SHE had met him only three times before, but unhesitatingly put pen to paper in celebration of the “gentle-faced man in a wheelchair” who, then, had just turned 82. I speak of Chimamanda Adichie, the young enormously already-world-acclaimed author, and Professor Chinualumogu Achebe, who transited on March 21, 2013 and was laid to rest last Thursday.

Of her, before the publication of her second novel, Achebe had written: “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers… She is fearless or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war…” Of him, Adichie, who kept a respectful distance from her revered literary hero, then wrote: “His work was free of anxiety, wore its own skin effortlessly... (emboldening me) … not to find my voice, but to speak in the voice I already had”.

Adichie, in addition to speaking up, must now, like the rest of us, including President Goodluck Jonathan who attended Achebe’s funeral in person, learn to live without the glittering presence in the flesh of Achebe. We, SSS and all, who trooped to Ogidi bearing fancy eulogy should now walk our talk, not simply only say tributes but, equally, act decisively on the eloquent truths and counsels of the eagle atop the Iroko tree.

It’s now not so important anymore to wonder if what Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka described as the “insensate murder of Chinua’s people in Kano” hastened the demise of Professor Achebe.  The man who would not accept an honour contaminated with bloodied hands and cloaked in mischief left enough for us to chew on, including in his The Trouble with Nigeria, Anthills of the Savannah and the biographical There was a country, which is still drawing the ire of those who box in themselves in their ethnic compartments

With his There was a country, Achebe hit the cruciate nerve and ruptured the portal artery of writers, politicians, academics and even plain journeymen, particularly of the Yoruba kind. But let me be clear:  Although the erstwhile de facto Vice Head of the Nigerian state during the civil war was not your detribalised Nigerian by any figment of imagination, I don’t agree with Achebe when he blames Awolowo for the extermination, through malnutrition, of hundreds of thousands of children and women during our country’s civil war of which, having lived the entire duration of the conflict in Biafra as an adult in my twenties, I claim a hands-on perspective. My opinion is that most of the blame should rest on the General who committed his people to war propelled almost only by his own ambition and arrogance when fully aware his troops were ill-prepared and lacked even the most rudimentary of hardware to effectively prosecute the war. In the same vein, my view is that Achebe’s claim that Igbo are the most progressive people in Nigeria is thoroughly debateable, probably far more arguable than the question of the Igbo political class that, even right now, is still seemingly irredeemably mercantilist, consistently selling out its own for the proverbial mess of porridge.

The civil war had much to do with ethnic hatred and, certainly, I wouldn’t rank Awolowo in the same league as Soyinka, Banjo or Ademoyega. In those three is ample testimony of Yoruba support for Igbos during the civil war. Equally true, I’d add, is the paucity of reciprocals citable on the Igbo side, either in the lead-up to the conflict or its aftermath. That we have continued to live in denial for over four decades, vaunting “no victor no vanquished” does nothing to diminish the crime or soothe its victim. Therefore, it should not be considered strange that an Igbo man feels aggrieved by the loss in the war of over two million of his kin, people who, even before the war proper, had been “abused, undergone genocide, and felt completely rejected by the rest of the community” to paraphrase Wole Soyinka.

But we should grasp, not miss, the subtle point I make: the same deep ethno-regional sentiments that played out during the civil war, which Achebe’s There was a country captured so vividly in his inimitable way, are still being deployed by Nigeria’s leadership and followership today, half a century later. Our social cancer, of widespread poverty, still reaching 70 per cent in urban areas and 80 per cent in the rural heartland of the country, is of a magnitude that is rare across the world. It’s doubly harrowing, given the stupendous wealth, pilfered from the treasury of our collective national natural endowments, of our political elite. And all in the face of our youth unemployment indices that still stagnate at alarmingly high levels, probably even higher than the 20 million given recently by no less an authority than Lamido Sanusi, current Governor of our country’s Central Bank. Or need we just keep bemoaning the violence and insecurity currently ravaging our people while our leaders waver, quibble and fiddle?

Professor Achebe was wholly correct when he diagnosed the disease that has long afflicted project Nigeria as “An entirely avoidable mess…, birthed by cataclysmic civil war, precipitated by the bile of ethnic hatred and which created a clique of military class and political adventurers, with academia as purchased collaborators that, together, foisted the culture of anti-intellectualism and exploited the ethnic divisions to rob Nigeria of national resources needed for all kinds of things – health, education, roads opportunities to fulfil its mission in the world”. His curative prescription was equally on the ball: “A political class and intellectuals, including university professors who dare to base their actions on principles, rather than on opportunity, and a national leader with the imagination to deliberately and decisively transcend ethnic pettiness”.

Even with the demise of Achebe and a few others, we haven’t completely lost the core intellectual, moral and technical capital required to rebuild our nation. If Obasanjo hadn’t gotten entangled by an inordinate third term ambition, the powerful team of committed technocrats he assembled during his second term might have succeeded in helping us attain the barest essential of sufficiency in power generation and, given that our civil service still possessed some of the best-trained minds, an anchor for good governance.

And, unlike the present Jonathan (and Yar’Adua before him), those who aspire to lead us need to settle mentally, beforehand, what to do with their power and not remain ad hoc, unprepared and accidental. Our leadership continues to shirk its responsibility to decriminalize politics in Nigeria, turn it, in the words of Professor Adejumo, “…from being a largely criminal project, mainly for those who can steal, maim, destroy and create an artificial sense of popularity, as criminality and good governance are mutually exclusive.”

We dismiss Achebe’s diagnosis and prescription to our own peril in Nigeria, and stand to reap copiously much the same plagues that descended on Biafrans for failing to see through Ojukwu’s deceit. Deceit? Yes, when Ojukwu slyly eliminated views contrary to his own, right up to Ahiara where, suffocating with oratory and waxing lyrical, he recited the principles of a ‘revolution’ he deserted barely six months later at Uli in his dreadfully-hasty escape. There at Uli, reneging on his ‘principled’ Ahiara avowal to “stand by the decisions, no matter the vicissitudes of this war” against Nigeria, Ojukwu took flight, disappearing into the night and leaving Effiong, a non-Igbo, to bravely pick up the pieces. Although, at Ahiara, Ojukwu himself conceded “mistakes of the head and never of the heart”, I’d go so far as to say they were mistakes of both the head and heart.

Yes, deceit when Ojukwu rejected a ceasefire followed by negotiations with no preconditions other than the integrity, not unity, of Nigeria, thereby pushing Biafrans deeper into the abyss. And yes again, deceit when he dismissed Raph Uwechue’s (he of 45 years ago as Biafra’s representative in France, not he of today’s so-called ‘Ndigbo’) “methodical pragmatism and moral rationalism” (to quote that man of letters, Leopold Sedar Senghor, erstwhile President of Senegal)” and continued to needlessly sacrifice the lives of vulnerable Biafran children and women.

Professor Achebe has said he would want to return as Nigerian in his next reincarnation. Perhaps he expects that some things would have changed for better in the country he once described as “… a child, gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward.” But only perhaps. Whatever, the man who beheld sights deemed only fit for gods remains every inch a Nigerian. A great Nigerian.