“If I were Nigeria,” my father said to me as we had a long-delayed conversation on the veranda of his single-storey house, “I will colonise São Tomé and all the islands up to Gabon; because the west could use those areas to destabilise us.”
That frank view expressed by my dad who schooled in Japan in the seventies and not in any western state like his pairs, has some merit. It speaks to what type of voice Nigeria has or does not have, in the global jungle of diplomacy, where ‘survival of the fittest’ is truly enacted. If I was called out to explain what type of creature Nigeria is in the diplomatic wild, here is what I will say: “Nigeria is from a species of elephants that are so tame, they run for cover in times of danger and turn on their own in times of anger.”
This image of sheer helplessness, utter abandonment, has been bludgeoned into my hair-covered skull…
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