Copia

Ikot Abasi

Ikot Abasi, also called Opobo, formerly Egwanga, port town, Akwa Ibom state, southern Nigeria. The town lies near the mouth of the Imo (Opobo) River. Situated at a break in the mangrove swamps and rain forest of the eastern Niger River delta, it served in the 19th century as a collecting point for slaves. In 1870 Jubo Jubogha, a former Igbo (Ibo) slave and ruler of the Anna Pepple house of Bonny (28 miles [45 km] west-southwest), came to Ikot Abasi and founded the kingdom of Opobo, which he named for Opobo the Great, a Pepple king (reigned 1792–1830). Also called Chief Jaja by Europeans, he destroyed the economic power of Bonny and made Opobo the leading power of the eastern Niger delta oil-palm trade until he was deported in 1887 by the British, who established a trading post at Opobo Town, 4 miles (6 km) southwest, on the west bank of the Imo River.
Modern Ikot Abasi serves as a trading centre for the yams, cassava (manioc), fish, palm produce, corn (maize), and taro produced by the Ibibio people of the area; it also is known for boatbuilding, although a sandbar partially blocks the entrance to its port from the Gulf of Guinea. The town is linked by highway to Aba and Port Harcourt. Pop. (2006) local government area, 132,023.

—Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

It was in Cross River state (Akwa Ibom was later carved from Cross River) when I was there, back in 1990, visiting my then girlfriend who was doing her post-University National Youth Service. We took a Toyota taxi van from The University of Port Harcourt, where I was living with my lecturer Dad. For a variety of reasons the trip lives lushly in my memory, not least because of the gorgeous tropical setting (We were in the rural part of Ikot Abasi). I was also aware of the area's rich history, centered on Opobo, where "King Jaja" went from captured Igbo slave to local leader, undertook an extended campaign of defiance against the British, was eventually captured through deceit and sent into exile.

In a few days there I read a lot and wrote a few poems, including one about Ikot Abasi itself. This week YB Poetry published my poem, Ikot Abasi Redux, written a couple of years ago as a sort of echo of that poem I wrote in 1990. That earlier poem, written when I was still a teenager, isn't really publishable in any proper journal, but I thought this a good time to post it in this informal setting as a sort of bookend to the "Redux." You can see the themes I carried into the more recent poem.

Ikot Abasi

(Thoughts from the World's Navel)

I. Fauna

In the wake of age-old night,

A downy, dewy new born baby

Ourang-outan hangs face downwards,

Legs in mother's knowing grip,

Wide-eyed at the brown, the chlorophyll.

Apprentice to the simple art of gestures,

It takes, in breath, the dizzy scene,

The trailing vines and sea-green herbs,

The brown dehiscent pods,

The endless symbiosis (breathe)

The roiling food chains (breathe again);

In mother's knowing grip,

It learns that which the eye can't see

In this plush romp of deity,

This nursery of being...

The primate urge that shaped our shrilling tongues to trope

Shows roots here like the ageless, sprawling tree in shallow soil.

II. Sylva

A tree is not a poem, but a poem might be tree:

A poem that is not a tree is grass or birophyte.

A poem, tree through hardened truth or old acuity

Is ringed by lesser stalks and shoots that struggle to the light.

Knowing truth in things unseen and rarely comprehensible,

A poem's tree by virtue of compression (heed the lesson)

Images, insisted Pound, are acorns—hard, inedible

The poet's business lies in rearing oaks to dine the mind on.

III. Antiquissima

Bah!

These centuries of prosody and rhetoric are latent here,

And have been since our times before imagining,

Flowing through the veins of leaves.

There are no hamadryads here,

No wooded tabernacles,

No slave moods in the elder's stool,

The hoe, the hollow ikolo.

Wisdom is never exercise

At the world's damp navel,

But an endless dance to soundless measure,

Answering to none at all

unless the simple seasons.

27 March 1990

at Ikot Abasi, Nigeria

The Nigerian fuel subsidy quagmire

I caught rumblings of the fuel subsidy removal affair while on my holiday travels, but only in the past few days have I gained a sense of just what a delicate moment in time this is for Nigeria.

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, for whom I've always expressed much admiration, wasted no time after being installed as Finance Minister and over the past quarter, working tirelessly to convince the Federal Government of Nigeria to eliminate the subsidy on motor fuel forthwith. The subsidy was removed as of the first of this year, triggering immediate protests. This is not the first time the government has tried to eliminate the subsidy, and it has always backed down due to popular response, but this time the government seems determined to hold its ground, and Okonjo-Iweala has been quite tough in defending her position. She points out that Nigeria is in danger of financial meltdown to rival that of Greece because of the unsustainable borrowing, much of which goes straight back out of the country in subsidy payments.

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The protests across Nigeria have looked to build on the extraordinary scope of popular actions in 2011, in which Time Magazine famously dubbed the protester Person of the Year, including the use of social media, where on Twitter they have adopted the hashtag "#OccupyNigeria." Of course the "Occupy Wall Street" protests that have lent vocabulary to so many subsequent protests were against policies that support the so-called "1%" of people who make fortunes off globalized finance, while most of the U.S. is facing a harsh recession. There were actually plans for similar "Occupy Nigeria" protests even before the motor fuel subsidy removal, but the popular response against the fuel subsidy provided a spark that no protest organizer could possibly pass up.

I do think this convergence of events has led to an unfortunate side-effect. Rightly or wrongly "Occupy Nigeria" has become seen as a vehicle for protest against subsidy removal rather than a protest against the corruption and mismanagement that in effect creates Nigeria's version of the "1%." The danger, however, is that I think most commentators would agree that at some point the fuel subsidy does need to be eliminated, and the real problem is not the subsidy elimination but the likelihood that the cash that the government would save thereby would just also be siphoned into the pockets of Nigeria's "1%".

Prof. Adeola Adenikinju of the University of Ibadan has been one of the most sensible commentators on the issue, which should not surprise anyone, as there are fewer more coherent discussions of the fuel subsidy conundrum than his 2009 presentation at OECD's Global Forum on Trade and Climate Change. That presentation, "Energy pricing and subsidy Reforms in Nigeria", should be required reading for anyone pondering these current events. He argues convincingly the economic case for subsidy removal, but he also admits the considerable present obstacles. He concludes:

Nigeria needs to keep to a formula based approach for determining fuel prices in the short term, while expediting actions in respect of putting in place a vibrant domestic refining industry.

This is where I think even the brilliant Okonjo-Iweala has missed the road, and at the same time I think the "Occupy Nigeria" crowd must learn the lesson of the accusations of incoherence and unthinking populism leveled against "Occupy Wall Street." Okonjo-Iweala is all about GDP growth, and that one measure can be a powerful blinder for economists. I remember watching her famous TED talk headlined "Want to help Africa? Do business here" and thinking: "OK I can sympathize with the desire to focus on foreign development as a vehicle for recovery on our continent, but isn't it even more important to focus on domestic industry?"

Why must we slaves to the mechanisms imposed by the IMF and The World Bank when China shows that there is more than one way to turn around an economy? We are coming from a similar historical and demographic place with the immense damage caused by Chairman Mao not so different from that caused by decades of African despots and colonial meddling. Yes, I do realize that the biggest issue with that thinking is that no African nation has the combination of ruthless and effective leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Surely there is a middle path, an African path.

I can hardly think of a more apt fulcrum for weighing out such a middle path than this fuel subsidy crisis. Imagine a timetable that clearly leads up to later subsidy removal through a series of confidence-building measures, some of which Prof. Adeola Adenikinju outlines in his presentation. Even Okonjo-Iweala has been forced to articulate a bit better the material gains to the people she expects from the savings from subsidy removal, mentioning health and social welfare programs, urban mass transit and more, but coming as it has, after the fact of the precipitous subsidy removal decision, this satisfies no one.

Unfortunately present discussion has sometimes broken down into he-said-she-said, for example whether subsidy removal was supposed to wait until April, or claims that Okonjo-Iweala has threatened to resign if any compromise is made on subsidy removal. All this heat without light is not helping matters at all. Even shotgun measures such President Goodluck Jonathan's pledge this morning to slash government salaries by 25% are not enough to grow from this crisis into a pattern of long-term solutions. A continued loss in confidence the current president and his talented Finance Minister could play into the hands of the many darker interests in the nation who have been the main actors in the historical sabotage of Nigeria's welfare. I to truly fear the emergence of some player, perhaps even an agent of the "1%," who claims the populist card against the current government and ends up taking Nigeria even further into the dark ages.

Jonathan and Okonjo-Iweala need to repeat their decisiveness in applying the fuel subsidy removal policy, but this time they must rapidly decide on reform of that policy. They need to articular a clear timetable and plan to tackle corruption, addressing the fact that declared government salaries are a fraction of the mismanagement problem. They need to take firm steps to shore up the domestic, refined petroleum industry. They need to deliver credible assessments of the effectivity of the social welfare institutions that Okonjo-Iweala is promising to support with proceeds from subsidy elimination. A solid, independent advisory panel of the likes of Prof. Adeola Adenikinju and former Petroleum Minister Professor Tam David West, among other specialists, could draw up such a timetable for government approval, acting under the highest standards of transparency.

Would such a course be an easy one? Of course not. But I suspect it would be less difficult than navigating the economic (inflationary pressure) and political (popular revolt) perils of the present course.

Above all, I do hope that the government and its security apparatus sees fit to let the protesters have their say. I'm very troubled by reports of hardships suffered by the protesters, and I hope that we can show the first glimmers of a new, modern Nigeria in the treatment of dissent. President Goodluck Jonathan is no Bashar al-Assad, and shouldn't even take a step in the direction of the Syrian crackdown. I do find myself hopeful that of all the post-war Nigerian governmental regimes, Jonathan's is the most likely to act with the necessary balance and prudence to turn this crisis around and start on the long, hard road to recovery for our nation.

Quotīdiē ❧ Whose Country? Is it Each One's?

walking by the waters,
down where an honest river

shakes hands with the sea,
a woman passed round me
in a slow, watchful circle,
as if I were a superstition;

—from "In My Country" by Jackie Kay

Poetry is as much a mirror that reflects the reader as a window to the writer. It's very interesting to read a poem that captures so well some facet of my own existence, but then reflects a reaction thereto that's a complete opposite of mine. I've always reveled in my otherness, whether I was in the US, the UK or in Nigeria at the time. I'm hardly above little venal flourishes, an over-emphasized accent here and there; and my favorite technique for getting to know others is to focus on serious questions of their own heritage and identities. But Jackie Kay does take me to the riverside in her poem, and opens into my own sense the cold tap of her own feelings as she finds herself probed by a stranger.

I have no idea why (it's certainly not toward from immediate logic) Kay's poem should bring me so to mind of a bit of Hopkins's "Carrion Comfort".

...whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?...

What great force of hap flings us, dashed like broken china, to half-borrow a trope from John Pepper Clark's "Ibadan," among the continents, those seven great hills rearing out of the oceans? And what gathers assorted locals around, fascinated by the shattered pieces of our identities? By the way, as heavily anthologized as it is, Clark's iconic poem is always worth another look.

Ibadan,
Running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

—"Ibadan" by John Pepper Clark

I'm a sucker for a volume of poetry that features a glossary of Scots and another of Igbo, especially when there might be but one in the species, Kay's Fiere, a lyric counterpart to her memoir, "Red Dust Road." She wrote these books throwing a light upon her quest to understand her Scottish birth mother and Igbo birth father.

Many poems in Fiere (Scots for friend, mate, companion) grow out of the experience Jackie Kay had tracing her birth-parents, as chronicled in her memoir Red Dust Road. But this collection of 44 poems has a stronger focus, one which draws on Kay's unusual personal story but grows into a celebration of what it means to be close to someone.

I've just ordered the book, so I can't comment in-depth, and Kay is new to me just today, but already she gives me an impression of a poet I'm likely to appreciate through shared understanding, like an Okigbo or even Catherine Tufariello, rather than for its distant brilliance, like say the work of Eliot.

In Nigeria, she sees a road "stretching/ perhaps into infinity/ to a foreseeable future/ and back to/ lost time".

Which reminds me of a work of my own, "Nchefu Road," which has loomed large in my notebook for 2 decades, but which has struggled to work its way to a finish. Igbo, journeyings and the inchoate. With such common threads clear upon the fringe, I look forward to pulling at the warp of Kay's work.

Siasia, finally!

It didn't take me long after arriving in Nigeria as a schoolboy to learn the legend of Samson Siasia. One of the best footballers among my classmates was immediately given "Siasia" as a nickname, and when I asked why, I would be regaled of the eponymous player's energetic style in the colors of Nigerian clubs Julius Berger and Flash Flamingoes, bombing forward to goal with pace and power. I watched him in the Nigerian 1994 African Nations Cup winning side, and playing in the USA '94 World Cup, that exciting, raw team that entertained everybody, and only lost in that extra time heart-breaker against Italy.

I've also watched his stewardship of Nigerian youth national teams, and his great exploits managing some of the promising talent that's become the backbone of our current side. For me, it should have been a no-brainer for Siasia to be promoted to national team coach, and I've said so again and again.

Well hallelujah! Finally it's come to pass. SIasia was appointed head coach of the Super Eagles last month. The heartwarming stuff started straightaway, with his celebrating with genune emotion, and singing Yoruba praise songs. This is an institution that means to almost 200 million people so much more than just a bunch of footballers ("41. They aren't kidding when they talk about football as a unifying force.") It's only proper for someone granted its custodianship to demonstrate what it really means to him, especially when that demonstration includes a bit of native Yoruba to reinforce the fact that we're keeping this business properly in the family. Yes, yes Shaibu Amodu (National team coach in several stints between foreign coaches) before him was also Nigerian, but he always seemed as much bureaucrat as trainer, and rarely showed the passion and fire I think our boys need to show what they're capable of doing in that green strip. In the past we've had great leaders in the field such as Yekini, Okocha, Olise, Amokachi and even Siasia. Unfortunately we don't really have that any more, so we need a spark from the sidelines. If Siasia can't provide that, no one can.

And now that the seemingly irredeemable NFF have astonished us by making the obvious move, I hope they have the good sense to be patient with Siasia. He is already making the noises that the national side needs a complete change in mindset. He is right, but it will not happen overnight. The once exciting John Mikel Obi, for example, has been turned into a lumbering apparatchik of the ruthlessly efficient Chelsea juggernaut. He has lost his soul. We'll need to figure out how to deal with Obi and other players who've undergone reprogramming by their clubs, who do after all pay their wages, fair enough. When they put on the green and white strip they need to rediscover the soul of Nigerian football, and there will be some trial and error while Siasia sets about leading them to that rediscovery. Let's not go running back to some European coach the first time the Eagles make a tournament misstep.

Much is made of the need for an Englishman in the England manager job. The same logic applies to African nations. It's not that African coaches would necessarily be better right away, but how can we eventually groom a cadre of African coaches if we don't put our faith in our present, brightest prospects? European coaches don't make it their business to build the local academies of coaches and players. They don't care. They just want their multi-million wages and matchday bonuses. We need someone who will shed a few tears and show that his connection to the job runs deeper than the paycheck. Enter Samson Siasia. And It's about time. "Oṣe oṣe ooh! Oṣe oooh! Oṣe baba!" Up Super Eagles!

Nigeria days on TNB

I've recently posted several Nigeria themed articles on The Nervous Breakdown. I started writing up a series of scatter-shot observations, 50 in all, on the occasion of the country's golden jubilee. The first part of "50 Observations on 50 years of Nigeria," items 1 - 16, touches on our staple food, fufu, military coups, parenting, machetes, the national anthem, Niger delta pollution, malaria, rainy season, "Ghana must go," Fela, and much more. The second part runs from items 17 - 32, touching on the principal languages, street hawkers, economics, religion, colonization, okada, Dele Giwa, clothing, ogogoro, and includes a brief La Divina Commedia parody aimed against the scum who light gas flares. The third part runs from items 33 - 50 and touches on Pidgin, Nollywood, masquerades, jaas, football, literature, the civil war and the cold war, serious oyinbo grammar, and of course partying.

My own interactions with the land of my birth have been complex, with so much time spent abroad, but so many crucial, formative years spent in Nigeria. I admit there is so much of me that reflects the time spent in America, and I do have a significant bent towards Britain, but the Igbo and overall Nigerian consciousness within me is mountainous. It's my utter foundation. I think I speak about Nigeria with an unflinching eye to my experiences of its glories, its tragedies, and its absurdities, but regardless of context and mood, my hope and faith in Nigeria is unquenchable, and I hope that's plain in my series.

As a sort of epilogue to the series, I posted an interview with award winning Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor, whose African themed fantasy and science fiction stories have always delighted me. She was a good college friend of Chimezie, whom I met a few times while visiting my brother in University. He brought my attention to Zahrah the Windseeker, and I was hooked, and I'm hardly alone in that. Her work has been hoovering up prizes and acclaim, and she is incubating some very exciting projects in multiple media. In the interview I ask her primarily about the "bubbling calabash of language stew" in her latest novel "Who Fears Death."

I also include a couple of gorgeous illustrations related to Nnedi's work, including the cover of Zahrah, and a pair of drawings by Ross Campbell, to whose work I was just introduced while preparing this interview. I'm really struck by Campbell's skill and feeling drawing ethnically diverse characters.

It has been a busy period following the birth of my daughter, with many exciting developments at work, a scare for my father's health (to which Chimezie has alluded), a more hectic than expected holiday period, and much more. I'm always grounded by my family, but it was very nice to be further grounded by so much contemplation of the past, present and future of that paragon of complexity, my native Nigeria.

Fela in Calabar

First of all let me mention that I've just completed my second installment in my series "50 Observations on 50 years of Nigeria." I'm giving it a day or two for a fresh-eye proofread, and I'll post it on The Nervous Breakdown probably tomorrow. In part 1, item 9 I said "Fela Anikulapo Kuti. 'Nuff said. We've always known he's the man. Nice to see the world catch up."

I recently ran across video of a Fela performance in Calabar in 1971, shot by the legendary drummer Ginger Baker who recorded with Fela.

Calabar is where I was born, and this concert would have been taking place as I was perfecting my toddling technique a few miles away (though I did also spend a lot of time rather farther away in my maternal home town of Ikot Ana). It's quite something to see that infectious energy of Fela. This was in the early years of his superstardom, and you can still feel the raw edge to the band which would grind its way to such unbelievable chops.

Quotīdiē ❧ She writes for nigeria

Nigerian female writers, it has been argued, really deserve commendation and encouragement with the value of impact they are making among their contemporaries in the Diaspora. Among over 400 leading women writers listed in Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing, edited by Jane Eldrodge Miller, Nigerians occupy conspicous percentage and position.
Some of these references include Flora Nwapa, a novelist, dramatist, short story writer and children's author; the late Zulu Sofola, novelist, dramatist, poet and children's literature writer; Kema Chikwe, a children writer, non fiction author and publisher; Tess Onwueme, a playwright; Mabel Segun, fiction writer, essayist and poet; Zaynab Alkali, novelist, short story writer and essayist; Buchi Emecheta, novelist and Catherine Acholonu, poet, dramatist, essayist and fiction writer. Others include Ifeoma Okoye, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and Ifi Amadiume. They have all proved their mettles in their various choice of genre and have won several awards in the world class record of literary circle.

—Yemi Adebisi, "Acholonu - Celebration of a Scholar," Daily Independent (Lagos)

Ahem.

"They've all proved their mettles..."
That definitely settles
How uncountably in fettle
Lies the pen upon that nettle.

But of course I digress.

Anyway, I've been observing for a while the current efflorescence of Nigerian women writers. The above list does not even include Adichie, Oyeyemi, Atta, Nwaubani, and I could go on and on. And then there is Okorafor another important example whom I've mentioned here on Copia before, and with whom I'm wrapping up a wonderful interview for The Nervous Breakdown. Adebisi's full article is an extensive encomium of Acholonu, which is richly enough deserved, but my main interest was captured by the leading paragraphs I quoted above. I don't know what is behind the phenomenon, but long may it continue.

Talib Kweli on the Politics of Oil: Ballad of the Black Gold

Spotted this new Talib Kweli song, called the Ballad of the Black Gold in a hypem link (you can watch the video there). Very timely given the recent BP mess. Much respect to Talib for going into some of the history of Oil politics in Nigeria; an excerpt from Verse 2 is below:

Nigeria is celebrating 50 years of independence
They still feel the colonial effects of Great Britain's presence
Dictators quick to imitate the West
Got in bed with oil companies and now the place is a mess
Take a guess, which ones came and violated
They oiled up the soil, the Ogoni people was almost annihilated
But still they never stayed silent
They was activists and poets using non-violent tactics
That was catalyst for soldiers to break into they crib
Take it from the kids and try to break'em like a twig
And make examples of the leaders; executed Saro-Wiwa,
Threw Fela's mom out the window right after they beat her
In an effort to defeat hope. Now the people's feet soaked in oil [?]
So the youth is doing drive-bys through speed boats [?]
They kidnap the workers, they blowing up the pipelines
You see the fires glowing in the nighttime

Quotīdiē ❧ Tincture of tigritude

One of my favorite quotes is from one of my greatest idols, Nigeria's great writer and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka: "A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces." This tiger of a story [Who Fears Death] definitely pounced on me without proclamation or warning. I'm glad I was ready for it.

—Nnedi Okorafor—"The Tigritude of a Story"

Soyinka's famous quote, made in response to the Négritude movement of Senghor, Césaire, and other Francophone African writers has always resonated with me as well. Afrocentrism that spends most of its time contemplating its own plumage was perhaps inevitable in those early days, so soon after the colonial yokes had been thrown off. But having been immersed in our own reality, having, as Nnedi also mentions, endured wars of desperation such as the Biafran, having lived to see our resources squandered and the legacy of revolutionary leaders turned despots, we're past time for preening. If we plan to survive, it's well past mealtime. We'd better pounce.

To be fair, Négritude never really took off in Anglophone Africa. In "Christopher Okigbo," Sunday Anozie quotes a letter sent to him by the great Nigerian poet. In 1966 Okigbo had been invited to the Negro Festival of Arts in Dakar, where his poem Limits was awarded first prize. Okigbo wrote:

About Dakar. I did not go... I found the whole idea of a negro arts festival based on colour quite absurd. I did not enter any work either for the competition, and was most surprised when I heard a prize had been awarded to Limits. I have written to reject it.

As Anozie says, "This sums up Okigbo's whole attitude to the color stress in Négritude." Soyinka's reaction was of the same kind. Anozie does actually surprise me by going on to claim that Okigbo's objections are ultimately shallow, and Soyinka's "cynical." To be honest, I find a lot that annoys me in Anozie's book, overall, but he also does more to plumb Okigbo's depths than anyone else I've seen, so it's still well worth a read.

But I do think Okigbo and Soyinka are right to shrug off the totems of tigritude, I think we're seeing a generation of African writers come into their own through the urgency of the modern African reality I describe above. I look forward to reading Nnedi's own testament, which UPS delivered yesterday.

By the way, Nnedi says:

Amongst the Igbos, back in the day, girls who were believed to be ogbanjes were often circumcised (a.k.a. genital mutilated) as a way to cure their evil ogbanje tendencies.

I had heard of female circumstances in parts of Igbo land, but I hadn't heard of its use as a counter to Ogbanje. I wonder whether that custom was widespread in Igbo land (as for example destruction of twins was a custom more in the far south than elsewhere). Time to ask our elders some straight questions.

PBS's timeline of Nigeria's presidents

In the wake of Yar'Adua's death, The PBS NewsHour published an outline of Nigeria's leaders, under the rubric "Nigeria's Post-Colonial Political Turmoil." Fair enough, and ever since archetypical man-of-action Nzeogwu* decided he wasn't messing about, it really has been a turbulent cascade, and sobering to re-read even in the drab copy of foreign service wonks. Stories of the many intrigues that have characterized Nigeria to date were always the midnight snack of my mates and I defying curfew in school, and many of these names are vivid folk heroes and villains to me. In a recent visit to my parents' they and my Uncles and family friends had even more lurid tales of the machinations surrounding the turnover of power from Yar'Adua to Goodluck Jonathan, and I do wonder where these will fetch up in the endless drama of the Stumbling Giant of Afica.

* Nzeogwu is an extraordinary person whose Wikipedia page does him no real justice. I recommend to anyone interested in African politics to find one of the several books about him, and about the seismic events he set in motion. You can hardly do better than the volume by later twice head of state Olusegun Obasanjo himself, if you can find it in print in the West.

Anyway, in their chart is a surprising omission. Nigerians will spot it in an instant.

1960-66
- Tafawa Balewa (Northern People's Congress)
1966
- J.T.U. Aguiyi Ironsi (Military)
1966-75
- Yakubu Gowon (Military)
1976-79
- Olusegun Obasanjo (Military)
1979-83
- Shehu Shagari (National Party of Nigeria)
1984-85
- Muhamaddu Buhari (Military)
1985-93
- Ibahim Babangida (Military)
1993
- Ernest Shonekan (Military)
1993-98
- Abdulsalami Abubakar (Military)
1999-2007
- Olusegun Obasanjo (People's Democratic Party)
2007-2010
- Umaru Yar'Adua (People's Democratic Party)
2010-present
- Goodluck Jonathan (People's Democratic Party)

So where the heck is Murtala Mohammed, whose 1975-1976 regime any Nigerian recognizes as a pivot point in so many ways, in national terms as well as international terms? You'll rarely find one as much a simultaneous hero and villain to so many. He was one of those larger-than-life figures in a Nation that could have done with far fewer larger-than-life figures. PBS hides him in the Gowon section, and briefly mentions him in the Obasanjo (Military) section, even though Obasanjo probably only became head of state because Mohammed had clearly marked him as his second, in the Mohammed/Obasanjo/Danjuma troika. Danjuma, based on his military influence, could easily have been Mohammed's successor, but even the dead Mohammed's shadow was long enough to set the succession, and eventually the path to the second republic of Shehu Shagari, a drunken orgy of corrupt civilian rule that probably made inevitable the whipsaw sequence of military regimes that followed.

It's more technically correct to have buried M.K.O. Abiola in the Babangida section, although it is the plain reality that Abiola never went from President-Elect to President.

Another observation is the procession from the "(Military)" to the "(PDP)." If Nigeria is to be a nation where ideas shine as brightly as individuals, then perhaps it's fitting that one of the brighter individuals who stands for some of the more "bottom-up" ideas for Nigeria's future, Donald Duke, publicly ditched the PDP. (Yeah, and I'm not sure what kind of statement it makes that Facebook is probably the best source for an event that has caused quite a few ripples among Nigerians everywhere).

The PBS timeline does make for interesting reflection, not least upon hope that Nigeria is in for times rather less defined by the drama of personages than have been since 1960.