Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

You Africans, please listen to me as Africans

And you non-Africans, listen to me with open mind

Here we go...*

Nigeria richly illustrates human life at the end of modern era. The most populous country on the African continent, Nigeria combines hundreds of languages and cultures. It is a meeting place of two Abrahamic religions – Islam and Christianity – while cursed with an abundant and relatively cheaply gained supply of oil. Nigeria is a cultural, religious, and economic crucible. For me, it was always high on the list of places I wanted to spend some time. Six years ago, through work I had done in the past, the opportunity presented itself.

In my youth, I spent a number of years developing a successful talent, if it is a talent, of running election campaigns in the US. However, after a dozen years experience, it became obvious to me America's democratic politics were falling apart. For two centuries, the politics of self-government had helped define life in America, but by the last decades of the 20th century, politics was becoming increasingly detrimental to the country as a whole, while correspondingly immensely profitable for a few. This led me to walk away from the then burgeoning business of campaigns, which last election cycle saw over $14 billion in “revenues”, a relatively small industry, but a business where return on investment is almost infinite.

In a last campaign and across the many years that followed, I tried, failing utterly, to explain to my fellow Americans that our politics was growing not just worthless but dangerously toxic. Switching personalities in an atrophying system did nothing. Absent extensive reform, this widening gyre of political deterioration would accelerate a downward spiral of dysfunction and corruption – things fall apart.

In the years since, in a few acts of desperation accompanied with an extensive lack of imagination, I dabbled in a couple of US campaigns. In one such act, I got to know and befriend Trippi, who started campaigning the same year I did, but stayed in the business. He continually tried to get me to do other campaigns, which I easily declined. In 2007, he went to Nigeria to consult Vice-President Atiku Abubakar's presidential campaign. In 2011, he helped elect Goodluck Ebele Jonathan president of Nigeria.

When Trippi first went to Nigeria, I said to him, “You want me to work a campaign? I will go to Nigeria.” In 2014, he called and asked if I wanted to go to Nigeria for Jonathan's reelection. Absolutely. Spending time in Nigeria then and again in 2019, it lived up to and far beyond everything I had preconceived. A vast anarchic place, densely populated with beautiful, intelligent people, the majority daily striving against local and global forces for life's bare essentials.

So, a few weeks ago, with great anticipation, I picked up Nigeria's great literary laureate Wole Soyinka's first novel in a half century, “Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.” The work is a scathing and hilarious satire in the tradition of Twain, Gogol, and Swift. While it is eminently and acutely about contemporary Nigeria, Soyinka's work is also a byzantine portrait of the human condition a fifth of way through the 21st century.

The book is filled with amusing and tragic observations of daily life in Nigeria, its core a well deserved merciless attack on the country's political and religious establishments. Soyinka's elite conspire not just metaphorically, but literally, to cannibalize the Nigerian people. Soyinka spins a tale of how both native and colonial tradition, technology, and corrupt and dysfunctional institutions work not for the commonweal of the land, but the egregious profit of a few.

Immensely amusing is the introduction of one of the novel's main characters, a successful engineer who has just received an appointment to the United Nations and waits to meet the prime minister, the “People's Steward”, at Aso Rock, the home and office of Nigeria's presidents. The engineer spends several chapters waiting for the meeting as various officials and hanger-ons attend him. I had the exact same experience.

At one point, Trippi, myself, and several others, spent several hours within the “Villa Potencia” waiting for a meeting with President Jonathan. People came in and out insuring us the meeting would commence shortly. A couple hours in, the president finally appeared and shook our hands. He came to me last, shook my hand and then continued to hold my hand by his side for a good bit of time. I had been in Nigeria long enough at that point to understand men holding hands had no identity connotations. It was a simple gesture of affection and respect.

Then, Jonathan let go of my hand, strode away, turning and looking back as he headed through the door saying, “I am coming.”

“Uh-oh,” I said to Trippi, “That's probably at least another hour.”

In Nigeria, “I am coming,” is a much used expression meaning, “I will be there, just not yet.” And so it was another hour before we began our meeting.

Jonathan's legacy is an interesting and admirable one. Conducting “free and fair” elections was one of the pillars of his administration, even if that meant being the only Nigerian president and one of the few incumbents on the African continent to ever lose reelection. And lose he did, to the great consternation of most who surrounded him.

In an early chapter titled, “The Gospel according to Happiness”, Soyinka establishes a main plot line, the great media spectacular/festival/election of a “People's Choice Yeoman of the Year.” Soyinka writes, “What the People's Choice achieved went beyond burnishing the image of the government or party in power; it vastly improved the battered profile of the nationals in the eyes of the world. The festival, veteran of numerous editions, proved that despite the contrary testimony of political elections, the citizenry, if only given a given a chance, could teach the world a thing or two in that political culture so wrongly attributed to the Athenians.”

Soyinka continues, “The government took the unprecedented step of forwarding the enabling resolution to UNESCO―with no less than twenty-five million signatures from across the nation, computer verified, a feat yet to be attained by three National Census editions.” That made me laugh out loud. Nigeria hasn't put together a new census for almost two decades and one thing every Nigerian can agree on is the last was an entirely valueless count.

After two years imprisonment in Nigeria for opposing the then military dictatorship, Soyinka spent a number of years in exile, including teaching in the US. “Chronicles from the Happiest People on Earth” is about today's United States, as much as it is about Nigeria. The whole People's Choice extravaganza has “Made in America” loudly labeled across it, where politics has become little more than a base television entertainment show. While Soyinka focuses on religious and political moldering, a true satire on power in the US would necessitate an extensive skewering of mega-corporate power.

Nigerians have wonderful senses of humor. They always made me laugh and laughed at my jokes. I use to extend my hands, separated chest high, and slowly bring them together saying, “US and Nigeria's politics are coming together.” The Nigerians would look at me quizzically and then laugh, I'd then say, “No joke.” In actuality, Nigeria and the US have been closely attached for decades. An umbilical cord coursing with oil devastated the Nigerian mother's strength as she attempted to meet the voracious unquenchable appetite of the unceasingly clamoring US fetus. Not that Americans know much of Nigeria's half-century role in providing them oil, and certainly know nothing of the destruction it caused Nigeria from exploding pipelines in the middle of cities, oil soaked landscapes and waterways across the Delta, flaring fouled skies, or the oil funded military boot that stamped on Nigeria's face for decades.

Today, funnily enough, Americans have little appreciation for satire, such is a society that wallows in ignorance of how the world works, inconceivably we remain true believers in the power and the actions of our monied aristocracy, who may not yet be literally cannibalistic as Soyinka's, certainly seem to prize the goal. Ripe for satire are our Oz-ian wizards of political economy, belching forth plumes of gibberish from their ivory towers. These righteously propagated fantasies explain how over the years it was to Nigeria's benefit to export all their oil, instead of burning it themselves. A long asked question across numerous Western halls of higher learning is, why can't Nigeria develop? The simplest answer, not only avoided, but never even popping into the great wizards of academia's heads – Nigeria didn't burn their oil, they exported it. The punchline being, across two centuries of industrialization, the only course of development known to humanity is burning fossil fuels, just ask the Chinese.

At its heart, and Soyinka's book has great heart, Chronicles is about the failure of a culture and its politics. At this point in the history of our species, it is exceedingly difficult for anyone to write un-confusedly about politics or culture. No one even knows what politics is, not Nigerians, and certainly not Americans. At its foundation, the dysfunction and corruption of Nigerian politics is different than what occurs in the United States, despite the Nigerian constitution opening with that original great decree of modern republicanism, “We the People.”

The great difference between the two politics is the problems afflicting Nigerian institutions are overwhelmingly those of systems never truly formed. From independence, governance in Nigeria was always greatly centralized, far too dependent on the capital Abuja and the Villa Potencia for funding and direction. It is a recipe for unaccountable power. Nigerian state and local governments were birthed malformed or simply never existed.

This is manifestly different than the American experience. Despite the long rewriting of American history, the main institutions of self-governance in 18th and 19th century agrarian America were not in Washington DC, or even the state capitals, but in the counties. Over time, with the movement from an agrarian to industrial society, distributed, that is, democratic political power flowed out of the counties to incorporated and increasingly unaccountable DC. In addition, last century's invention and adoption of various electric media furthered political centralization, creating a politics now more similar to present Nigeria than the politics of the old agrarian American republic. Reading Soyinka's work, one sees the US on many pages, the great difference being present Nigeria evolved from a lack of democratic political institutions and processes, while the US experiences the long decline of once strongly established, functioning, and vibrant democratic systems, now abandoned by the people themselves.

Soyinka's work is brilliant satire of our contemporary world, though doubtful it will be appreciated in the US. Americans incapacity to appreciate satire stems from their refusal to look honestly at power, thus we are incapable of effecting healthy, desperately needed change. Presented with any given reality contradicting any held belief, defaced beliefs endlessly propagated in the interests of established power, Americans retort the presenter is being cynical or negative. Americans strongly believe they live in the best of all possible worlds, which gets to the great flaw of Soyinka's work, the land of the happiest people on earth isn't Nigeria, it's the United States.

*”Shuffering and Shmiling”, Fela Anikulapo Kuti – Soyinka's cousin