By Tunji Ajibade

Expressing candid opinion is not something serving public servants often engage in. That’s not Dr Iyorwuese Hagher, Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Canada, in his latest book, Nigeria: After the Nightmare. And as the author stated in his introduction, “this book attempts to look at the lost years of Nigeria’s waste and wanton squandermania of its national wealth.” But he started out like a story writer: ‘Wazobia is thirty five years old when he died. He had been very ill for a whole year. Most of that year, he could still afford to visit the hospital. He would spend several hours waiting to see a doctor or nurse at the outpatient departments of our hospital, along with other “living dead.” That was in his Prologue: Snapshots.

This academician, politician, administrator and diplomat then went on to establish the basis for the title of his book. With the book’s three parts that have The Brink Scenario, Nightmare Scenario, and Revival Scenario, the author noted that one of Nigeria’s nightmares is the wrong perception other nations have about it.

He would observe that international affairs is often dictated by perception rather than reality, and it is not just Nigeria that has suffered from this. Wrong notion that Iraq had nuclear bombs led to an invasion, the full impact of which is yet to be ascertained. What worked against that nation has worked against Nigeria, too.

This nation, the author insisted however, does not deserve it. It is also undeserving of the status of a ‘state to watch’ on United States of America’s terror list, a tag the nation came by in December 2009 following the attempted effort by Nigeria’s Umar Abdumutallab to bomb an airplane out of US skies. But the event as well as the stigmatization that followed, the author posited, is an outcome of a conglomeration of other problems.

The author would note that part of Nigeria’s nightmare is in the fact that it is not what a Nigerian thinks he is that counts, but what the outside world perceives him to be. While a Nigerian sees himself as a fun loving, enigmatic, political and religious being, the international community sees him as an over-confident, black African, loud-mouthed and a sweet talker who descends from a geneatic pool of scammers. In a situation where a former US Secretary of States, Collin Powel, and Oprah Winfrey, could hold this much view, the author worried that Nigeria’s image problem abroad is a nightmare indeed. Then he went further to explore how the damage was done.

Nigeria, under Western eyes, is seen mostly from books, the media and in films. New York bestsellers such as the non-fiction work, the Ice Man; CNN’s How To Rob A Bank; the films, 419: The Nigerian Scam; as well as District 9 and The Coming Anarchy by Robert Kaplan are the opium of the Western middle class, its bureaucratic elites and its public service. They are the channels from which they perceive a nation such as Nigeria and this reflects in their diplomatic dispatches. Some of these materials in books, the media and films hit at West Africa most, of all the regions of the African continent and they especially single out Nigeria for bludgeoning. Much damage, Hagher noted, were done in this way than any other. But it is not just Nigeria that Hagher looked at in his analysis here. He also brought subjects and events from around the world together to show how much injustice is done to the nation in seriesof attempts by Western writers, journalists and filmmakers to deliberately portray Nigeria in the extremes.

While treating issues that constitute nightmares for Nigeria, the author traced some of the problems to their roots. He selected and treated issues that, internally, contributed to the situation in which the nation found herself. When the author mentioned corruption in official circles, for instance, he noted how foreign companies in the course of transacting business have encouraged it over the years. Then there was his observation of what he called the ascending capabilities of generations of leaders in Nigeria to encourage corruption, a thing that led to the coinage of the name, lootocrats.

Writing at length, and as a contemporary of some of the events he described, Hagher noted of Nigeria’s troublesome paths to underdevelopment thus: “Since the 1950s corruption and poverty found very fertile ground in Nigeria. Paradoxically, every Nigerian leader claimed to be fighting corruption, yet Nigeria seemed to be under developing.”