The Prize and The Truth (Odia)
THE NLNG LITERATURE PRIZE CONTROVERSYBefore The Nigerian Prize
BY ODIA OFEIMUN
Unlike Professor Olu Obafemi, President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, I do not take the Word as an egg which cannot be reassembled once it is broken. The truth is that the word, if it is an egg, was already broken. All that we do as writers is to train it in support of life, scooping it, beating it, refining and spicing it, to educate taste, thus making and adding meaning, nutritious meaning, to existence. How well we do this is dependent on how we use imagination — the heart, mind and will, that is part of our being homo sapiens. Those who do not care about the meaning that they make, who therefore think of deconstructing before they have learnt to construct, are the ones who tend to put the world in trouble. They tell the rest of us that we can always leap before we think. They seek to, and because they fail to assemble the egg that is already broken, they see the world as a free-wheeling place where anything goes. Hence, they assume that every use of the mind is thinking. But it is not. I do believe that if Nigeria is to survive and thrive, there must be men and women who are prepared to undergo the self-punishment of learning how to think for her and to put dreams to work with transparent moral courage. This must be done on the basis of a well-primed knowledge industry. And, the men and women must be willing to test reality, allowing contending positions to engage that reality, before jumping into the boil of things to act with finality. Otherwise, even with the best of intentions, their supposed reforms will always end up deforming the society. On the matter of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize For Nigerian Literature, which has, unwisely, been changed to The Nigerian Prize For Literature, my grouse is that those who were elected to, and are supposed to think for us, abandoned their duties, capitulated to wonky personal agendas, and are now blaming the rest of us for the mistakes which they even admit that they made. Rather than take responsibility for their errors, that is, if they were indeed errors rather than willed acts, they seem to think that the virulence with which they assault and heap abuses on their critics will frighten the rest of us into silence. They want us to accept the good the bad and the ugly as equal in status. Again, I do not agree. On the contrary, I am amused that Professor Obafemi and his General Secretary, Nduka Otiono, are charging me with being a dictator because I demand their adherence to rules and conventions that are the common property of the Nigerian writers who elected them. Even if it is true that I helped to frame some of the rules and conventions during my time as General Secretary and President, I cannot be accused of dictatorship because I insist that the rules must be followed. The rules do not belong to me. They were designed for the maintenance of literary standards and the embossment of excellence. I insist that those who do not believe in them and who therefore imagine that they can ride roughshod over them ought to be made to see how they endanger our literature. Well, what I have done and would do here is to show that their abandonment of the rules in the process of designing the NLNG Prize is a departure from associational propriety and a mark of escape from civilized norms that continue to sustain all successful vocational, occupational and professional associations. If we are not to spend the next so many decades recriminating over the imposition of a Prize that mis-defines and misdirects Nigerian literature, I think this is the time to set aside the feckless approach so grossly displayed in ‘their’ NLNG “fiasco”. Let me note that I am responding mainly to the issues raised on the pages of the November 2004 edition of ANA Review, the New Age (November 17, 2004) and The Guardian (Sunday, November 21, 2004) where the General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors and his President, spent 8o percent of their write-ups heaping abuses on me for pointing out, among other things, errors in their approach to the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize for Nigerian Literature. The intriguing part, which amuses me a mighty lot, is that after agreeing with me on all the salient points, they remain unprepared to face up to the implications of their admission of error. Take the simple case of the invitation extended to them by the NLNG to help in designing a Prize for Nigerian Literature. The General Secretary claims to have initiated it. Lets take him on his word. He writes: “The first hint that “the fastest growing gas company in the world” may be interested in supporting the development of Nigerian Literature emerged from a casual meeting I had in 2002 with Mrs Olamide Olusanya, President of WRITA(Women Writers of Nigeria) and Head of Procurement at the NLNG. At the meeting we discussed possibilities of the gas company making a difference in the sponsorship of the literary arts through the Association of Nigerian Authors” (my emphasis). Otiono, our General Secretary, is careful not to tell us whether the Gas company, following the Angolan example, sent Mrs Olusanya to sound him out or whether he was the one who invited her to the meeting. Was it just informal? This was one year before the Company decided. And, we are not told that he thereafter sent a proposal to the Company. He does not say that he made a representation to the Company. Until another “former colleague at The Guardian and now Head, Public Relations and Communications at the gas company, Mr. Ifeanyi Mbanefo surprised” him “with a phone call”. Otiono is categoric that because of his zeal to make a difference, he obliged by playing the role of unofficial consultant, supplying contact addresses and phone numbers of intellectuals, scholars and writers who would be members of a proposed Advisory Committee. They contacted well-known members of ANA including two former Presidents and past judges of the Association. Professor Olu Obafemi takes on the narrative from there. He writes some of the most preposterous non-arguments that I have ever read from a teacher of literature. He begins by making it seem as if our differences lie in the fact that he became a writer by studying literature in the University while I, he assumes, stumbled into poetry “from the roadside”. Even the worst of his students could have showed him how laughable his distinction is especially as it does not and cannot tell us about the quality of his own poetry. Or may be I should add to his woes by letting him know that I wrote publishable poetry while I was a mere 19-year old petrol attendant at Yaba and later factory labourer at Apapa before I even dreamt of going to the University to study Political science. But this is not the issue. The real problem lies in having an elected President of a reputable writers’ association who can write that “ANA was never invited as an Association to partner with NNLG (sic). Individuals, who are credible and enduring members of ANA were invited, in their own individual capacities, to consider the desirability and viability of a major Prize for Literature. They were invited also to work out a framework and possible guidelines for its structuration, appoint a panel of judges and, they (sic) may be asked to stay on as an Advisory Committee”. I have quoted this passage in full to show that between Nduka Otiono and his President, Olu Obafemi, they did not work as a team, did not intend to work as a team, and frankly do not know what it means to talk about working as a team. They lacked a sense of the logic of office. Even the unlearned can see from Obafemi’s rendering of their job-description that the Gas company gave them every format to turn the tables, every table, into an ANA table, if they so wished. The NLNG virtually handed ANA all the grounds for doing what ANA had been doing with other non-members who endow or propose prizes. They could have drawn up a format that would provide sustenance for ANA during the life-time of the Prize. They could have followed the pattern already in existence of allowing the association to take the fees for administering a prize sponsored by a non-ANA member. They did not think of it. Obafemi and Otiono were quite together in seeing the invitation by the Gas Company purely as a matter requiring ANA to behave like a mendicant in its own business. The question is: even if they were invited as mere individuals, atomized consultants, which was not the case, couldn’t they summon the gumption to act in accordance with the mandate given to them by all Nigerian writers? And, before or after bringing out all the big shots in ANA why couldn’t they work-out a common ANA position? Why would an ANA President and General Secretary go into a negotiation with another organization and be seen to be arguing, having unseemly altercations, with other ANA members in the presence of the “other party”? This I call mixing individual grapes and organizational apples. Quite in evidence is that, faced with the largesse from the NLNG, their self-definition became personalist, rather than collective. So it may well be asked: what kind of cultural literacy or learnedness is that which allows a Professor to admit to such abdication of responsibility in public without feeling ashamed? Or, how could the President of ANA claim that in the matter which all Nigerian writers elected him to pursue, he allowed himself to be wheedled into the position of an ordinary stool pigeon! The truth of the matter is that once they decided to go to the Gas Company as atomized mendicants, they lost the power to think as ANA members. Personal agendas overrode associational ones. The unspoken issue is that they were bidding to have power over their fellow writers beyond their stay in office. So they preferred to create or capitulate into an Advisory Committee that ANA would not have any control over. Quite a brazen display of self-interest at the expense of the very organization that gave them a place to stand. (If only to give Otiono his own medicine by quoting from a private conversation: he used to tell me while I was ANA President, that I did not know how to use power. So this is what he meant? — using a mandate granted by others to spoil or take over their business?). I dare say that the Gas Company may have done better by going to the Carpenters’ Brigade or some such body, to think through a Prize for writers. They may have gotten a better deal than doing business with writers who have reasons for not wanting to be identified with their own Association. Engineers, medical and legal practitioners, accountants and public relations people stand by their Associations and societies. In the past, ANA, although poor in financial terms, used to stand tall by its own. Now the association is not only too poor to have a secretariat, even the moral scruples have gone to the wind. For the first time in the history of the Association of Nigerian Authors, a non-member, an official of the NLNG could walk into a meeting of the Lagos branch of ANA to insist that ANA’s representatives signed for their pay and therefore had no moral right to point their noses in the sky. In umbrage, both President and General Secretary have expended a good deal of the wood in the forest arguing that they did not lobby for or negotiate honoraria. As I claim that they did. What they have not said is that they did not receive any. Having acquiesced as mere individuals to what was proposed, they did not need to negotiate. Their acquiescence was negotiation. You reckon that anyone who is a member of such an Association would be embarrassed to hear of the goings-on as I have been. Interestingly, the culprits are not embarrassed. It reminds me that Olu Obafemi was the judge and Nduka Otiono was the recipient of that notorious ANA award which had to be withdrawn because it was simply not in order. May be, as President and General Secretary, they want to reduce ANA to the level of that amoral approach to standards that allows no rules and no conventions to stand. And I suppose they are responding to me with so much vehemence and virulence because they think that we should keep our secrets secret in the manner of those who hide every crime against the nation as a “family affair” in the mainstream of national party politics. Fortunately, I am not good at such family affairs. If someone truly belongs to my family he and she should not burn down the family hearth and barn as a way of proving it. And if those who “commit” errors continue to insist on being lionized for it, they leave the rest of us no choice but to constantly remind them of what is right so that they don’t turn miscreance into norm for the whole society. I suppose part of the price I have to pay for insisting is Olu Obafemi’s misuse of English at my expense: He writes: “Odia is wanton, prodigal, and indiscretionary (sic). He tramples and suffocates both the sapling and the aged; the young lamb and the old sheep, in the literary guild, with recklessness and sickening superciliousness”. Of course, he knows that even those who see themselves as my antagonists in ANA would not agree with him. My battles are fought in the open in pursuit of common advantages, in the interest of the collective. I believe that people who do unto others what they don’t allow anyone to do them, should not be allowed to go on the rampage. I don’t see why, for instance, I should take sides with a class of young writers who want to be members of an Association whose rules they assault or who hold strong opinions about authors they have not read. I call them clap-trappers. Nor do I see why I should humour so-called older writers who swindle the young by setting unwholesome examples for them to emulate. I have no reason to apologize for the many battles I have won in this regard. If those who championed wrong causes are still trying to turn their shame into perennial standards, why should I who won the battles be hiding! Or feel awkward because time and circumstance uphold my positions as right. In the current matter of the NLNG Prize, it is morning yet on creation day. But see how Nduka Otiono is proving me right even before the sun begins to make shadows. In one breath, on the pages of ANA Review, he claims that members of the NLNG Literature Panel were influenced “to yield regrettable grounds” by the “subtle threat by one of the NLNG officials that the gas company’s management could easily lose interest in instituting the Prize if the Advisory Panel proved too rigid”. What he does not say is that only an Association which has been completely atomized into fractious individualism could be so easily threatened. Wouldn’t it have been better to forego the establishment of the Prize than destroy what makes your Association worthy of the name? Or do I have to narrate the stories of what ANA lost in the past because we preferred to be a poor Association rather than become the handmaiden of either military autocrats in our midst or foreign donors trying to tell us who to appoint in our Secretariat? The odd part is that after capitulating to the subtle threat, Otiono goes on to blame the peculiar “liberalism” of artists for what he himself calls the “costly error”. Why blame all artists and all writers for a clear incapacity that he is directly responsible for? Let’s catch his own words as he regrets the Literature Panel’s failure to keep the names of the judges secret. He writes: “Again, the liberalism of artists had lured them into leaving loopholes which the NLNG officials exploited to wrest the entire process of administering the Literature Prize from the Advisory Board and never referred to her again till date”. What I cannot understand is why Otiono should first of all consumate a spineless negotiation, refuse to make a bid for administering the prize, and even regretting not being able to hide the names of judges, then libel the rest of us for his lack of skills and forthrightness. Or has he forgotten that it was him, and his President, not all Nigerian artists and writers who were approached by the Gas company? If he has, that is just too, too convenient. It is glaring that both of them abandoned the turf in advance of any difficulties that the NLNG created for them. Olu Obafemi’s brag that he went into the NLNG Panel as an individual is, from this purview, quite pathetic. Why sell the soul of your vocation first and then start fighting, not to gain the whole world, but to be allowed to bid for crumbs! Yes. Asking ANA members not to attend readings because it was not franchised to ANA is just plain asking for crumbs. Giving up your turf for a mere 20,000 dollars Prize is asking for mere crumbs in the face of the losses that we now know it vouchsafes for a literature that, the whole world agrees, has a solid tradition. Is it for crumbs that we are now supposed to go amoral? I ask this question because a member of the NLNG Literature Panel, Professor Femi Osofisan, has been quoted to the effect that there is nothing the matter with the Gas Company registering The Nigerian Prize for Literature. To him it is just a matter of one company outsmarting others by jumping first. Does this say that we are all now mere handmaidens of a smart multinational which can choose to mis-define and misdirect our literature if it pleases? This is what I call selling national patrimony for a mess of pottage. Even if we are all now in the age of liberalization, privatization and deregulation, our identities have not yet been so privatized, liberalized and deregulated to the point where we must celebrate a private company’s right to use the state apparatus, outside the dictates of market forces, to over-ride the capacity of other companies to compete with it. If this is the reform some people want us to have, with private companies hijacking the government to win battles in advance of real competition in the marketplace, it tells us about the storms ahead. I do not want to be misunderstood. I do also believe that if a company so personifies the goals of a country, or a literary prize so incarnates the quality and excellence in the literature of a country, people in that country may choose to identify with it as a prime definer of their country’s interests or goals. This is the way that American interests used to be identified with General Motors. And the Booker and Pulitzer became modal definitions of British and American ideas of the way literature should be viewed. But not before the proof. And, not by a crude resort to legislation outside due process as has just been done by the gun-jumping that took the NLNG to the Attorney General. I would say that a writer who cannot make the necessary distinction between what is right in the market place but not in the sphere of citizenship and identity-building, has either given up the ground for morality in society or is simply doing the business of anything goes. Against such a tack, I think that the NLNG should do itself a favour by simply disavowing the idea of the Nigerian Prize and reverting to having it as the NLNG prize simplicita. It would do the image of the company and the self-respect of Nigerian writers a world of good. No matter how many permissions and imprimaturs they get from the Attorney General or even the President in order to continue to award The Nigerian Prize for Literature, it wont do. By the same token, I think that ANA members who sponsored the ban on Nigerian writers abroad should learn some humility and confess to having goofed. Otiono’s argument that Chimamanda Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus, could not have won the NLNG Prize because she was not published in Nigeria is disingenuous. First you ban them then you use their not publishing at home as a clincher to prove the point. It’s chicanery. Or first ban them then invite them to seminars and readings to help develop Nigerian literature. It does not occur to our prime defenders of the ghetto prize that involving off-shore writers in home-based activities in this manner is truly unjust and abusive of fellow-feeling. If the purpose is to encourage the off-shore writer to publish at home, or do simultaneous publishing at home and abroad, I don’t see why it is necessary to inflict a ban that disavows their citizenship. I should add, in this connection, that the President of ANA does himself too much injustice when he says that ”Odia went on one of his numerous refresher courses abroad, came back, armed with fresh loyalties, from abroad, to come and rubbish those who he refers to as the stay-at-homes”. The number of times “from abroad” appears in this sentence shows the fixation that led to the ban on fellow writers. If he has a chance to ban me for daring to do a six-day journey abroad to deliver lectures on African studies and cultural philosophy, he would probably do it. Besides, his colossal sense of spite wont let him admit the obvious: that the only reason he hates my guts is that my loyalties are old and unchanging, not fresh. Nor have I any reason to rubbish the stay-at-home writer who has respect for his trade. I am a stay at home writer myself. Only I am just not in love with Olu Obafemi’s love of Ghetto reasoning. I believe that ghettos, whether as urban jungles or sites in literature are unhealthy places to live in. My quarrel, yes, it is a quarrel, is with the fact that the very creme of the hierarchy in ANA lent their names to the rampage of the unwholesome envy which valorizes the ghetto and disparages fellow writers simply because they have refresher courses abroad, live abroad, or publish abroad. Literature is supposed to be our business not banal envy. And why should I not have refresher courses abroad, or simply just go abroad to see how the world is going, if that is how I get the knowledge or the kick that I need, for my work? By the way, shouldn’t the current President of ANA apologize to all ANA members for casting aspersions on any kind of refresher course that another writer undertakes in pursuit of literature and literary matters? Is he opposed to the fact that some Nigerian writers have written some of their best works during fellowships and solitude paid for in foreign climes? I suppose he would croak if he knows that I am writing this in Dakar (Senegal). What a ghetto mentality! For Goodness sake, the job of a President of ANA is not to dictate or impose a viewpoint upon Nigerian writers but to help create conditions that will make it possible for all Nigerian writers, irrespective of their views, to go on writing and writing well. Now he wants to divide the soul of Nigerian literature, dictate where I can stay to do my writing, and outlaw good writing because it was not produced in his ghetto. Assuredly, there is a moral edge to it which ties into the current granting of prizes to books that are not merely bad, but a swindling of the younger generation. It begins with treating demands for higher standards in writing and behaviour as being unduly ruthless, dictatorial and suffocative of the young shoots. This gives comfort to those who waffle and hedge in the face of literature that is not up to the mark. Judgment is then reduced to a matter of a national average which follows the notorious tradition of substantial compliance. To complicate matters, we just entered the age of prizes for journalists, an age so long overdue but one so fraught with danger. When journalists with the potential to serve as assessors and gate-keepers are judged on the basis of a criteria that lacks transparency, such a prize simply becomes a means of honoring those who do hatchet jobs for the reigning ANA chieftain. And, I am not speaking in abstractions. Nduka Otiono has reported in ANA Review a case of the NLNG people influencing This Day newspapers to mis-report or not report him. He offers no proof. He makes another charge even in relation to NLNG taking over members of his own team. But here I want to point directly to the current and first winner of the ANA prize for cultural journalism. I have just got a taste of the kind of journalism for which he was granted the prize. Recently, I sent a poem on Ken Saro Wiwa to some friends and newspapers on Remembrance Day for the Ogoni Nine. The current winner of the ANA journalism prize, Chuks Ohai of Daily Independent, phoned me to say that although I did not send him a copy of the poem he got one on the internet. I congratulated him for his enterprise. A few days later, the poem was published in the Daily Independent, first with the wrong title and then credited to author unknown. If The Guardian and later, The Sun had not published it with proper credits and I hadn’t received that phone-call, I would have thought, the error was mine. Which shows that there was a public means of correcting the ignorance of the editor of the culture page of the Daily Independent. And, which shows that this business of author unknown was meant to injure me in some way. The implication is that the Daily Independent as a newspaper was caused to deliberately abuse my intellectual property. I initially thought it was a matter for a lawyer. But, I think it is enough to use this medium to ask the editors of the paper if this is the kind of journalism for which they want their reporters to win prizes? I should ask Olu Obafemi and Nduka Otiono, without prejudice to their need to have hatchet-men, if this is the kind of journalism for which ANA should award prizes? It is not just about this writer. It is about not making the public suffer too much victimage in the hands of reporters and editors who may become so hostage to a warped personal agenda that they displace the public’s right to know. It is about creating the right disposition in the media before the establishment of a proper Nigerian Prize for Literature. • Ofeimun is a past Secretary-General and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA.
BY ODIA OFEIMUN
Unlike Professor Olu Obafemi, President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, I do not take the Word as an egg which cannot be reassembled once it is broken. The truth is that the word, if it is an egg, was already broken. All that we do as writers is to train it in support of life, scooping it, beating it, refining and spicing it, to educate taste, thus making and adding meaning, nutritious meaning, to existence. How well we do this is dependent on how we use imagination — the heart, mind and will, that is part of our being homo sapiens. Those who do not care about the meaning that they make, who therefore think of deconstructing before they have learnt to construct, are the ones who tend to put the world in trouble. They tell the rest of us that we can always leap before we think. They seek to, and because they fail to assemble the egg that is already broken, they see the world as a free-wheeling place where anything goes. Hence, they assume that every use of the mind is thinking. But it is not. I do believe that if Nigeria is to survive and thrive, there must be men and women who are prepared to undergo the self-punishment of learning how to think for her and to put dreams to work with transparent moral courage. This must be done on the basis of a well-primed knowledge industry. And, the men and women must be willing to test reality, allowing contending positions to engage that reality, before jumping into the boil of things to act with finality. Otherwise, even with the best of intentions, their supposed reforms will always end up deforming the society. On the matter of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize For Nigerian Literature, which has, unwisely, been changed to The Nigerian Prize For Literature, my grouse is that those who were elected to, and are supposed to think for us, abandoned their duties, capitulated to wonky personal agendas, and are now blaming the rest of us for the mistakes which they even admit that they made. Rather than take responsibility for their errors, that is, if they were indeed errors rather than willed acts, they seem to think that the virulence with which they assault and heap abuses on their critics will frighten the rest of us into silence. They want us to accept the good the bad and the ugly as equal in status. Again, I do not agree. On the contrary, I am amused that Professor Obafemi and his General Secretary, Nduka Otiono, are charging me with being a dictator because I demand their adherence to rules and conventions that are the common property of the Nigerian writers who elected them. Even if it is true that I helped to frame some of the rules and conventions during my time as General Secretary and President, I cannot be accused of dictatorship because I insist that the rules must be followed. The rules do not belong to me. They were designed for the maintenance of literary standards and the embossment of excellence. I insist that those who do not believe in them and who therefore imagine that they can ride roughshod over them ought to be made to see how they endanger our literature. Well, what I have done and would do here is to show that their abandonment of the rules in the process of designing the NLNG Prize is a departure from associational propriety and a mark of escape from civilized norms that continue to sustain all successful vocational, occupational and professional associations. If we are not to spend the next so many decades recriminating over the imposition of a Prize that mis-defines and misdirects Nigerian literature, I think this is the time to set aside the feckless approach so grossly displayed in ‘their’ NLNG “fiasco”. Let me note that I am responding mainly to the issues raised on the pages of the November 2004 edition of ANA Review, the New Age (November 17, 2004) and The Guardian (Sunday, November 21, 2004) where the General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors and his President, spent 8o percent of their write-ups heaping abuses on me for pointing out, among other things, errors in their approach to the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize for Nigerian Literature. The intriguing part, which amuses me a mighty lot, is that after agreeing with me on all the salient points, they remain unprepared to face up to the implications of their admission of error. Take the simple case of the invitation extended to them by the NLNG to help in designing a Prize for Nigerian Literature. The General Secretary claims to have initiated it. Lets take him on his word. He writes: “The first hint that “the fastest growing gas company in the world” may be interested in supporting the development of Nigerian Literature emerged from a casual meeting I had in 2002 with Mrs Olamide Olusanya, President of WRITA(Women Writers of Nigeria) and Head of Procurement at the NLNG. At the meeting we discussed possibilities of the gas company making a difference in the sponsorship of the literary arts through the Association of Nigerian Authors” (my emphasis). Otiono, our General Secretary, is careful not to tell us whether the Gas company, following the Angolan example, sent Mrs Olusanya to sound him out or whether he was the one who invited her to the meeting. Was it just informal? This was one year before the Company decided. And, we are not told that he thereafter sent a proposal to the Company. He does not say that he made a representation to the Company. Until another “former colleague at The Guardian and now Head, Public Relations and Communications at the gas company, Mr. Ifeanyi Mbanefo surprised” him “with a phone call”. Otiono is categoric that because of his zeal to make a difference, he obliged by playing the role of unofficial consultant, supplying contact addresses and phone numbers of intellectuals, scholars and writers who would be members of a proposed Advisory Committee. They contacted well-known members of ANA including two former Presidents and past judges of the Association. Professor Olu Obafemi takes on the narrative from there. He writes some of the most preposterous non-arguments that I have ever read from a teacher of literature. He begins by making it seem as if our differences lie in the fact that he became a writer by studying literature in the University while I, he assumes, stumbled into poetry “from the roadside”. Even the worst of his students could have showed him how laughable his distinction is especially as it does not and cannot tell us about the quality of his own poetry. Or may be I should add to his woes by letting him know that I wrote publishable poetry while I was a mere 19-year old petrol attendant at Yaba and later factory labourer at Apapa before I even dreamt of going to the University to study Political science. But this is not the issue. The real problem lies in having an elected President of a reputable writers’ association who can write that “ANA was never invited as an Association to partner with NNLG (sic). Individuals, who are credible and enduring members of ANA were invited, in their own individual capacities, to consider the desirability and viability of a major Prize for Literature. They were invited also to work out a framework and possible guidelines for its structuration, appoint a panel of judges and, they (sic) may be asked to stay on as an Advisory Committee”. I have quoted this passage in full to show that between Nduka Otiono and his President, Olu Obafemi, they did not work as a team, did not intend to work as a team, and frankly do not know what it means to talk about working as a team. They lacked a sense of the logic of office. Even the unlearned can see from Obafemi’s rendering of their job-description that the Gas company gave them every format to turn the tables, every table, into an ANA table, if they so wished. The NLNG virtually handed ANA all the grounds for doing what ANA had been doing with other non-members who endow or propose prizes. They could have drawn up a format that would provide sustenance for ANA during the life-time of the Prize. They could have followed the pattern already in existence of allowing the association to take the fees for administering a prize sponsored by a non-ANA member. They did not think of it. Obafemi and Otiono were quite together in seeing the invitation by the Gas Company purely as a matter requiring ANA to behave like a mendicant in its own business. The question is: even if they were invited as mere individuals, atomized consultants, which was not the case, couldn’t they summon the gumption to act in accordance with the mandate given to them by all Nigerian writers? And, before or after bringing out all the big shots in ANA why couldn’t they work-out a common ANA position? Why would an ANA President and General Secretary go into a negotiation with another organization and be seen to be arguing, having unseemly altercations, with other ANA members in the presence of the “other party”? This I call mixing individual grapes and organizational apples. Quite in evidence is that, faced with the largesse from the NLNG, their self-definition became personalist, rather than collective. So it may well be asked: what kind of cultural literacy or learnedness is that which allows a Professor to admit to such abdication of responsibility in public without feeling ashamed? Or, how could the President of ANA claim that in the matter which all Nigerian writers elected him to pursue, he allowed himself to be wheedled into the position of an ordinary stool pigeon! The truth of the matter is that once they decided to go to the Gas Company as atomized mendicants, they lost the power to think as ANA members. Personal agendas overrode associational ones. The unspoken issue is that they were bidding to have power over their fellow writers beyond their stay in office. So they preferred to create or capitulate into an Advisory Committee that ANA would not have any control over. Quite a brazen display of self-interest at the expense of the very organization that gave them a place to stand. (If only to give Otiono his own medicine by quoting from a private conversation: he used to tell me while I was ANA President, that I did not know how to use power. So this is what he meant? — using a mandate granted by others to spoil or take over their business?). I dare say that the Gas Company may have done better by going to the Carpenters’ Brigade or some such body, to think through a Prize for writers. They may have gotten a better deal than doing business with writers who have reasons for not wanting to be identified with their own Association. Engineers, medical and legal practitioners, accountants and public relations people stand by their Associations and societies. In the past, ANA, although poor in financial terms, used to stand tall by its own. Now the association is not only too poor to have a secretariat, even the moral scruples have gone to the wind. For the first time in the history of the Association of Nigerian Authors, a non-member, an official of the NLNG could walk into a meeting of the Lagos branch of ANA to insist that ANA’s representatives signed for their pay and therefore had no moral right to point their noses in the sky. In umbrage, both President and General Secretary have expended a good deal of the wood in the forest arguing that they did not lobby for or negotiate honoraria. As I claim that they did. What they have not said is that they did not receive any. Having acquiesced as mere individuals to what was proposed, they did not need to negotiate. Their acquiescence was negotiation. You reckon that anyone who is a member of such an Association would be embarrassed to hear of the goings-on as I have been. Interestingly, the culprits are not embarrassed. It reminds me that Olu Obafemi was the judge and Nduka Otiono was the recipient of that notorious ANA award which had to be withdrawn because it was simply not in order. May be, as President and General Secretary, they want to reduce ANA to the level of that amoral approach to standards that allows no rules and no conventions to stand. And I suppose they are responding to me with so much vehemence and virulence because they think that we should keep our secrets secret in the manner of those who hide every crime against the nation as a “family affair” in the mainstream of national party politics. Fortunately, I am not good at such family affairs. If someone truly belongs to my family he and she should not burn down the family hearth and barn as a way of proving it. And if those who “commit” errors continue to insist on being lionized for it, they leave the rest of us no choice but to constantly remind them of what is right so that they don’t turn miscreance into norm for the whole society. I suppose part of the price I have to pay for insisting is Olu Obafemi’s misuse of English at my expense: He writes: “Odia is wanton, prodigal, and indiscretionary (sic). He tramples and suffocates both the sapling and the aged; the young lamb and the old sheep, in the literary guild, with recklessness and sickening superciliousness”. Of course, he knows that even those who see themselves as my antagonists in ANA would not agree with him. My battles are fought in the open in pursuit of common advantages, in the interest of the collective. I believe that people who do unto others what they don’t allow anyone to do them, should not be allowed to go on the rampage. I don’t see why, for instance, I should take sides with a class of young writers who want to be members of an Association whose rules they assault or who hold strong opinions about authors they have not read. I call them clap-trappers. Nor do I see why I should humour so-called older writers who swindle the young by setting unwholesome examples for them to emulate. I have no reason to apologize for the many battles I have won in this regard. If those who championed wrong causes are still trying to turn their shame into perennial standards, why should I who won the battles be hiding! Or feel awkward because time and circumstance uphold my positions as right. In the current matter of the NLNG Prize, it is morning yet on creation day. But see how Nduka Otiono is proving me right even before the sun begins to make shadows. In one breath, on the pages of ANA Review, he claims that members of the NLNG Literature Panel were influenced “to yield regrettable grounds” by the “subtle threat by one of the NLNG officials that the gas company’s management could easily lose interest in instituting the Prize if the Advisory Panel proved too rigid”. What he does not say is that only an Association which has been completely atomized into fractious individualism could be so easily threatened. Wouldn’t it have been better to forego the establishment of the Prize than destroy what makes your Association worthy of the name? Or do I have to narrate the stories of what ANA lost in the past because we preferred to be a poor Association rather than become the handmaiden of either military autocrats in our midst or foreign donors trying to tell us who to appoint in our Secretariat? The odd part is that after capitulating to the subtle threat, Otiono goes on to blame the peculiar “liberalism” of artists for what he himself calls the “costly error”. Why blame all artists and all writers for a clear incapacity that he is directly responsible for? Let’s catch his own words as he regrets the Literature Panel’s failure to keep the names of the judges secret. He writes: “Again, the liberalism of artists had lured them into leaving loopholes which the NLNG officials exploited to wrest the entire process of administering the Literature Prize from the Advisory Board and never referred to her again till date”. What I cannot understand is why Otiono should first of all consumate a spineless negotiation, refuse to make a bid for administering the prize, and even regretting not being able to hide the names of judges, then libel the rest of us for his lack of skills and forthrightness. Or has he forgotten that it was him, and his President, not all Nigerian artists and writers who were approached by the Gas company? If he has, that is just too, too convenient. It is glaring that both of them abandoned the turf in advance of any difficulties that the NLNG created for them. Olu Obafemi’s brag that he went into the NLNG Panel as an individual is, from this purview, quite pathetic. Why sell the soul of your vocation first and then start fighting, not to gain the whole world, but to be allowed to bid for crumbs! Yes. Asking ANA members not to attend readings because it was not franchised to ANA is just plain asking for crumbs. Giving up your turf for a mere 20,000 dollars Prize is asking for mere crumbs in the face of the losses that we now know it vouchsafes for a literature that, the whole world agrees, has a solid tradition. Is it for crumbs that we are now supposed to go amoral? I ask this question because a member of the NLNG Literature Panel, Professor Femi Osofisan, has been quoted to the effect that there is nothing the matter with the Gas Company registering The Nigerian Prize for Literature. To him it is just a matter of one company outsmarting others by jumping first. Does this say that we are all now mere handmaidens of a smart multinational which can choose to mis-define and misdirect our literature if it pleases? This is what I call selling national patrimony for a mess of pottage. Even if we are all now in the age of liberalization, privatization and deregulation, our identities have not yet been so privatized, liberalized and deregulated to the point where we must celebrate a private company’s right to use the state apparatus, outside the dictates of market forces, to over-ride the capacity of other companies to compete with it. If this is the reform some people want us to have, with private companies hijacking the government to win battles in advance of real competition in the marketplace, it tells us about the storms ahead. I do not want to be misunderstood. I do also believe that if a company so personifies the goals of a country, or a literary prize so incarnates the quality and excellence in the literature of a country, people in that country may choose to identify with it as a prime definer of their country’s interests or goals. This is the way that American interests used to be identified with General Motors. And the Booker and Pulitzer became modal definitions of British and American ideas of the way literature should be viewed. But not before the proof. And, not by a crude resort to legislation outside due process as has just been done by the gun-jumping that took the NLNG to the Attorney General. I would say that a writer who cannot make the necessary distinction between what is right in the market place but not in the sphere of citizenship and identity-building, has either given up the ground for morality in society or is simply doing the business of anything goes. Against such a tack, I think that the NLNG should do itself a favour by simply disavowing the idea of the Nigerian Prize and reverting to having it as the NLNG prize simplicita. It would do the image of the company and the self-respect of Nigerian writers a world of good. No matter how many permissions and imprimaturs they get from the Attorney General or even the President in order to continue to award The Nigerian Prize for Literature, it wont do. By the same token, I think that ANA members who sponsored the ban on Nigerian writers abroad should learn some humility and confess to having goofed. Otiono’s argument that Chimamanda Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus, could not have won the NLNG Prize because she was not published in Nigeria is disingenuous. First you ban them then you use their not publishing at home as a clincher to prove the point. It’s chicanery. Or first ban them then invite them to seminars and readings to help develop Nigerian literature. It does not occur to our prime defenders of the ghetto prize that involving off-shore writers in home-based activities in this manner is truly unjust and abusive of fellow-feeling. If the purpose is to encourage the off-shore writer to publish at home, or do simultaneous publishing at home and abroad, I don’t see why it is necessary to inflict a ban that disavows their citizenship. I should add, in this connection, that the President of ANA does himself too much injustice when he says that ”Odia went on one of his numerous refresher courses abroad, came back, armed with fresh loyalties, from abroad, to come and rubbish those who he refers to as the stay-at-homes”. The number of times “from abroad” appears in this sentence shows the fixation that led to the ban on fellow writers. If he has a chance to ban me for daring to do a six-day journey abroad to deliver lectures on African studies and cultural philosophy, he would probably do it. Besides, his colossal sense of spite wont let him admit the obvious: that the only reason he hates my guts is that my loyalties are old and unchanging, not fresh. Nor have I any reason to rubbish the stay-at-home writer who has respect for his trade. I am a stay at home writer myself. Only I am just not in love with Olu Obafemi’s love of Ghetto reasoning. I believe that ghettos, whether as urban jungles or sites in literature are unhealthy places to live in. My quarrel, yes, it is a quarrel, is with the fact that the very creme of the hierarchy in ANA lent their names to the rampage of the unwholesome envy which valorizes the ghetto and disparages fellow writers simply because they have refresher courses abroad, live abroad, or publish abroad. Literature is supposed to be our business not banal envy. And why should I not have refresher courses abroad, or simply just go abroad to see how the world is going, if that is how I get the knowledge or the kick that I need, for my work? By the way, shouldn’t the current President of ANA apologize to all ANA members for casting aspersions on any kind of refresher course that another writer undertakes in pursuit of literature and literary matters? Is he opposed to the fact that some Nigerian writers have written some of their best works during fellowships and solitude paid for in foreign climes? I suppose he would croak if he knows that I am writing this in Dakar (Senegal). What a ghetto mentality! For Goodness sake, the job of a President of ANA is not to dictate or impose a viewpoint upon Nigerian writers but to help create conditions that will make it possible for all Nigerian writers, irrespective of their views, to go on writing and writing well. Now he wants to divide the soul of Nigerian literature, dictate where I can stay to do my writing, and outlaw good writing because it was not produced in his ghetto. Assuredly, there is a moral edge to it which ties into the current granting of prizes to books that are not merely bad, but a swindling of the younger generation. It begins with treating demands for higher standards in writing and behaviour as being unduly ruthless, dictatorial and suffocative of the young shoots. This gives comfort to those who waffle and hedge in the face of literature that is not up to the mark. Judgment is then reduced to a matter of a national average which follows the notorious tradition of substantial compliance. To complicate matters, we just entered the age of prizes for journalists, an age so long overdue but one so fraught with danger. When journalists with the potential to serve as assessors and gate-keepers are judged on the basis of a criteria that lacks transparency, such a prize simply becomes a means of honoring those who do hatchet jobs for the reigning ANA chieftain. And, I am not speaking in abstractions. Nduka Otiono has reported in ANA Review a case of the NLNG people influencing This Day newspapers to mis-report or not report him. He offers no proof. He makes another charge even in relation to NLNG taking over members of his own team. But here I want to point directly to the current and first winner of the ANA prize for cultural journalism. I have just got a taste of the kind of journalism for which he was granted the prize. Recently, I sent a poem on Ken Saro Wiwa to some friends and newspapers on Remembrance Day for the Ogoni Nine. The current winner of the ANA journalism prize, Chuks Ohai of Daily Independent, phoned me to say that although I did not send him a copy of the poem he got one on the internet. I congratulated him for his enterprise. A few days later, the poem was published in the Daily Independent, first with the wrong title and then credited to author unknown. If The Guardian and later, The Sun had not published it with proper credits and I hadn’t received that phone-call, I would have thought, the error was mine. Which shows that there was a public means of correcting the ignorance of the editor of the culture page of the Daily Independent. And, which shows that this business of author unknown was meant to injure me in some way. The implication is that the Daily Independent as a newspaper was caused to deliberately abuse my intellectual property. I initially thought it was a matter for a lawyer. But, I think it is enough to use this medium to ask the editors of the paper if this is the kind of journalism for which they want their reporters to win prizes? I should ask Olu Obafemi and Nduka Otiono, without prejudice to their need to have hatchet-men, if this is the kind of journalism for which ANA should award prizes? It is not just about this writer. It is about not making the public suffer too much victimage in the hands of reporters and editors who may become so hostage to a warped personal agenda that they displace the public’s right to know. It is about creating the right disposition in the media before the establishment of a proper Nigerian Prize for Literature. • Ofeimun is a past Secretary-General and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA.
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