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This Fiction Called Nigeria: The Struggle for Democracy
An uncompromising look at Nigeria’s crisis of democracy by a renowned essayist and criticIn this groundbreaking work the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonizers at the turn of the twentieth century.When Nigerians went to the polls to vote in the 2023 elections, they had experienced a quarter century of democracy, after a similar period of almost unbroken military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of self-rule are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, rent by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration.Maja-Pearce shows that recent mobilizations against police brutality, sexism and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country’s youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of the young, unwilling to go on as before.
208 pages, Paperback
Published October 8, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 18, 2024
Almost airless in its concentration on the top of a particularly appalling political system (and its international aiders and abetters, from Shell to the IMF to Biden) but few books I've read recently have done political invective and shade quite like this one.
February 4, 2025
“The population doubled to 223 million, making us the sixth largest nation in the world.”
“In many ways, the story of Nigeria is the story of oil, the proceeds of which provided us with the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed nation in the 20th century, instead of which we created a cabal of fabulously wealthy chiefs in what is one of the world’s most unequal countries: the five richest men are worth US$29,9bn between them. Worse yet, it seems their only ambition is to rape girls. Take for instance, Ahmad Sani Yerima, the former two-term governor of Zamfara state and two-term federal senator. During his tenure, he bought his Egyptian driver’s thirteen-year old daughter as his fourth wife for US$100,000. When it was pointed out that the senate itself had passed the Child Rights Act (which Zamfara refused to ratify), he retorted, ‘History tells us that the Prophet Muhammad did marry a young girl as well.”
“So why do we, the ‘people’, tolerate such levels of obscenity? Consider that the victor in the 2023 presidential election election, Bólá Ahmed Tinúbú, claims to be a descendant of the most successful indigenous slave trader in nineteenth-century Lagos, after whom a prominent downtown square is named. It says something about our warped or perhaps non-existent sense of the history no longer taught in our public schools that nobody has yet suggested renaming it, perhaps for fear of drawing attention to our complicity in selling our brothers and sisters to the White Man anchored off the malaria-infested coast. Even more humiliating, the descendants of the slave trader have themselves disowned him; but then Tinúbú has lied about many things. Such is the calibre of the person who would seek to rule us. As we shall see in due course, he is also a thug, but then that is the nature of our politics.”
“SARS was launched in 1992, in response to a growing spate of armed robberies. But in reality, their main targets were young men in flashy cats with smartphones and laptops. They also picked up feminine-seeming boys. They go through their phones, violating their privacy. When they see queer content, these people are beaten, extorted, assaulted, and even after this they are still outed to their loved ones.”
“There is a tiny demographic of old men known as 'elders' who comprise less than 3.5 percent of the population aged over sixty-five but whose suffocating sense of entitlement - and our acquiescence in it - has been a convenient cover for the large-scale theft that has impoverished a country otherwise considered 'too rich to be poor.”
“Consider the case of Minere Amakiri, the journalist who had his head shaved with a broken bottle and then received twenty-four lashes, ‘howling in excruciating pain’, for writing about an impeding teachers’ strike over non-payment of salaries.”
“It was only after President Abacha’s death, apparently in the arms of two prostitutes specially flown in from India, that revelations of the hit squads - responsible for eliminating opponents - emerged.”
“They have enacted a wide range of legislation aimed at particular ‘social vices’ and un-Islamic behavior. To date, mainly the poor are suffering from the consequences, beginning with Safiya Husseini and Amina Lawal, two women who became pregnant in the absence of their estranged husbands and were sentenced to death by stoning. The alleged father of Husseini's baby didn't have to do anything more than protest his innocence in the absence of four male witnesses who were otherwise required to have seen 'the penis inside the woman's vagina'; as the judge put it, a man is not a woman, whereby she will have a protruding stomach to show.“
“Two convicted thieves had their right hand amputated, one for stealing a cow, the other for stealing three bicycles. In the case of the first, a surgeon was specially flown in from Pakistan because, it seems, no Nigerian doctor was available. The operation was performed at a state house clinic, as an excited crowd waited outside, whereupon the amputee was led back to his impoverished village by state government officials in what was described a festive atmosphere.”
“The politicians know perfectly well that this fiction called Nigeria cannot survive their depredations that are enabled by the very fact that nobody ever owed allegiance to someone else’s abstraction that we have refused to take responsibility for. This is why they buy houses in Dubai and educate their children in the UK…”
“In many ways, the story of Nigeria is the story of oil, the proceeds of which provided us with the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed nation in the 20th century, instead of which we created a cabal of fabulously wealthy chiefs in what is one of the world’s most unequal countries: the five richest men are worth US$29,9bn between them. Worse yet, it seems their only ambition is to rape girls. Take for instance, Ahmad Sani Yerima, the former two-term governor of Zamfara state and two-term federal senator. During his tenure, he bought his Egyptian driver’s thirteen-year old daughter as his fourth wife for US$100,000. When it was pointed out that the senate itself had passed the Child Rights Act (which Zamfara refused to ratify), he retorted, ‘History tells us that the Prophet Muhammad did marry a young girl as well.”
“So why do we, the ‘people’, tolerate such levels of obscenity? Consider that the victor in the 2023 presidential election election, Bólá Ahmed Tinúbú, claims to be a descendant of the most successful indigenous slave trader in nineteenth-century Lagos, after whom a prominent downtown square is named. It says something about our warped or perhaps non-existent sense of the history no longer taught in our public schools that nobody has yet suggested renaming it, perhaps for fear of drawing attention to our complicity in selling our brothers and sisters to the White Man anchored off the malaria-infested coast. Even more humiliating, the descendants of the slave trader have themselves disowned him; but then Tinúbú has lied about many things. Such is the calibre of the person who would seek to rule us. As we shall see in due course, he is also a thug, but then that is the nature of our politics.”
“SARS was launched in 1992, in response to a growing spate of armed robberies. But in reality, their main targets were young men in flashy cats with smartphones and laptops. They also picked up feminine-seeming boys. They go through their phones, violating their privacy. When they see queer content, these people are beaten, extorted, assaulted, and even after this they are still outed to their loved ones.”
“There is a tiny demographic of old men known as 'elders' who comprise less than 3.5 percent of the population aged over sixty-five but whose suffocating sense of entitlement - and our acquiescence in it - has been a convenient cover for the large-scale theft that has impoverished a country otherwise considered 'too rich to be poor.”
“Consider the case of Minere Amakiri, the journalist who had his head shaved with a broken bottle and then received twenty-four lashes, ‘howling in excruciating pain’, for writing about an impeding teachers’ strike over non-payment of salaries.”
“It was only after President Abacha’s death, apparently in the arms of two prostitutes specially flown in from India, that revelations of the hit squads - responsible for eliminating opponents - emerged.”
“They have enacted a wide range of legislation aimed at particular ‘social vices’ and un-Islamic behavior. To date, mainly the poor are suffering from the consequences, beginning with Safiya Husseini and Amina Lawal, two women who became pregnant in the absence of their estranged husbands and were sentenced to death by stoning. The alleged father of Husseini's baby didn't have to do anything more than protest his innocence in the absence of four male witnesses who were otherwise required to have seen 'the penis inside the woman's vagina'; as the judge put it, a man is not a woman, whereby she will have a protruding stomach to show.“
“Two convicted thieves had their right hand amputated, one for stealing a cow, the other for stealing three bicycles. In the case of the first, a surgeon was specially flown in from Pakistan because, it seems, no Nigerian doctor was available. The operation was performed at a state house clinic, as an excited crowd waited outside, whereupon the amputee was led back to his impoverished village by state government officials in what was described a festive atmosphere.”
“The politicians know perfectly well that this fiction called Nigeria cannot survive their depredations that are enabled by the very fact that nobody ever owed allegiance to someone else’s abstraction that we have refused to take responsibility for. This is why they buy houses in Dubai and educate their children in the UK…”
November 29, 2025
On the one hand, the critique of liberal democracy is a necessity. On the other hand, it does do good to remember that it can always, in fact, be worse. Maja-Pearce argues by invective, mostly successfully, and quite deserved by the political development (or lack thereof) of the country. Though the lack of a robust class analysis is frustrating, MP remains clear-eyed as to the Nigerian Condition in the 21c.
April 16, 2025
This was really interesting to read but I don’t think it was my style of literature. It read too much like a textbook and felt really difficult to follow
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews