Nation of Dead Patriots

By Dr. Oliver Akamnonu

An imaginary African country Mungeruun gains its independence from the colonial authorities after a fairly protracted but bloodless struggle. An internal struggle for power between a few of its politicians is amicably sorted out in the interest of national cohesion. An army coup dtat that involved a lopsided assassination of principal officers and civilian leaders is followed by a countercoup with indiscriminate killing of officers and civilians alike. A devastating civil war in which the former colonial master plays less than an impartial role follows.

An unusual collaboration between the Eastern and Western world power blocks ensures the defeat of the rebellious section of the country. That section had declared that its military technology was light-years ahead of that of the other side, perhaps thereby, provoking cooperation against her by strange bedfellows. The acclaimed leader of the free world is apparently persuaded to play a mere observer role under the persuasion that the conflict is an internal affair of the concerned country.

The discovery of massive reserves of oil places the reunited country in an unprecedented economic advantage. But the new rich status of the country does not translate to a better life for the majority of the countrys peoples as monumental and unimaginable levels of corruption bedevils the framework of the once promising nation whose patriots of old had sacrificed so much to ensure its independence and progress.

What went wrong?

With the corruption of the young, even from the cradles, are there hopes for a return to the path of good and patriotic governance?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465324313

Dr. Oliver Akamnonu

Oliver Akamnonu is a physician and author of the award-winning poetry book "Rap to Mars" as well as the highly popular book "Arranged Marriage and the Vanishing Roots".An anesthesiologist by specialization he has published more than 15 other prominent books in the USA and these include: "Nation of Dead Patriots", "Bature", "The Pagans' Medals", "The Honorable", "Comedy of Naked Vampires", etc. A former school captain of his high school Government Secondary School Afikpo, former State Chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association, former member of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, member of the first Board of Federal Medical Center Owerri, decorated "Distinguished Medical Practitioner", Chairman Akamnonu Foundation for the Poor, Dr. Akamnonu is a dual citizen of the USA and Nigeria and is married to Dr. Chika Akamnonu and they have four children, Olisa, Chibu, Somto and Chuka. He lives in in Massachusetts USA.

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Copyright © 2009 by Dr. Oliver Akamnonu.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are

the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

THE NATION, THE PEOPLE, AND THEIR PAINS

MUNGERUUN AT BIRTH AND MATURITY

ELECTIONS AND SELECTIONS

THE MUNGERUUN OF YESTERDAY, HIS LIFESTYLE AND HIS DREAMS

THE POLITY, THE POLITICS, AND THE PEOPLE

ROADS LADEN WITH THORNS

COLLAPSE OF THE SCHOOL SYSTEM

WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS?

THE PUBLIC MASTER IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE

ENJOY THE PAPACY AND VACATE THE SEAT NO MORE

IN THE KINGDOM OF THE GODFATHER

THE MAKING OF THE CRIMINAL

CRY, THE BELOVED MUNGERUUN

THE PUBLIC SERVANT AS THE OVERLORD

THE PORTS: THE NATION’S MIRROR

THE MUNGERUUN YOUTH: THE QUEST FOR GREENER PASTURES

VILLAINS ALONGSIDE THE MARTYRS: NEVER AGAIN

LAND MADNESS AND LANDOWNERS

QUEST FOR UNDESERVED HONOR

CULTURE OF SQUALOR AND CORRUPTION IN GOVERNANCE AND SERVICE

THE MUNGERUUN, HIS CONGRESSMAN, AND HIS GOVERNMENT

A SECOND COLONIZATION: THE FOUNDATIONS ARE LAID

THE MUNGERUUNS ABROAD

MUNGERUUN’S LEADERSHIP: VILLAINS OR SAINTS?

THE MUNGERUUN YOUTH: WHAT FUTURE, WHAT PROSPECTS

TURNING GARBAGE TO GOLD

THE FORGOTTEN MUNGERUUN: THE SCUM OF THE EARTH

THE DISCERNING MUNGERUUN AND HIS PRAYER

MUNGERUUN AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

THE SADDLE OF LEADERSHIP: THE GREAT EXPECTATIONS

QUITTING IS NOT THE ANSWER

EPILOGUE

—even when my safety is not assured—

DEDICATION

To Soyinka, Achebe, Gani, Agbakoba, Balarabe, Falana, and to all men and women everywhere who have at one time or the other stood up for truth, for justice, for fair play, and for good governance.

And to any and all who have suffered or worked for the elimination of corruption and the institution of transparency in public life in our world.

PROLOGUE

Planet Earth is created to suit man and other animals.

It is created large enough to accommodate all men.

Scarcity on earth is largely the product of man’s greed.

The gathering tendency of man can never be wished away.

It must be forced away if it cannot be wished away.

Some men, like some ants, will gather and will never be satisfied.

THE NATION, THE PEOPLE, AND THEIR PAINS

She is so richly blessed with all forms of agricultural, human, and mineral resources. It would seem as if a greater part of the world’s natural resources was deliberately concentrated in that part of the continent. From the mangrove swamps in the Deep South to the semiarid borders in the Far North, the country is so laden with minerals, liquid, and solid that a visiting foreign president had once told the nation’s president in response to the latter’s request for aid and debt forgiveness that [your country] has no business with poverty. So much is the recognition by the rest of the world of the enormous wealth and potentials of that vast nation. She is very rich, but the majority of her people are very poor.

A visit to Kumbruuja, the nation’s capital, would tend to belie any statement that the average citizen of Mungeruun lives in abject poverty. For Kumbruuja to attain the status of one of the fastest growing capitals in the world, the wealth of the nation, even if it is concentrated in the hands of few politicians and retired military generals and their families and friends, must be truly enormous. Sitting foreign presidents hardly make unauthenticated statements in public. A statement by this sitting foreign president that Mungeruun has no business with poverty could not have been a vain one. It must have been well researched.

But most of the people of Mungeruun live in poverty. The roads are a disaster. Majority of the people have no potable water. The few rich ones drill deep into the soil for drinking water and in search of water for other domestic and industrial purposes. Electricity is a luxury. Sometimes people in many urban areas go for weeks and months without power supply. And at the end of each month, officials of the state-controlled power company visit homes and offices with bills for power that they had not supplied. Occasionally they put one or two armed policemen in their revenue drive vehicles to intimidate and extort money from the people. They carry long ladders with them and will often threaten to climb the power poles and cut the service wires and carry the wires away. Oftentimes, the intimidated consumer, fearing that what it will cost him to replace the wire will be more than what the officials are asking for in their arbitrary bill, would opt to pay the bill for a service that has not been rendered.

At other times, calling on one of the officials subtly to the side and settling him with an amount less than the face value of the bill will do the magic. The cash is quickly put in the pocket of the official without thanks, and the ladder will be dragged back into the revenue drive van, and the officials will be gone for that day. A repeat visit may take another month during which interval the consumer might not have seen even as little as candlelight from the electricity company that changed its name recently from an authority to a holding company. On the surface, the anger of the consumer often descends on the field worker of the power company. But the real problem emanated from the overall boss in the seat of power under whose charge the billions of dollars voted to give light to the citizens may have been callously embezzled. Homes and offices are left without power supply. Even hospitals are left in darkness. People resort to all forms of electricity generating sets to provide power for a few hours of the day. Virtually every apartment has its own power-generating set all lined up at the patio of each apartment or in front of the building. The noise and smoke pollution can only be imagined by somebody who has visited any of these buildings at night. For a few hours at month end, candlelight strength of light may show through the bulbs. The electronic equipments that were not hooked off the power sockets often get damaged during such intermittent low voltage supplies with occasional high voltage surges. The power authority claims immunity from lawsuits over such damages. The members of staff of the power company are often silently cursed from far and wide for such damages. But of course, the real culprit is the overall boss of the political system under whose charge the money meant for the equipment and other materials disappeared. Of course, when the boss is corrupt, the trend goes down the line. The boss did not do the stealing in isolation. He had some cooperation from within, and under such circumstances, he will lack the moral authority to enforce discipline in the system. A free fall of discipline therefore results. Nobody cares about the ultimate effect on the economy of the nation.

It is believed and indeed often stated in many quarters in Mungeruun that the patriotic ones have lived their time and have passed on. Granted that even in times past there were instances of alleged economic sharp practices even at those times, there was hardly any time when the sleaze was so blatant. There was said to be an instance where one of the leaders built a university and ensured that he did not provide enough university-owned student hostels. Meanwhile, he was said to have flooded the precincts of the university with his personal buildings and rentable apartments. There was also the allegation of the award of almost all government textbook supply contracts to a company owned by the wife of another of the leaders of old. Only the one up north, the noblest and the best of them all, went without blemish in terms of the ever-present temptation to amass wealth at the expense of the polity. But even with whatever allegations against some of those patriots of old, whatever their sins might have been, they were saints compared with what Mungeruun began to see a generation after the exit of the founding patriots.

The question thus begins to get asked, Has Mungeruun become a nation of dead patriots? Are there no more men of conscience and unquestionable patriotism in governance that will stand up for Mungeruun? Patriotism has shifted from allegiance to the nation to allegiance to the state, the local government, and the town union. Mungeruun as a nation is left on her own. Who will stand up for Mungeruun? Who will speak for her? Who will place the interest of Mungeruun in the front burner? Who really believes in Mungeruun as much as the founding fathers did? Every leader or misleader behaves while on the seat of power as if the nation will collapse or disintegrate the next day. The tendency therefore is to grab as much as the sitting leader can, before a feared inevitable end comes. Is that the way any nation can make progress? Everyone that occupies the seat of power tries to grab as much as he can as if there is no tomorrow. The conscience of the nation as epitomized by the likes of the Ganis, the Soyinkas, the Agbakobas, the Balarabes, and a few more can cry no more. Their voices are drowned by a louder cacophony emanating from a multitude of praise singers and hangers-on aided by a powerful government-sponsored radio and television network of image makers that daily dish out embellishments and cooked up achievements and stories of phony completed projects.

But the people on the ground know better. They are no fools. One cannot tell them that the light is shining when they haven’t seen power supply for months. One can say that ten or sixteen billion dollars has been spent on the power sector, but the people know that the money has been embezzled. One cannot tell them that one has spent three billion dollars on road construction and rehabilitation when they pass through the same road daily and see that nothing was done. The fact that the people don’t have a free voice and that free speech is often muzzled does not mean that the people are deaf, blind, and dumb.

Over the next couple of years, the overall health implications of the millions of carbon monoxide-emitting electricity generating sets may begin to manifest. Scores of death are reported monthly as a result of inadvertent carbon monoxide poisoning from the rural areas and even from urban areas where people sleep off with small generators (as these plants are called), working close to their bedrooms. A newlywed man had gone to the village to inspect his new house with a fitter. The recently-completed community electricity project which they had committed hundreds of thousands of dollars into, would not give them power. All those projects had become glorified monuments and white elephants. The officials have collected their cuts and disappeared, and after the first few days of commissioning, there would be no more power supply. The newly-wed man and his fitter had gone to bed believing that the exhaust pipe of the generator was pointing to the outside of the building. By morning, the doors had to be broken to bring out the dead bodies of the man and his fitter. Another group of eight visitors who slept in the living room of a newly-wed couple were in the morning found dead in their sleep. The electricity-generating set at the corridor was still humming as the bodies of the dead young men were being evacuated in the morning. All these were in houses that were connected to the public power supply system. And it was not that the people were not prepared or were unwilling to pay for power supply from the power holding company that was publicly funded. It simply was that the funds designated for improvement and upgrading of the power sector had been embezzled at source. And the embezzlers are known. They had stolen the money partly to bank away and partly to rig their way into political election victory. And they are said to have won the elections, and their paymasters have grown more potbelly. And the money voted for malaria eradication program is embezzled. And the people died. And nothing would happen to the people who led them to their death. They would rather be glorified. And His Excellency’s car and the long entourage will blow the multiple sirens. And those who have not yet died will be chased into the algae-filled open gutters. If they do not fall in fast enough into the gutters, the horsewhips of His Excellency’s outriders will land on their shoulders. And they will regret being on the road on the day that His Excellency chose to drive out. A King John of evil fame would be smiling in his grave, seeing men in the twenty-first century rehearse what he did in the streets of London many centuries ago.

The officials of the government-controlled water board, seeing how rounded the cheeks of the power company people have become, occasionally also mount their own drives. The hapless citizens watch in desperation as their own people, people who have rigged their way into positions of power, wreck havoc on their lives under the guise of governance. They steal the revenue accruing from the sale of their abundant petroleum and gas resources. They make their children stay home from school because they will not pay the teachers. They chase them off the pothole-filled roads with their siren-blowing speeding vehicles. They speed even in the midst of the people as if their sins are in hot pursuit of them. Even the leaders themselves will have no peace of mind. They are ever mindful of the volatility and temporariness of their tenure. They therefore commence on their embezzlement spree from their first day on the seat of power. It is possible that many of them are on narcotics to steer away from the realms of reality. For certainly no man in his right senses will do what many of them do. For, only a madman gathers much more than he can consume. Many of such acknowledged madmen line the roads of the cities. They gather junk, rags, empty polythene bags, empty broken bottles, discarded vehicle parts, and all. They are ever busy like ants gathering all day long. They collect a few pennies amidst the junk and admire them. They look at their massive possessions. They smile, and are happy. They then proceed to gather some more. Their arsenal will never be full.

In like manner, do many of these misleaders of Mungeruun gather. They will never be satisfied. And when a man gathers more than he needs and proceeds to gather more, there is no difference between him and that madman on the roadside. The only possible difference is that one is dressed in rags and the other is dressed in gold. One is an acknowledged mad man while the other is called a leader but is a mad man all the same.

But the acknowledged madman’s rags are better and more useful to his society. This is because when the latter dies from massive worm infestation or a leg ulcer or malnutrition or he gets knocked down by a moving vehicle, his rags will be gathered and recycled. And the recycled products will be of use to the people, even if it be momentarily. Another madman in gold will soon mount the saddle and continue the cycle. The type of recycling process that the Mungeruun mad man understands is the recycling of his kind in power. Another mad man must be made to succeed a retiring mad man so that the cycle will continue. The chain must not be allowed to break lest the loot of a retired mad man may get exposed. And if by chance an educated sane man ascends the saddle he must be made to protect the interest of the retired mad men. Their loot must be baptized and their gathered rags of gold must be overlooked. They have done their best in the art of gathering. And Mungeruun must remain forever grateful to them. And it must be ensured that they remain relevant in the scheme of things. And their legacy of plunder must be eulogized.

But the unacknowledged mad man’s gold is useless to the people. He will die in one faraway country in Europe, America, and lately India. His assembled loot mostly in coded accounts will lie in foreign banks and will be useless to his people. At best, the host country will look for ways to get another madman who calls himself a leader from Mungeruun to come and borrow the late mad man’s money at rates and terms that will make Mungeruun more indebted for generations to come. And the new misleader’s cut from the loan transaction goes back into a similar bank account. And the people are told that the nation is making progress. And back at home the misleader attempts to buy up whatever remains of government assets in the name of privatization. He sells these to himself or to his relations and friends at give-away prices. He appeared to realize rather lately that some other looters lower placed in his administration had almost out-looted him. And so he goes for a kill from all fronts. He even calls for donations from the private sector to add to his store. But it is a store that will never be filled. It is an appetite that will never be satisfied. Who has ever heard of or seen a mad man who gathers treasures at the roadside being satisfied? And praise singers will praise the embezzler and misleader to the high heavens. They call him Baba (father of all), but this is not his name. And they name some major roads after him. And the deluded madman grins and gathers the sides of his overflowing robes. He takes a few staggering steps as if in a dance, a naked dance in the marketplace fit only for a drunk, a dance done only by the likes of the madman and his kind.

And so it is that a man thought to have been destined by nature to salvage Mungeruun found himself derailing the strongest. Only after intense pressure did he find himself retiring into his kingdom of wealth. But it is wealth largely stolen from the poor, and will never bring contentment. Even if the abdomen protrudes beyond the fundal height for term pregnancy, it will never find contentment. And it will never stop gathering even the pennies on the roadside until it probably implodes.

And the nation groans in pain, and the people cry for a redeemer. Nobody listens to their cry for it is an internal affair of Mungeruun.

Every people get the type of government that they deserve, the people are told. But do the people of Mungeruun really deserve all this dehumanization? Was that what the founding fathers of the nation fought for. Was that what many of them staked their lives against British colonialism for? Are there no more living patriots in Mungeruun? Has the country degenerated to a nation of dead patriots?

The patriotic Mungeruun is the dead Mungeruun, someone once said. Has the nation degenerated to that level? And the Ganis, the Soyinkas, the Agbakobas, and the Balarabes cry their voices hoarse, for sanity, justice, and fair play.

Are there no more sane ears in power or even in the corridors of power to advise the powers that be, to strive to halt the drift to Armageddon?

Is it truly believed that the looters of today and the would-be looters of tomorrow can be effectively stopped without a thorough probing and punishment of the looters of yesterday?

A deliberate glossing over on the misdeeds of the past is tantamount to collusion. The heavens will not come down if the looters of yesterday are brought to justice. It will only serve as a deterrent to future looters. Soyinka had aptly stated in 1967 that a compromise with blatant evil practices leads to a putrefaction of the nation. As always, he could not have been more right. Promises of immunity from probing that were made in the past to previous looters have contributed to getting Mungeruun to her present sorry situation, a nation without reliable power supply even in the midst of trillions of barrels and metric tons of crude oil and natural gas.

The hungry bread thief is set ablaze on the roadside for stealing to stave off starvation. A hungry pregnant woman received a stolen pineapple to eat and was jailed for seven years by a court in Ugotta. She gave birth to a baby boy in a Kuveri jail two months later. It took a sustained legal defense from a magnanimous Kuveri lawyer briefed by a concerned Catholic women’s group, to secure the release of the hungry mother and baby from prison. That was happening in Mungeruun, a country where one mad politician who goes by the name of His Excellency Mr. President Commander in Chief could afford not to be able to explain how billions of dollars of money meant to give power supply to his poor countrymen was spent. And that was the same commander in thief who could afford to send hundreds of fully armed soldiers to wipe out a village in the oil-producing areas of his country. That was the same president who could afford to massacre scores of defenseless citizens, young unarmed males who were loaded in buses from Akokige in the eastern parts of his country heading for a peaceful rally to demand for a civil and entirely legitimate cause that in no way threatened the peace. The international organizations that are charged with investigation of human rights abuses may not hear of these. And when they do hear, these are classified as internal affairs of Mungeruun. In any case, Mungeruun is a third world country. Lives are so cheap. The story of one dead rioter in a first world country would have captured more headlines. It will indeed be a worthwhile exercise for some statisticians to do a study on how many hundreds of living men in a third world country like Mungeruun would be taken as equal in worth to the body of one dead rioter in the first world. They may yet come up in their estimation with a number close to infinity!

MUNGERUUN AT BIRTH AND MATURITY

She was a huge land mass populated by multiple ethnic nationalities over two hundred of them, judging from the multiplicity of languages and culture. The colonial masters had succeeded by sheer military force in overpowering the various groups and welding them into two administrative units, a North and a South. They called each of the two sections a protectorate even when nobody had requested for any form of protection from the colonial masters. With time in their infinite wisdom, the colonialists deemed it necessary to amalgamate the two protectorates, North and South, into one common unit. Hence, Mungeruun was born as a marriage of convenience.

A few educated men and women from the new nation with time started demanding for independence for the country from the colonial masters. The agitations came most strongly from the eastern and western parts of the country. The northern parts were also in support of the agitations but had wanted a more gradual handover to enable the people from that region to catch up more in terms of Western education. Thus, it was that self-government was gained by the East and the West a little earlier than the northern region.

Full independence was however finally granted to the entire country as a united entity. It was a big credit to the colonialists for their ability to weld together such diverse peoples under one administrative entity. It was equally, indeed a greater credit to the political leaders of the united entity that they saw the entity as a united body and did not start fighting a divisive war at those initial times. If that had happened, the entity would not have survived at those early stages. It might even have constituted a good reason for the colonial power to delay or deny the granting of independence. But the founding fathers of Mungeruun made that major sacrifice for the good of the country. There were three of them ruling as premiers in the three regions then. Two of them had run elections for the highest office in the land. A third one among them—the most loving of his people, and by far the least self-ambitious—was content to stay back and live with his people. The latter built no mansions for himself and did not gather for himself the wealth of his people. Even though he was accused of forcibly holding down a section of the region that he ruled, there was no questioning his fiscal integrity as a leader. He could easily have captured power at the center if he so desired judging from the fact that the colonial masters in their wisdom had ceded a larger chunk of the land mass of the entity Mungeruun, to his people and had in a census conducted by them announced a dominant population figure for the northern part of the entity. But leadership at the center was not the priority of this leader. He delegated another to that highest office and was content with his previous position in the region among his people. He may indeed be justifiably adjudged the noblest and the best. If Mungeruun today and over the past many decades had people of that degree of self-discipline, humility, and patriotism, there would have been no need for this story.

Mungeruun perhaps would have been found worthy in character and in learning to be invited to join NATO or even some respected group of industrialized nations. After all, she has the potentials, and she is situated north of the Atlantic! But despite her size and enermous potentials she was not adjudged worthy to be among the twenty nations of the world to be invited to a gathering of those that matter.

The founding fathers of the nation had fought for the freedom of the people to decide their own destinies. They sacrificed personal comfort and luxury to see to the attainment of independence. They could easily have collaborated with the colonial masters to rip off their people. They chose instead to agitate for independence for their people. Some of them went through imprisonment. One of them devoted columns in his newspaper to espousing the cause for independence. They did not necessarily take to armed struggle. But they used their tongues and their pens. They used their brains. And their followers saw that they were sincere. The latter knew that their leaders were not ripping them off. They knew that their leaders were being patriotic. They trusted their leaders. They thus followed them willingly and put in their best. They made no demands. They put up no preconditions as to what positions they would be given. They simply put up their best for the good of the cause. They fought the good fight with all their might. It was all for the good of Mungeruun.

There was no crude oil to sell. There were no billions to embezzle. But there was the land to be farmed and Mungeruuns made maximum use of the land. Cocoa blossomed in the West and was able to build what was then the tallest building in the land. It also provided free education for the school children in the West. Bags of groundnuts built pyramids in the North, and the funds accruing there from, sustained the people and built the schools. Palm oil and palm kernels were exported from the East and the first indigenous university in the land was built largely out of the products of palm fruits and palm nuts. Some of the palm nuts were exported to East Asia from where Mungeruun today imports vegetable oil.

Today the groundnut pyramids are no more. The palm oil is no longer enough for domestic demands. The cocoa story is as good as a tale to the younger generation. Crude oil, the one that Mungeruuns don’t have to labor for, has taken over. As cocoa, groundnuts, and palm oil made the waves, the mangrove swamps and the other delta areas mattered little. It is claimed that they were not neglected. But they were considered irrelevant in the scheme of things. Hardly any meaningful development took place there. They were allegedly difficult to develop. Today those swamp lands and the adjoining offshore areas lay the golden eggs for Mungeruun. Still, Mungeruuns in those same areas hardly fare any better than they did many decades ago.