Corruption in Africa and plethora of commissions and task forces foretold

Like a drift of quail, I had remained in the literary doldrums until I laid my hands on No Longer at Ease, authored by the eclectic blessed memory and patriarch of the African Novel Chinua Achebe.

He brought out the stark difference between the artistic prowess in me and the rudderless school boy of yester-years when he conjured up images and motivations through its chief protagonist Obi Okonkwo.

Strange enough, this left me with a deeper and more rewarding appreciation of the place of challenges in the lives of mortals. It further stirred up the literary eye in me to see the unseen and to think the unthought-of.

Nikolai Gogol’s’ comic and political genius in his satire, The Government Inspector came in calling and left me with an insatiable hunger for more of literary nuggets when he humorously depicted Mayor, the chief protagonist as an honest fool in furthering the theme of corruption in a hierarchical and imperialistic Russian society of the 1850s.

But still, No Longer At Ease remained perched at my highest echelon, while I intermingled my reading with the James Hadley Chase concoction.

SOLEMN, DIGNIFIED PORTRAIT

This solemn, dignified portrait that Achebe draws of Obi Okonkwo is serious in tone, which created a sympathetic and a remorseful mood in me that verged on the seismic due to the fall of Obi Okonkwo.

It is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the short story genre and master at developing moods of gloom. For in The Fall of the House of Usher, he said, “During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Achebe’s main social-political criticisms in No Longer at Ease, a sequel to Things Fall Apart is that of corruption in Nigeria during the political interlude of the pre and post-colonial era. With the conflict coming at the beginning of the novel, one is left puzzled at the mastery of Chinua Achebe in crafting a story.

Obi is doomed from the start with external and inner conflict epitomising his life.

On returning to Nigeria, Obi gets a job with the Scholarship Board in the

Colonial civil service that comes with a car, money, and respect. A bribe is dangled in front of him in form of cash and later sex, but he navigates it only for it to become his Achilles heel when he is caught and arraigned in court.

At first he is as critical as Achebe of bribery and sees himself as an idealistic and educated pioneer in Nigeria to bring corruption down in the civil service as the Nigerians geared themselves into self-rule from the colonialists.

Obi thought he would instigate sanity in Nigeria but falters when push comes to the shove.

Umuofian Progressive Union is a group of Igbo men who have left their villages to live in Nigerian primary cities. They take a collection to send their son Obi to England to study law under the aphorism, “For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market”, with an intention that he will return to help his people navigate British colonial society.

But once in England, Obi switches his major to English where he studies poetry as a self-willed man. Conflicting Ibo and European traditions seen through Obi’s eye shows Achebe’s negative opinion about colonialism, though, paradoxically, the white man’s education has brought him status and high appeal in society.

Romantic relationship

Obi later develops a romantic relationship with a Nigerian woman, Clara Okeke the outcast descendant and the marriage stalls at the altar of the Igbo traditions with his Christian father and mother confounding the conflict further.

When finally Obi informs Clara of the events, she intimates to him that she’s pregnant, and the botched abortion which Clara reluctantly undergoes causes her complications and terminates the relationship.

Obi sinks deeper into a financial mire due to his poor planning, a need to repay his loan to Umuofian Progressive Union and a burden to pay for his siblings’ education.

Achebe foreboded the abominable spread of the tentacles of corruption, the ever evasive multi-hydra behemoth in Africa.

Even with a plethora of winding and inconclusive commissions and task forces having fired blanks and later degenerating into journalistic butt of jokes in Kenya — “The anti-corruption tribunal investigates the anti-corruption task force which probes the anti-corruption committee which investigates the anti-corruption commission which probes the anti-corruption inquiry” — one can only hope that this ghost will one day be fully annihilated in Africa and pacify the physically departed but literary alive soul of Chinua Achebe, the enigmatic pacesetter of African writing.

The writer is an author (email: [email protected])