The Igbo have a rather pithy saying about fortuitous revelations. It is good, they say, that the wind blows now and then, or so that men too would know that the chicken has an anus. The chicken indeed does have an anus, and there is evidence of this in the Enugu Government House where an impeachment saga has opened up some funny chicken business.

I was on my way to Kigali in 1994, to report the brewing troubles in Rwanda, when the Ebola fever epidemic broke out in Zaire. Travelers were quarantined in the Kinshasha International Airport. All connecting flights to Kigali were cancelled. I contemplated the possibility of an Air Afrique flight to Arusha, in Tanzania, and from thence by car to Kigali.

Fifty of Africa’s Heads of states and governments arrived Washington DC, the US capital last week for a conference with the American president, Mr. Barack Obama. But the universe was indifferent – well not quite – it had a rather morbid sense of humor: Ebola was in the ai

Imagine this scenario: Boko Haram grows more sophisticated; more daring, recruits wider, establishes better training facilities, acquires deadlier arms and more potent military capacity, enough to subdue and carve out a wide swath of Nigeria from the Chad basin, to the Adamawa hills. It secures swaths of land from parts of Chad, parts of Cameroon, and parts of the Central African Republic, and it creates an effective new country in the very heart of Central West Africa. This scenario is not too far-fetched, and ought to worry Nigeria’s security analysts, because it seems to me that we have a new scale of a vast and unthinkable problem shaping from this insurgency.

I doubt very much that a majority of Nigerians are tuned in to the goings on at the National Conference. A lot of Nigerians still regard it with some distrust. For one, it was constituted without the consent or input of the voting public; the citizens of Nigeria.

As I write this, Hurricane Arthur lashes against the Cape Hateras, in the Outerbanks of North Carolina’s Atlantic Coast, where I’ve been vacationing with my family in the summer cottage of our friends, the Kladakis.
We are in the true eye of the hurricane. It is 2 am; the wind has gained strength, all is dark and silent; calm even; but for the eerie roar of the sea outside.

Democracy is a system of social organization in which profoundly conflicting interests clash, and are resolved in a ballot in which the highest number take precedence. But that’s not all of it: it is also a habit of the mind willing to accept the sacred results of the ballot. The ballot in a democracy is the Holy Grail; sacred because it is the expression of the highest will of the most important factor in the social contract: the governed.

Last weekend, I drove from Orlando to Jacksonville, with my son, Kiran Amaechina, my cousin Chika, and his friend, Dozie Aguwa, to watch the Nigerian National team, the Eagles, play the US National Soccer team, in the final prep matches before the World Cup finals in Brazil. My son loves football – soccer they call it here – and plays as an attacking midfielder for a U-12 youth team, the “Spartans,” here in Orlando. So, I’m something of a “soccer dad.” I drive him around for his after-school practices and his many games and tournaments. And I love it.

Nigeria’s Afro-Jazz legend, Fela Kuti wrote a song in 1975, which he titled, “Expensive Shit.” It was a lyrical satire, an account of one of his numerous run-ins with the powers of the Nigerian state, which forced him once, as a means of collecting evidence on him to, not expectorate, but dislodge fecal matter. It was from suspicion that he had destroyed evidence by chewing and swallowing down marijuana.

The Igbo are conducting what I call the inward gaze. I went to Chicago, therefore to articulate the following positions: that the Igbo must come to terms with their historical role and task as builders of a modern polynational state. In this task, they are in partnership with other nationalists for whom the Nigerian state built on justice, equity, and freedom is a historical imperative.

It is very true that Nigeria’s elite – its political, business and intellectual leadership – has much to answer for its regard of its historical role in shaping a better Nigeria for posterity. Part of the crisis of Nigeria is elite incoherence where it matters.

As I write this, I have right here before me, the full text of the speech made to Nigerians by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, on Republic Day, October 1, 1963, titled, “Bravely Struggling Against Odds.”

Americans themselves rose up and backed their president across party line. They closed ranks in the national interest. Nobody blamed the president for a National Security slip that allowed terrorists to acquire a plane; operate under the radar of a vast and sophisticated American Surveillance capacity, and haul a deadly flying missile each on the World Trade Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington DC, two powerful symbols of American power and invulnerability.

Valentine Soroibe Agim was mostly known as Bob Miga. For those like me who grew up in Nigeria in the 1970s and early ‘80s, Bob Miga was a classic act; a superstar, and one among a wave of music celebrities whose sounds touched a core in our lives in a powerful and memorable way. It was particularly so for those in the East of Nigeria who came out of the civil war utterly devastated by war. Music saved our lives. It was young men – many just barely out of high school – who consoled us with the pulse of the most invigorating sounds ever created in the continent of Africa – with their unique, modern Afro-rock idioms. These young men took Nigeria by storm. They played music to fob-off anger and despondence. They played music to live.

A specter hangs above Nigeria. It is the specter of war and violence. The election year 2015 draws very close, and closer still rises this spectre that will mark the coming year as Nigeria’s second annus horriblis. Since the election of the current President, Nigeria has been inundated by serial acts of extreme violence and subversion, coming mostly from the North.