Is Nigeria truly a failing state? By Dan Amor

A two hundred and thirty-six page book written by Dr. Amanze Obi, literary scholar, critic and journal­ist, who until recently was chairman of the Editorial Board of the Sun Group of Newspapers and published in 2013, is an engrossing tapestry of the Nigerian condition. Drawing affla­tus from history, politics, philosophy, culture and every day experience, ‘Del­icate Distress: An Inter­preter’s Account of the Ni­gerian Dilemma’, navigates the beleaguered contours of a nation, interrogates her chequered post colo­nial heritage and protean existential predicaments defined by recrudescent, fratricidal debacles, mili­tary misadventure, insti­tutionalized corruption and prostrate economies as well as a loud poverty, disease, willful inexplica­ble deaths, amnesia, and gleeful self negation.
As a renowned editorialist and distinguished news­paper columnist, Obi, in this book, harmonizes a robust stalking style with a penetrating apocalyptic deconstruction of Nigeria as a failing state.
It is written with a fresh, pulsating, stark and chill­ingly unsentimental prose style.
Divided into five un­equal parts, ‘Delicate Dis­tress’ is truly a delicate intermeshing of the con­gealed monumental trag­edies and other emerging contemporary realities in the Nigerian histori­cal continuum which have conspired to drive the country to the precincts of a yawning precipice. In refracting these prismatic realities, the essayist gen­erously benefits from var­iegated trajectories that have yielded a heaving in­tellectual harvest. Obi im­pressively combines lyrical lightsomeness and rhyth­mic richness with abiding patriotism and perspicac­ity of cultural thought and insight. The result is a bold and visceral gnawing at a nation’s soul and psychol­ogy and the rankling of the weeping sores of a mortally wounded nation at odds with itself. Amanze Obi’s reservoir of literary re­sources and reportorial ex­perience has interlaced all the essays in this collection.
Part One: Tales Unpleas­ant, which begins with a critical introduction, dis­tills the hydra-headed Ni­gerian society with such precarious equilibrium that facilitates the paradox of happiness in a shrink­ing federalism. It circulates the anti-intellectual politics that heralds the perils of disunity and the challenge of constitution-making in a country in which inequity has been elevated to state policy. Part two: North-South Divide, appraises an elusive rapprochement that has failed to balance the re­gional agenda between East and North but rather aggra­vates regional war even at the Confab. In gloating and fretting over oil, Northern leaders who misruled Nige­ria for 39 years out of her 53 years of post independence experience have succeeded in creating a dangerous class of youth in the North who agitate amidst excruci­ating poverty.
While remaining divided by the advocacy for state police, Northern governors and their Southern coun­terparts are still swimming in the illusion of politics of number.
Part Three: Agitation, Militancy and Terrorism, investigates the seed of agi­tation and the corruption of the legacy of Ken Saro-Wi­wa on the Niger Delta ques­tion. From a summit for the Niger Delta, the advent of NDDC, the rise of separa­tists and the emergence of Boko Hram, a barren na­tion still fiddles in the face of terror. But hypocrisy still parades in stark nakedness as terrorism when Christi­anity is under attack. It also spotlights America and the politics of terrorism.
Part Four: The Absurd and the Ridiculous, re­ports the once ridiculously absurd life presidency or Third Term project of the Obasanjo days. It begins with kite-flying to test the waters, the substantive phase when money did the bidding and the roles or reactions of the geo-polit­ical zones in/to the whole charade. And finally, Part Five: Overcoming the Di­lemma, ingeniously recre­ates the search for consen­sus amidst the controversy of the 2007 elections. This part examines an umpire’s force of conviction as the court pleases even as it does not yet please, giving a red eye for the judiciary when the safety valve or sole ar­biter of the common man becomes agent of tenure elongation.
The part also publishes the Igbo question and cri­sis of reintegration into the failing Nigeria project. Beaming its searchlight on the jostle for the Presiden­cy, the dilemma of a flee­ing race, the part concludes with an overview beyond the cleavages. The book ends in an optimistic note: that despite the paroxysms of crises, a lean and blight­ed future, there is still hope for Nigeria. Despite the fact that Nigeria is seen as an estate, an exclusive preserve of the elect who have per­fidiously appropriated it for themselves courtesy of the military and their collabo­rators in agbada and the instrumentality of belching and roaring guns and ballot robbery, the rest of us can go to the gallows if we feel agitated and unhappy.
One huge lesson from ‘Delicate Distress’ is that we should not delude ourselves in this well orchestrated and celebrated season of paradoxes and confusion. The real casualties are the rest of us whose souls have been gouged out of us like splintered snail shells. The real victims are the major­ity who do not have any means of survival and their future is their shameful present. The real casualties in this unconscionable tis­sue of confusion are and will remain those whose resources have been misap­propriated by the powerful rich while they have been alienated and left in the murky waters of poverty, want, oppression, repres­sion, disease and death.
It pains that the fate of this nation is still in the clutches and vice stran­glehold of those who have tied us in these adaman­tine chains, driven us to this cheerless lurch and tied us in this cumbersome yoke on our delicate neck thereby subjecting us to a state of permanent distress. The book which was pre­sented on August 27, 2013 in Abuja, makes a compel­ling read. Go for it, grab it, savour it, and keep a copy in your family library for generations yet unborn. It is a collector’s item.

“The exchange rate that people talk about is the parallel market rate. Anybody who says it is ir­relevant is not discussing Nige­ria as an economy. The official one is like the time when you had the price control regime. The official exchange rate is redundant. It is just for rent and for arbitrary allocations.”

– Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, former CBN governor