A Prefatory Note
The title of this series is borrowed from Jimmy Cannon, the late American sportswriter and newspaper columnist whose Nobody Asked Me, But… pieces turned unsolicited observations into a distinctive form of newspaper writing.
Every now and again, I notice something that makes me pause: a word we use without thinking, a habit we have somehow decided is perfectly normal, a type of Nigerian behaviour that strikes me as funny, or something that irritates me enough to wonder about it.
That’s the general idea here.
The subjects will wander: language, manners, politics, culture, business, society, art, leadership, relationships, fashion, religion, parties, traditions and the small absurdities of Nigerian life. Some observations may be serious. Others may be entirely frivolous. I don’t always agree with myself, and I certainly don’t expect everyone else to agree with me.
I notice something. I wonder about it. I write about it.
Nobody asked my opinion, but here it is anyway.
O Mia Patria, Nigeria! What Happened to You?
I have always been fascinated by the small rituals of power.
Who sits where. Who stands where. Who walks through which door. Who is met on the tarmac. Who is met at the entrance. Who gets the red carpet and who gets the side entrance.
At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022, most of the visiting heads of state and government were taken to Westminster Abbey in shared buses. President Biden was an exception, arriving in the presidential limousine. China’s representative, Vice-President Wang Qishan, also arrived separately, in a Chinese motorcade.
Make of that what you will.
Ceremonial protocol is one of the languages of international relations. Countries spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding who sits beside whom, who receives whom, and which motorcade gets police outriders.
I was reminded of this when I saw Chinese President Xi Jinping being received at Andrews Air Force Base by President Trump earlier this week.
That video made me think of another airport, 65 years ago.
Nigeria had been independent for less than a year when Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa visited the United States at the invitation of President John F. Kennedy. When Balewa arrived in Washington, he was received by the American Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Nigeria was barely a year-old newly independent African country trying to work out what independence actually meant. Yet the American Vice-President came to meet its prime minister at the airport. No one sends the VP to the airport for a country it considers inconsequential. America expected Nigeria to matter. The country held so much promise! Balewa went on to meet Kennedy at the White House, address Congress and travel around the United States.
These little rituals of power also tell us something about what countries have become.
China, for instance.
More than a century ago, the philosopher Bertrand Russell spent much of 1920 and 1921 in Peking, where he lectured and observed Chinese society at close quarters. He came away with a view that was different from the prevailing Western assumption that China was simply an inferior and backward civilisation waiting to be instructed.
Russell thought the Chinese had much to learn from the West — science, technology, industrial organisation, but he also believed the West had much to learn from China.
“We have quite as much to learn from them as they from us,” he wrote in The Problem of China in 1922.
China was then weak, divided and subject to foreign powers that behaved as though technological advancement gave them a natural claim to civilisational superiority. Russell thought that was a dangerous conceit. He also predicted that the Chinese would eventually demand to be treated as equals by the West.
He could not have dreamed what China would become.
China spent much of the twentieth century acquiring the things it needed to become powerful – industrial capacity, infrastructure, scientific expertise, military capability and a state capable of pursuing long-term objectives. It made catastrophic mistakes along the way. The Great Leap Forward brought famine, and the Cultural Revolution tore through institutions and society.
But after 1978, China began a sustained period of economic development that changed its place in the world.
Today, an American president goes to the airport to receive the Chinese president. “PERSONALLY, ” as we say around here.
And then there is Nigeria.
In 1961, the American Vice-President went to the airport to meet our prime minister. What happened between then and now is a much larger story than can be explained in one unsolicited opinion piece.
The coups began in 1966. Balewa was killed. Military rule replaced parliamentary government. Then came another coup, the civil war and decades in which political power repeatedly changed hands outside the democratic system. Somewhere along the way, we became accustomed to leadership that demanded very little of itself. (You know the story.)
Institutions that should have been accumulating experience were repeatedly interrupted. A civil service develops habits. A diplomatic service builds relationships. Universities acquire traditions. Businesses learn to plan beyond the next government. Political parties develop institutional memory. Every time a country tears up the board and starts again, some of that accumulated knowledge disintegrates.
China kept building, while Nigeria kept going back to last save.
Nigeria turns 66 on October 1. Sixty-six years is long enough for a country to have made mistakes, wasted opportunities, surprised itself and started over more than once. It is also young enough, in the life of a nation, to change course.
I am certainly not giving up on us. We remain Africa’s most populous country. We remain a major oil producer. Nigerians have built extraordinary careers in science, medicine, business, academia, and the arts, sadly often outside the country.
Bertrand Russell published The Problem of China in 1922.
It took 104 years for a Chinese president to be received at an American military airfield by an American president. The Chinese president arrived in Washington as the leader of a country the United States must deal with as an equal.
Just as Russell predicted.
Nigeria does not have to become China, but we can build, we can accumulate, and we can change course.
And perhaps, if we get some of those things right, the Nigeria of the future will not have to wait 104 years to have somebody important come to meet us at the airport.
Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.
* Lakisokun, a political consultant, historian, and Chair of Trustees of The Tarihi Trust Foundation, writes from Lagos. Tarihi Trust is a Pan-African foundation for memory, history and civic understanding.
