lightly with you.
You alluded that the opinions polls favored Mr Obi to win the elections, but you forgot to inform Mr Biden that there were several other polls leading to that elections 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 favorable 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 lecture in Harvard in 2018 that you ‘routinely lie’.
Chimamanda, there is nothing wrong in being sympathetic to your Ibo race/root after all you rejected a Nigerian national honors and accepted a chieftaincy title in your native eastern Nigerian, your books Purple Hibiscus and 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/personality.
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 and other parts of Nigeria compared to that of the PDP and the APC.
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 in 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 writing more letters to draw their attention to the sit at home situation in the south east 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 being girls under 10) and how to seek for support for the government to address and arrest the situation once and for all.
I hope to see you being 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 account and fictional stories and one that seeks to further the political ambition of your fellow catholic member and townsman (by the way I am catholic), for me, the Nigerian larger condition deserves more than the attitude of an ostrich.
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
