In a press statement issued he personally signed, the president prayed that the Almighty would grant them the fortitude to bear the loss.

The statement reads:

“With a deep sense of grief, I condole with Ms Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her husband, Dr Ivara Esege, and the entire family on the passing of their son, Nkanu Nnamdi.

“As a parent myself who has suffered the loss of a loved one, no grief is as devastating as losing a child.

“I empathise with the family at this difficult time, and I mourn this sad loss with them.

“Ms Adichie is a literary icon who has brought joy and light to many homes globally, and I pray she and her family find strength in the Almighty in this trying hour.

“My prayers are with the family.”

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In her keynote address during the virtual launch of the book by the writers, PYO Collective, she explained that the Vice President brought a different kind of leadership which had inspired millions of young Nigerians.

She spoke about his people-focused policies from his time as an Attorney General in Lagos State.

She also noted that the Vice President always spoke the truth irrespective of the circumstances, making allusion to his speech at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies post-2023 election.

“The essays in this book, they come from a diverse range of writers and they’re all very different in style, but they all have a kind of organic enthusiasm to them. You read them with the sense of reading pieces written by people who actually wanted to write them. And so it feels to me that this book is a labour of love and the fact that it is a labour of love says something about the subject, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. It speaks to a humane and human quality that he has the ability to bring diverse people together,” she said.

Recalling a conversation with her later mother, the Half a Yellow Sun writer said, “I remember once we were watching television and Prof was speaking and my mother said in that very firm tone of hers, “Now, this one is a gentleman”. And there was of course an undercurrent to her words, and there was something rather loudly left unsaid, which was, the others are not gentlemen. One of the writers in this book, Oreoluwa Ogunbiyi puts it rather beautifully when she said she was struck by Prof’s careful attentiveness. Reading that I thought this would be a wonderful definition of a person who is a gentleman. The person who has the quality of careful attentiveness. This brings me to a recurring idea in this book, which is that Prof. Yemi Osinbajo is different, unlike the others, unexpected.”

In a labyrinth but curiously fascinating fashion, Chimamanda repeatedly harped on Prof. Osinbajo’s humane and human qualities.

She chronicled his speech at the APC presidential primaries and his leadership qualities especially when he acted as President.

“I remember watching Prof’s magnificent speech at the APC primaries, and I was particularly struck by these words from him, “You cannot wish this country well and vote for someone you do not believe in.” After listening to that speech, I was certain that Prof would win but it seemed to me, to use an American colloquialism, a no-brainer. But by some magically mysterious or perhaps mysteriously magical process, he did not win. So I remember sending Prof a message saying that I had hoped he would win, but also telling him how conflicted I would have been because he is the only other person I could have supported in this election and this support will have been based on his humane and human qualities but also the fact that he has demonstrated leadership and particularly so I think when as Acting President, he took a principled action telling us Nigerians that one cannot desecrate the sanctity of the National Assembly,” she said, referring to the immediate dismissal of Lawal Daura, the former DSS DG.

Speaking about the Vice President as a teacher, she noted, “I must say that I’m surprised that this book does not have someone who wrote of Prof as a teacher. I think it is in fact one of the fundamental traits that he has, is that he is a good teacher. I think the greatest gift a teacher can have is the eternal gratitude of his or her students and Prof. has that. I remember once watching a very wide range of Prof’s students talking about him as a teacher, how patient he was, how he really wanted them to understand the concepts, and also how he wasn’t burdened by that quality of ego which sadly I think afflicts many academics in Nigeria. I must say that hearing Prof’s students talk about him warmth my heart particularly because it reminded me of my own father who was a dedicated professor and taught for more than 40 years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. And so today we celebrate a man who is different. A man who is Vice President, lawyer, and teacher.”

She urged readers to get a copy of the book and hoped that more literature will be written on Prof. Osinbajo. “This is a book I hope many people read and I also hope that someday somebody will write a proper biography on Prof. sometime in the future and say that Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Vice President, teacher, lawyer, and a good man.”

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Something remarkable happened on the morning of February 25, the day of the Nigerian presidential election. Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust. Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigerians have had little confidence in elections. To vote in a presidential election was to brace yourself for the inevitable aftermath: fraud.

Elections would be rigged because elections were always rigged; the question was how badly. Sometimes voting felt like an inconsequential gesture as predetermined “winners” were announced.

A law passed last year, the 2022 Electoral Act, changed everything. It gave legal backing to the electronic accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results, in a process determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The chair of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, assured Nigerians that votes would be counted in the presence of voters and recorded in a result sheet, and that a photo of the signed sheet would immediately be uploaded to a secure server. When rumors circulated about the commission not keeping its word, Yakubu firmly rebutted them. In a speech at Chatham House in London (a favorite influence-burnishing haunt of Nigerian politicians), he reiterated that the public would be able to view “polling-unit results as soon as they are finalized on election day.”

Nigerians applauded him. If results were uploaded right after voting was concluded, then the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which has been in power since 2015, would have no opportunity for manipulation. Technology would redeem Nigerian democracy. Results would no longer feature more votes than voters. Nigerians would no longer have their leaders chosen for them. Elections would, finally, capture the true voice of the people. And so trust and hope were born.

By the evening of February 25, 2023, that trust had dissipated. Election workers had arrived hours late, or without basic election materials. There were reports of violence, of a shooting at a polling unit, and of political operatives stealing or destroying ballot boxes. Some law-enforcement officers seemed to have colluded in voter intimidation; in Lagos, a policeman stood idly by as an APC spokesperson threatened members of a particular ethnic group who he believed would vote for the opposition.

Most egregious of all, the electoral commission reneged on its assurance to Nigerians. The presidential results were not uploaded in real time. Voters, understandably suspicious, reacted; videos from polling stations show voters shouting that results be uploaded right away. Many took cellphone photos of the result sheets. Curiously, many polling units were able to upload the results of the House and Senate elections, but not the presidential election. A relative who voted in Lagos told me, “We refused to leave the polling unit until the INEC staff uploaded the presidential result. The poor guy kept trying and kept getting an ‘error’ message. There was no network problem. I had internet on my phone. My bank app was working. The Senate and House results were easily uploaded. So why couldn’t the presidential results be uploaded on the same system?” Some electoral workers in polling units claimed that they could not upload results because they didn’t have a password, an excuse that voters understood to be subterfuge. By the end of the day, it had become obvious that something was terribly amiss.

No one was surprised when, by the morning of the 26th, social media became flooded with evidence of irregularities. Result sheets were now slowly being uploaded on the INEC portal, and could be viewed by the public. Voters compared their cellphone photos with the uploaded photos and saw alterations: numbers crossed out and rewritten; some originally written in black ink had been rewritten in blue, some blunderingly whited-out with Tipp-Ex. The election had been not only rigged, but done in such a shoddy, shabby manner that it insulted the intelligence of Nigerians.

Nigerian democracy had long been a two-party structure—power alternating between the APC and the Peoples Democratic Party—until this year, when the Labour Party, led by Peter Obi, became a third force. Obi was different; he seemed honest and accessible, and his vision of anti-corruption and self-sufficiency gave rise to a movement of supporters who called themselves “Obi-dients.” Unusually large, enthusiastic crowds turned up for his rallies. The APC considered him an upstart who could not win, because his small party lacked traditional structures. It is ironic that many images of altered result sheets showed votes overwhelmingly being transferred from the Labour Party to the APC.

As vote counting began at INEC, representatives of different political parties—except for the APC—protested. The results being counted, they said, did not reflect what they had documented at the polling units. There were too many discrepancies.

“There is no point progressing in error, Mr. Chairman. We are racing to nowhere,” one party spokesperson said to Yakubu. “Let us get it right before we proceed with the collation.” But the INEC chair, opaque-faced and lordly, refused. The counting continued swiftly until, at 4:10 a.m. on March 1, the ruling party’s candidate, Bola Tinubu, was announced as president-elect.

A subterranean silence reigned across the country. Few people celebrated. Many Nigerians were in shock. “Why,” my young cousin asked me, “did INEC not do what it said it would do?”

It seemed truly perplexing that, in the context of a closely contested election in a low-trust society, the electoral commission would ignore so many glaring red flags in its rush to announce a winner. (It had the power to pause vote counting, to investigate irregularities—as it would do in the governorship elections two weeks later.)

Rage is brewing, especially among young people. The discontent, the despair, the tension in the air have not been this palpable in years.

How surprising then to see the U.S. State Department congratulate Tinubu on March 1. “We understand that many Nigerians and some of the parties have expressed frustration about the manner in which the process was conducted and the shortcomings of technical elements that were used for the first time in a presidential election cycle,” the spokesperson said. And yet the process was described as a “competitive election” that “represents a new period for Nigerian politics and democracy.”

American intelligence surely cannot be so inept. A little homework and they would know what is manifestly obvious to me and so many others: The process was imperiled not by technical shortcomings but by deliberate manipulation.

An editorial in The Washington Post echoed the State Department in intent if not in affect. In an oddly infantilizing tone, as though intended to mollify the simpleminded, we are told that “officials have asserted that technical glitches, not sabotage, were the issue,” that “much good” came from the Nigerian elections, which are worth celebrating because, among other things, “no one has blocked highways, as happened in Brazil after Jair Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid.” We are also told that “it is encouraging, first, that the losing candidates are pursuing their claims through the courts,” though any casual observer of Nigerian politics would know that courts are the usual recourse after any election.

The editorial has the imaginative poverty so characteristic of international coverage of African issues—no reading of the country’s mood, no nuance or texture. But its intellectual laziness, unusual in such a rigorous newspaper, is astonishing. Since when does a respected paper unequivocally ascribe to benign malfunction something that may very well be malignant—just because government officials say so? There is a kind of cordial condescension in both the State Department’s and The Washington Post’s responses to the election. That the bar for what is acceptable has been so lowered can only be read as contempt.

I hope, President Biden, that you do not personally share this cordial condescension. You have spoken of the importance of a “global community for democracy,” and the need to stand up for “justice and the rule of law.” A global community for democracy cannot thrive in the face of apathy from its most powerful member. Why would the United States, which prioritizes the rule of law, endorse a president-elect who has emerged from an unlawful process?

Congratulating its outcome, President Biden, tarnishes America’s self-proclaimed commitment to democracy. Please do not give the sheen of legitimacy to an illegitimate process. The United States should be what it says it is.

Compromised is a ubiquitous word in Nigeria’s political landscape—it is used to mean “bribed” but also “corrupted,” more generally. “They have been compromised,” Nigerians will say, to explain so much that is wrong, from infrastructure failures to unpaid pensions. Many believe that the INEC chair has been “compromised,” but there is no evidence of the astronomical U.S.-dollar amounts he is rumored to have received from the president-elect. The extremely wealthy Tinubu is himself known to be an enthusiastic participant in the art of “compromising”; some Nigerians call him a “drug baron” because, in 1993, he forfeited to the United States government $460,000 of his income that a Chicago court determined to be proceeds from heroin trafficking. Tinubu has strongly denied all charges of corruption.

I hope it will not surprise you, President Biden, if I argue that the American response to the Nigerian election also bears the faint taint of that word, compromised, because it is so removed from the actual situation in Nigeria as to be disingenuous. Has the United States once again decided that what matters in Africa is not democracy but stability? (Perhaps you could tell British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who quickly congratulated Tinubu, that an illegitimate government in a country full of frustrated young people does not portend stability.) Or is it about that ever-effulgent nemesis China, as so much of U.S. foreign policy now invariably seems to be? The battle for influence in Africa will not be won by supporting the same undemocratic processes for which China is criticized.

This Nigerian election was supposed to be different, and the U.S. response cannot—must not—be business as usual. The Nigerian youth, long politically quiescent, have awoken. About 70 percent of Nigerians are under 30 and many voted for the first time in this election. Nigerian politicians exhibit a stupefying ability to tell barefaced lies, so to participate in political life has long required a suspension of conscience. But young people have had enough. They want transparency and truth; they want basic necessities, minimal corruption, competent political leaders, and an environment that can foster their generation’s potential.

This election is also about the continent. Nigeria is a symbolic crucible of Africa’s future, and a transparent election will rouse millions of other young Africans who are watching, and who long, too, for the substance and not the hollow form of democracy. If people have confidence in the democratic process, it engenders hope, and nothing is more essential to the human spirit than hope.

Today, election results are still being uploaded on the INEC server. Bizarrely, many contradict the results announced by INEC. The opposition parties are challenging the election in court. But there is reason to worry about whether they will get a fair ruling. INEC has not fully complied with court orders to release election materials. The credibility of the Nigerian Supreme Court has been strained by its recent judgments in political cases, or so-called judicial coronations, such as one in which the court declared the winner of the election for governor of Imo State a candidate who had come in fourth place.

Lawlessness has consequences. Every day Nigerians are coming out into the streets to protest the election. APC, uneasy about its soiled “victory,” is sounding shrill and desperate, as though still in campaign mode. It has accused the opposition party of treason, an unintelligent smear easily disproved but disquieting nonetheless, because false accusations are often used to justify malicious state actions.

I supported Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, and hoped he would win, as polls predicted, but I was prepared to accept any result, because we had been assured that technology would guard the sanctity of votes. The smoldering disillusionment felt by many Nigerians is not so much because their candidate did not win as because the election they had dared to trust was, in the end, so unacceptably and unforgivably flawed.

Congratulating its outcome, President Biden, tarnishes America’s self-proclaimed commitment to democracy. Please do not give the sheen of legitimacy to an illegitimate process. The United States should be what it says it is.

Sincerely,

Chimamanda Adichie.

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Adichie delivered the keynote address at the 62nd edition of the NBA Annual General Conference holding at the Eko Atlantic City in Lagos State.

The conference had the theme: “Bold Transition”.

Adichie made a distinction between the words – troublesome and disruptive.

According to her, both words are often used to describe negative emotions whereas they can also describe positivity.

“Traditionally, the word disruptive has often been used in a negative sense;  we have school teachers who reprimanded students for being disruptive in class.

“Traditional synonyms for the word disruptive could mean troublesome, disorderly, unsettling or trouble making; but today, the word disruptive has taken a more positive connotation especially concerning technology and access to information.

“Troublesome and innovative may seem opposed to one another but I will argue that they have their pride of place in the Nigerian Bar Association.

“Many people who have abused their powers in Nigeria will describe the NBA as troublesome: to me, this is worthy of praise,” she said.

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According to Adichie, it is common to refer to people who are pace setters, rights activists or social critics as troublesome owing to their stand or viewpoints on issues.

She said that troublesome could then be viewed as positive.

She urged pace setters not to relent in spite of challenges.

On the theme of the 2022 NBA AGC, she commended the planning committee.

She said that the theme touched on vital areas of  existence.

On the ongoing NBA football tournament, Adichie said that she noted that there was a disparity in the prize for winners in the male and female categories.

The NBA had pegged the  prize for the winner in the male category at N500,000 and the female, N200,000

Adichie said that the disparity did not reflect the theme of the conference: Bold Transition.

Thus, after her speech,  dignitaries at the event took turns to make voluntary donations for the female category.

The prize for the female category consequently rose from N200,000 to N3.2 million.

The event had in attendance past presidents of the NBA, senior advocates of Nigeria, and some presidential candidates for the 2022 NBA elections, among others.

Source: NAN

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The prize founder and director, Kate Mosse, disclosed this in a statement made available on Thursday in Abuja.

The novel, which originally won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2007, was set in Nigeria during the Biafran War and dwelt on the end of colonialism, class, race and female empowerment and how love can complicate all of these things.

Mosse said: “I am thrilled that Half of a Yellow Sun has won the silver Winner of Winners. Our aim has always been to promote and celebrate the classics of tomorrow today and to build a library of exceptional and outstanding international fiction written by women.

“The ‘Reading Women’ campaign has been the perfect way to introduce a new generation of readers to the brilliance of all of our twenty-five winners and to honour the phenomenal quality and range of women’s writing from all over the world,’’ she said.

Mosse added that the public chose Adichie over a stellar-line up including Zadie Smith, the late Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremainand and Maggie O’Farrell.

She added that that one-off award marked the culmination of the Prize’s year-long 25^th anniversary celebrations, forming a key part of Reading Women campaign which championed a quarter of a century of phenomenal winners.

Throughout 2020, thousands of readers embarked on a challenge to read all 25 previous winners of the Prize, joining the Prize’s digital book club to share their thoughts, and downloading newly created online reading guides and exclusive author interviews.

Over 8,500 people joined in the public vote in September.

Adichie gave thanks for the award, saying “I’m especially moved to be voted ‘Winner of Winners’ because this is the Prize that first brought a wide readership to my work – and has also introduced me to the work of many talented writers.”

Adichie will be presented with a specially-commissioned silver edition of the Prize’s annual statuette, known as the ‘Bessie’, which was originally created and donated by the artist Grizel Nivenas part of the gift of an anonymous donor.

She will talk further about her writing and being chosen for the ‘Winner of Winners’ award in an exclusive live online event hosted by Mosse and the Women’s Prize for Fiction on December 6.

Adichie’s work has been translated into 30 languages and appeared in numerous publications.

Her first novel Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2005, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Her non-fiction includes the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists, published in 2014, and her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, published in 2017.

A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Source: NAN

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