CHUMA NWOKOLO
IF it is a true account, if it is any good at all, the autobiography of a public person must embarrass some people, including the author himself. Perhaps that is why Mark Twain left instructions that his autobiography should be published 100 years after his death. By the time it was eventually published in 2010, all those who could have been wounded by his words had already died by other means. Unfortunately, autobiographies that are a century old go straight to the shelves of history. The societies they were addressed to are dead and they have no role in the intellectual or social life of the world it chronicles. Honest autobiographies which also have the ambition of documenting public and private lives and policies must rise above the fears of Mark Twain and publish and be damned, in the writer’s lifetime. This is the only way to contribute to public reflection and intellection.
Our public persons in the evening of their lives owe us a duty of self-reflection and documentation. In his sixtieth year, Chief Clement Tudonemem Ofuani has addressed this duty, publishing an autobiography which, although 616 pages long is remarkably readable. Titled From My Corner, it contains a level of detail that lends authenticity without becoming tedious. Its nineteen chapters take us from his birth in his hometown in Ubulu-Okiti through secondary and university education in Enugu and a professional career in Accounting, Banking and Insurance in Lagos and Abuja. It spans a political career in the state government in Asaba and the federal government in Abuja. From rural diplomacy in the wards of Delta State, it moves to economic activism from Southern Africa to the far East. In these pages, he has taken on Nollywood, Executive Producing a film adaptation of Festus Iyayi’s novel, Violence, whose screenplay was written by his wife, Rosemary. Readers who have lived contemporary lives with him will recognise in this book the streets, the crises, and the dramatis personae and the circumstances of their times.
In this book, the author shows his natal identification with rural poverty, a poverty brought into his family by the Nigerian Civil War. It is a story that transforms the traumas of childhood into rigorous values, creating guide rails for the author’s trajectory through career and politics. For instance, we read of the author’s brilliant elder brothers having to repeat primary six five times before their father could raise the funds for one of them to go to Teacher Training College. From this story, and his own repetition despite excellence in exams, we can trace the inspiration for the author’s reconstruction of his primary school alma mater, and the Institutional Strengthening initiative of the Ministry of Economic Planning that under him, enabled the Commissioner for Education to reform school services.
One of the stumbling blocks of our politics are political leaders who are born of privilege and for whom the rural poor are a breed apart, an alien people. The first quarter of this book established the author’s roots as a card-carrying member of rural Nigeria. With that comes an unwitting exploration of that invisible feature of old Nigeria, a feature that is melting gradually away in the sun of modernity, and that is our extended family system.
In his lecture, An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe, touted the African Extended family as a concept that could be a transformational export to the rest of the world. In this autobiography, the author showcases the power of the Extended Family. In those pages, we follow the author as a young student as he goes from village to town to city, turning up sometimes without notice and enjoying the generous protection and hospitality of near and distant relatives. It speaks of a time of innocence and hope even. Sometimes, the relationship is as distant as ‘a prominent gentleman from my hometown’ on whose doorstep he appears as a Youth Corp member in Kaduna, but even that was enough to secure the author a welcome into the home of the family for days on end.
Yet, such a culture requires work, and the book narrates the efforts of the nineteen-year-old author and his brothers and cousin at healing a rift between their father and their uncle in order to maintain the health of that extended family. Such a culture requires giving back, and the book records the adoption of the author’s nephew, on the untimely death of his brother, Anslem, from the age of three until his graduation ceremony in the author’s alma mater, the University of Nigeria.
What is even more instructive was how this concept of the extended family could morph to include people from other ethnic nations within Nigeria – and that even as ethnic reprisals were raging in Wukari as he travelled to Yola for his youth service in 1985, or escaped the Reihard Bonke Riots in Kano in 1991. The author records the kindnesses of strangers from the West, East and North alike as he made his way through life. Illustrations of this kindness is rife in the book, and includes an anecdote of a perfect stranger from Akwa Ibom opening his house to the author as a young accountant stranded in Port Harcourt in the ‘80s. These are important extensions of the concept of the Extended Family, which prevent it from becoming another name for nepotism and tribalism.
These stories are important because they construct for us, not just the autobiography of Clement Ofuani. By building a collage of empathetic stories, a larger biography of our country and our people emerges. Statesmen and politicians who embrace this concept of the extended family are able to coopt ALL their constituents into an ‘Umunna’ (or kindred) as large as the territory they govern. They are able to ‘adopt’ street children and almajiris into the extended family of the statehouse, rather than treating them as mere subjects and recipients of occasional charity. This perception is the birthplace of human-facing policies.
The author chronicles an important phase in the political, judicial and media Resource Control battle in Nigeria between the federal and state governments, and the political horse-trading that resulted in the 13% derivation principle implementation. The author’s role in this outcome is laid out, as well as the results, the ramping up of Delta State’s budget from N6bn to N58 billion within 24 months, with similar escalations across the oil producing states of Nigeria. His advocacy underlines one of the constitutional puzzles that few Nigerians can understand: how solid minerals are treated so differently from the liquid and gaseous minerals. That puzzle approached conspiracy levels worthy of a nail-biting Cyprian Ekwensi novel when we consider how S. 134(6) of the 1960 Constitution (which guaranteed to regions royalties from mineral oil accruing from their continental shelf) disappeared in the 1999 iteration of the constitution, along with practically all Akwa Ibom’s offshore oil wells.
Chief Ofuani’s book presents an insider’s viewpoint of the intimate workings not only in the Delta State PDP political machine and State Government, but also in the Aso Rock nerve centre of the Federal government. As an SA to the Commissioner for Finance in the first Ibori Government, and a Commissioner for Economic Planning in the second, the author also served in the subsequent governments of Uduaghan as Economic Adviser and Okowa, eventually, as Director General of the Capital Territory Development Agency. He also served as Senior Presidential Special Assistant to two presidents, thereby acquiring almost two unbroken decades of policy and political insight. From My Corner is therefore a useful resource book for political and policy researchers interested in that season and locale of Nigeriana from the perspective of an astute and involved observer.
In reviewing autobiographies, the reviewer has to caution himself about the hero bias that emerges from the narrative. This is the bias that is revealed by the framing of the author of the hero of every set piece he relates. In Nnamdi Azikiwe’s My Odyssey, the former Nigerian president writes about his embarrassment upon first arriving in America as a student, when he finds a man on his knees in the garden of Azikiwe’s professor. Mistaking him for a gardener, Azikiwe offers him the disrespect that the typical Nigerian has for that humble station, only to return to eat humble pie when he realised that the gardner was none other than the professor himself. From My Corner records similar moments of authorial embarrassments. Two stand out.
The first was on page 120. Writing about his marketing prowess during his stint in Devcom Merchant Bank, he says:
‘On one occasion, I visited a client, PZ Industries Plc and after my interactions with the Accountant in which I had mentioned that their account with us had gone dormant, he informed me that that account should have been closed and indeed by the next day we received a letter from them instructing us to close the account! On the marketing front for deposits, I was clearly very unsuccessful.’
The second has more profound implications for nation, and is related on page 488, with reverberations of Ayisha Osori’s political memoir, Love Does Not Win Elections. Writing about the end of his ill-fated gubernatorial campaign, he says:
‘I had not slept a wink in more than 36 hours. As it turned out, all of these were make-believe as the leadership of the party later convened a meeting with all the aspirants to agree on the sharing formula for the ad hoc delegates. …. Based on this configuration, I got 6 slots in my LGA out of 33 ad hoc delegate slots. At this point I realised that my campaign was all but over as there was no reasonable pathway for me to win the ticket.‘
All in all, From My Corner is a welcome addition to the genre of Autobiographies authored by Politically Exposed Persons.
In such volumes, the elephant in the room is usually the corruption and abuse of office that goes with it. The author approaches this subject with a mixture of candour and reticence. Young, and mid-career persons in similar quandaries will take inspiration from his readiness to walk away from his job, when his red lines are crossed, as he did when he walked away from a UBA job offer into a home where both husband and wife were unemployed. At the same time he details his personal involvement in the rambunctious politicking of the era and is honest about his professional dilemmas. As he relates in page 121,
‘My job remained really frustrating and the financial engineering I was compelled to carry out to avoid regulatory sanctions tasked my moral being even more than at CPMB but I lacked the courage to resign. I was the economic pillar in my extended family and on top of that, I now had a young family of my own to fend for. Resigning from my job would put everyone in greater difficulty and I felt that I would earn little sympathy from society explaining that I resigned because of my scruple about our financial reporting.’
He deconstructs the architecture of civil service corruption, the arbitrage hustles in banks, and the sharp practice in audit firms. Chapter seven reads like a primer on how to use negotiation principles to bring change to established civil service structures with a win-win template. It showed how simply by ironing out inefficiencies, greater development could arrive at the grassroots.
In my view, although billed as an autobiography, much of the book is best viewed as a technocratic biography of an interesting phase in the political life of state and country, replete with high drama, intrigue, impunity, kidnapping for ransom, as well as high treason.
It documents the author’s role in such Delta State’s budgeting initiatives as the Capital Spending Envelopes (P. 167) and the advocacy that resulted in the appropriation of some of the Telecoms Licence Auction of $570million to the states, leading to a net income of N600million to Delta State.
In Chapter 15, the author indulges a brief precolonial and colonial history of Nigeria by way of a foundation for elaborating the crisis in the oil-producing Niger Delta. He also details his role in the Yar’Adua government’s Amnesty programme for Niger Delta militants.
More fascinating is his insider’s insight into the intrigues that surrounded Vice President Goodluck Jonathan’s succession to the presidency, following the death of President Yar-Adua, which brought Nigeria to a constitutional crisis that engaged the country for weeks. He writes at Page 441:
‘In line with President Yar’Adua’s determination to comply with the laws, he caused a letter to be written to the National Assembly notifying them of his absence and transferring presidential powers to the Vice President as Acting President. I saw the letter after he had signed it. PSP passed it to the Special Adviser to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Mohammad Abba Aji for transmission to the National Assembly. President Yar’Adua travelled to Saudi Arabia thereafter but we later found out that the letter was not transmitted to the National Assembly for reasons that we could only speculate on.
‘Fortunately, President Yar’Adua’s health condition improved and he returned to office after 11 days. The people who made the decision not to transmit the letter as required by the Constitution probably felt justified on his return, that power did not slip from their hands for even a second.
‘However, on November 23, 2009, President Yar’Adua’s health deteriorated seriously again requiring emergency evacuation to Saudi Arabia. Here was now the quandary. It was widely believed that President Yar’Adua was incapable of writing any letter to the National Assembly at the point of his hurried evacuation to Saudi Arabia but that may have been far from the truth. In reality, the real crux of the matter was the apparent concern of the ‘cabal’ that by transmitting a letter during the second medical trip, it could be signaling to the nation that President Yar’Adua’s health status this time was something far more serious. Thus, no letter was transmitted and Vice President Jonathan could not assume the executive powers of the President as Acting President.’
From Chapter seven, the author sets out in greater detail, the academic and intellectual basis of his political thought. In earlier chapters he had documented his inspirational encounters with Dr. Akanu Ibiam, who in the author’s words, had ‘a strong reputation for honesty that was a rarity for a politician anywhere and even moreso in our country’. He writes of a brief meeting with MKO Abiola. (who warns him wittily not to be in a hurry to become the next Chief Abiola) Now, he elaborates on his relationship with Thatcherism and his attraction to American politics, especially in the Bill Clinton era.
On page 135, he says:
‘From the works I had been reading, I had begun to lean towards conservative thinking in terms of economic ideology which put me at odds with the socialist leanings of the NCP, however, deep down, I also felt that while promoting more efficient use of public resources, unfettered capitalism created deep social problems of increasing economic inequality, abject poverty and economic and political inequity that accentuated insecurity. Therefore, I thought that political leadership should seek a balance between the efficiency gains to the free market and the moderating controls of government to achieve social equity.’
Yet, towards the end of the book, the author confronts the final bus stop of the capitalist train, the bus stop of State Capture, whether in South Africa, The United States or Nigeria. By page 418, he is a veteran of state politics with an office in Aso Rock and he from that perspective, he writes:
‘with the appointment of Dr. Rilwan Lukman as the Petroleum Minister, he got his former Special Technical Assistant, Alhaji Ibikule to be appointed as the Executive Secretary of PPPRA. From that point PPRA which was supposed to be a regulator of NNPC’s downstream petroleum activities became an adjunct of NNPC and lost its voice. This move also established precedence for regulator capture in the Petroleum industry which subsequent administrations appeared only too pleased to retain.’
Clearly from this perspective, From My Corner can at best be considered the first salvo of a public intellectual who, at sixty, is just beginning another career.
