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In the Nigeria of our day, writing is synonymous with loss of gravitas.

To be identified as
someone who ‘makes noise on the pages ofnewspapers’, is the surest road
to Siberia. Power and media currency are, are, to all intents and
purposes, diametrical opposites. Why then do I write?

I first encountered
my demons as a fourteen year-old at the British Council Library in
Kaduna. During the long summer holidays, with nothing better to do, I
spent all my days reading everything I could lay my hands on – history,
literature, science, philosophy. I stumbled upon Bertrand Russell in a
feat of absentmindedness. Russell wrote such beautiful and witty prose.
Although his childhood was as lonely as mine, I was not born an Earl
and did not grow up in a palace in Richmond. And my grandfather was not
prime minister. I was born in a humble evangelical village parsonage in
the ancient central savannah of Nigeria; a place more beautiful than
the Swiss Alps.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to write with the wit and lucidity of Lord Russell.

I also look back
with nostalgia to an earlier chivalrous tradition that was founded on
robust intellectual culture. The Founding Fathers of the Nigerian
Republic — Azikiwe, Awolowo and Balewa — were excellent writers. It
is only in an ignominious age like ours that people would deign to look
askance at anybody who takes up the pen.

It was the mystic
Carlos Fuentes ho noted that writing is a ‘struggle against silence’.
In our own case, it is the silence borne of decades of military
tyranny. As a consequence, we have lost the civic culture, which has
inspired our greatest patriots.

Many people write
to promote sectional agendas. Others write because someone has paid
them handsomely. I write because I believe in Nigeria and her manifest
destiny; because of my faith in the unconquerable power of the human
spirit — in the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil. Some have accused
me of writing to curry favour with the powers that be. One or two have
already declared me to be the prospective envoy at the Court of St.
James where I would presumably idle my days in small talk and
champagne. Never have a man’s ambitions been more under-estimated.

It was Elbert
Hubbard who observed that, in order to avoid being criticised, you
would have to “do nothing, say nothing, be nothing”. When I wrote about
gays and the Church, I was accused of being homophobic. One or two
critics have advised me to avoid writing about politics, which I know
nothing about. One regretted that my writing no longer made him cry, as
it did when I wrote on child abuse. I must therefore, I suppose,
restrict myself to subjects likely to exert the most lachrymose impact.
I once made the mistake of mentioning our five German shepherds. It set
off a bedlam of howls. Nobody will ever know that those dogs protected
me from the real and present danger of assassins; and of course, God
Almighty, and the late President Yar’Adua, who called the people
concerned to order.

Criticism is a form
of recognition. But even criticism has limits. Some have compared me to
Reuben Abati of The Guardian; others say I am ‘the new Dele Momodu’. I
would rather I was compared with Obadiah Mailafia.

Echoing the
Scottish philosopher David Hume, I would say that the invention of the
Internet marks the real end of chivalry, as we have always known it.
The Nigerian Internet crowd is a rather illiberal horde. Most of them
live abroad and have lost touch with realities back home. Most are in
all sorts of primordial cocoons — Biafra, Arewa or Oduduwa. Hiding
under bizarre pseudonyms, they have succumbed to the Western-inspired
nonsense about our being a ‘failed state’. When I got tired of the
haranguing, I decided to throw in one lone Latin expletive – just to
test the waters. Pandemonium! “We told you this fellow is not what he
claims, beneath the gentility”; “We must never vote him!” On and on
they went.

What some of these
people lack is a bit of irony. When I wrote about Cecilia Ibru, I never
for once absolved her of any crime. What she did was horrendous, and
all the more tragic, considering how hard she had worked to build up
Oceanic and how so many looked up to her as a model. Even if she we
were my mother I would never excuse her crimes. Someone even asked if I
had collected money from her.

Reminds me of the
story of the woman who was caught in adultery. As the Jews set off to
stone her to death according to the Laws of Moses, Jesus asked that
those who had never committed adultery be the first to do so. He was
not denying her sin. All have sinned and have come short of the glory.
We are human and fallible. What matters is to learn from our mistakes
and to move on.

“Woman, where are your accusers?”