advertisement

Chinua Achebe Rejects National Honour(Says 'Nigeria's condition ... too dangerous for silence')
BY KAYODE OGUNBUNMI

AMID a debilitating four-day warning strike by organised Labour and Civil Society groups to protest recent hike in fuel prices, the Federal Government last Thursday reeled out names of nominees for this year's National Honours Awards.
But barely 24 hours later, one of the recipients, the literary icon, Professor Chinua Achebe has turned down the offer of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) he was nominated for.

advertisement

Achebe cited the harsh conditions in the country and the unresolved political crises in Anambra, his home state, as reasons for rebuffing the award.
In a two-page letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Friday, Achebe said, "Nigeria's condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honour awarded me in the 2004 Honours List."
This would be the second time a nominee for the National Honours Awards would be rejecting such a decoration.

In the early days of the Obasanjo administration, Chief Gilbert Akinyede (now late) declined the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) bestowed on him on the ground that it came too late in the day.

Akinyede had asked rhetorically in an interview with The Guardian: "Are they (Federal Government) just recognising my contributions to nation building? I can assure you that my people from old Ondo State to the current Ekiti State recognised what I did for them a long time ago."
Professor Achebe, author of the monumental work, Things Fall Apart, which has sold over 11 million copies in more than 50 countries, said he was writing the letter to the President "with a very heavy heart."
His words: "I write this letter with a very heavy heart. For some time now I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.
"I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance of the Presidency."
Achebe recalled in the letter that he had accepted four previous National Awards not minding the imperfection in the Nigerian system.

"Forty three years ago, at the first anniversary of Nigeria's independence I was given the first Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. In 1979, I received two further honours - the Nigerian National Order of Merit and the Order of the Federal Republic - and in 1999, the first National Creativity Award," he said.

"I accepted all these honours fully aware that Nigeria was not perfect; but I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples," he added.

The Commander of the Federal Republic, (CFR) is the second highest to the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR) on the list of national honours.

The Federal Government last week announced a list of 191 Nigerians and foreigners as recipients of this year's awards. Achebe's name topped a list of six recipients of the CFR. Others on the list are Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu; the Etsu Nupe, HRH Alhaji Yahaya Abubakar; the Obi of Onitsha, HRH Alfred Achebe; Chief Sonny Odogwu and Major General Alwali Kwazir (rtd).

Professor Achebe has fought a long and tasking battle with national misrule, which has been the burden of Nigeria and nothing better captures this struggle than his pithy submission in his little book, The Problem With Nigeria.

"The problem with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership," he wrote. Yet, he seemed to have high hopes for the Obasanjo government.
In an interview with the UNESCO Courier in June 2001, shortly after his visit to Nigeria, Achebe said Obasanjo, after four years, "has done fairly well."
According to him, "the problem of getting Nigeria back to sanity, let alone prosperity, is far greater than anyone imagined. So there doesn't seem to be a chance for much dramatic achievement in this first term. But the fact that we are still knocking about and asking how we should proceed is a truly great measure of success."
But from the concluding paragraph of his weekend letter to the President, he must have had a rethink since then.
"Nigeria's condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence," he wrote, adding, "I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honour awarded me in the 2004 Honours list."
Achebe, arguably the greatest novelist that Africa has produced, is also a living example of the harm that inept leadership in Nigeria has forced on the citizens: a car accident on a bad road in 1990 forced him into a wheelchair. Unable to receive the medical care he needed in Nigeria, he now lives with his wife in a suburb of New York City at Bard College, a small elite liberal arts college, where himself and his wife teach.

When in 1999, he came home for the first time after nine years in the US, Achebe was bestowed with the first National Creativity Award, worth N1 million. However, The Guardian learnt that the money has not been given to him.

Apart from his epochal Things Fall Apart, Professor Achebe's writings include Anthills of the Savannah, Morning Yet on Creation Day, Arrow of God, Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, Girls at War and Other Stories, Hopes and Impediments and The trouble with Nigeria.