Celebrated across the globe, Professor Niyi Osundare - poet, dramatist, critic, essayist and media columnist - remains one of the most verdant minds within the generation of contemporary Anglophone Nigerian poets. He ventillates his mind to KEHINDE OYETIMI, OLARONKE JAIYEOLA and JOSEPH AJAYI on his infuriation against his Nigeria. Excerpts:

SIR, if you are to draw from the recent happenings in the country, especially under the Jonathan administration, what would be your assessment of the nation?
Generally there is a downward trend in the affairs of Nigeria.  I discovered that Nigeria is deteriorating in every aspect of her national life. In education, everything seems to be going down; teachers are on strike, kids are not being taught. Our country is getting more and more illiterate. The government doesn’t seem to care. Our roads are worse than they ever were. Hospitals have disappeared. In the past, the rich among us used to go to America and Germany and Britain. They still go. The not-so-rich couldn’t go at that time. Now the not-so-rich go to India and Egypt. The terrible irony is that both countries started on the development trail with Nigeria about the same time.  At the political level, Nigeria is being railroaded into a one-party state by a behemoth called the PDP. There is no security of life and property. I know these are clichés more or less; but they are important clichés, because they are the fears that rule our lives. The days are not safe; the nights are full of fright.

The police take bribes in open daylight. There was a time law enforcement agencies took bribes remorsefully, reluctantly, shamefacedly. That is why the Yoruba word for bribe is owo eyin: the money you receive with your hands at your back. Today, the bribe has become owo iwaju, the illicit gratification you receive with your hand stretched out boldly before you, not just to take it but to demand it. When the driver or the victim says “Oh I have no change,” The policeman says “No problem:l have change.” Terrible! But we should not single out the police for blame; their act is part of the general Nigerian decay.  The point I’m making is clear and simple: this is a lawless country.

Yes, Nigeria is becoming more and more lawless. I tell my children, friends and colleagues: “Please live within your means and be very careful.” There is no authority of ultimate justice in this country.

Who will you appeal to? This is why we have not been able to solve the high profile murders that have taken place in this country in the last two decades. We still do not know who killed Papa Rewane; we still do not know who killed Harry; we still do not know who killed Bola Ige. Oh, if we want to go further back, we still do not know who killed Dele Giwa.  Or, to get closer home, in my own state, Ekiti, the murderers of Omojola and Daramola have yet to be identified and brought to book.  A country with so many unsolved crimes cannot avoid being a crime-ridden place. What this  shows is that crime pays. I also look at our politics and I ask how democratic is Nigeria? What is Nigeria’s definition of democracy? There is absolutely no democracy in Nigeria today. We only have some form of civil rule.

The level of illiteracy I encounter in this country is truly staggering. Our Humanities graduates cannot write; their Science counterparts are under-educated in out-dated, ill-equipped workshops and laboratories.Everywhere, the  knowledge industry  is on the downturn. The culture of the mind has been supplanted by the scramble for money and material possessions. Many universities in this country today  do not have bookstores, real bookstores. Even  my beloved University of Ibadan doesn’t have a full and functional bookstore in the real sense of the word. It makes me feel like crying because I was one of the greatest beneficiaries of that bookstore in my days as an undergraduate. I used to go there to browse. I love the smell of new books.

Nigeria is less literate now than it was about 20 years ago. Forget the proliferation of universities that we  now have all over the place. This country boasts another tragic irony. When the total number of the universities in Nigeria was not more than eight, Nigeria was more literate and more book- conscious than now when we have well over a hundred universities sprouting like mushrooms  all over the land.

At the moment Nigeria is a pseudo-literate society.  No country in this state can ever claim to be developing without deceiving itself. This is why I decided to cry out. I am not an Amos or Jeremiah. I am not a prophet of doom. However, the kind of training I have received,  the kind of work I do, and my passion for this country encourage and empower me  not only to see things as they are but also  as they are capable of being. They enable me to project and anticipate. I have never seen a country like this where you cannot point out one aspect  of the national life that is on the upswing. All the development indices seem to be pointing south. Our rulers are too deaf, too  blind,  and too greedy to know what is happening. Those who know do not care; those who care do not know.

President Jonathan is an outgrowth of the Nigerian political decay. We were here a couple of weeks ago when we experienced the politicisation of the ill-health and demise of his predecessor. The way the whole thing was stage-managed was sickening. It was a conspiracy. This was what threw up Dr. Jonathan as president. People say he is a good man and I have no right to doubt them. But I am looking at his political pedigree. How much experience does he have? How much testing has he gone through?  Dr. Jonathan has no honeymoon. His honeymoon is over. We still do not know where he wants Nigeria to head or not head. He said something about his predecessor’s seven-point agenda. He said he was not going to follow all of them. Good, now we ask Dr. Jonathan: where is your own agenda? The Nigerian people are asking.  Dr. Jonathan doesn’t look like the messiah that we are looking for. Hitherto, he appears to lack the grit, fire, drive, and radical resolve that are desperately needed by the desperate Nigerian situation. He may prove me wrong. I would be glad to be proved wrong.

There was a show of fisticuffs in the House of Reps. How does this portray us? What does this signal come 2011?
The show of shame that we saw was disgusting, absolutely intolerable, but by no means surprising. If you see the quality of those who call themselves lawmakers in this country, you wouldn’t be surprised. To begin with, these are lawmakers who got to their present position by breaking the law.

Many of them were rigged into office. Negative, negative, negative may not produce positive, positive, positive. How many of them were honestly and transparently elected by the people? Only a tiny minority. What else do you expect from law-breakers parading themselves as lawmakers?

Many of the people currently strutting in  the streets as “Distinguished Senators’ and “Honourable Representatives”, and who are gobbling up the nation’s resources, should be in the back woods or at best end up as  local government councillors. But they have been shot into the limelight by the Nigerian system.  Many of them are barely literate in the complex act (and art) of law-making. Many cannot spell ‘Nigeria’ correctly. This is part of the deterioration in the  Nigerian life that I was talking about. When you compare the quality of legislators now with the quality of legislators in the First and Second Republics, you are struck by a staggering difference. Time there was when legislators stood, spoke, made  sense, and commanded respect. A couple of months ago, I was in conversation with that noted historian, Professor Banji Akintoye who now lives in the US. This still acutely cerebral man was so pained by current happenings in Nigeria – the venal and despicable jobbery that the noble and patriotic act of lawmaking has become.  To be sure, a number of our  lawmakers are educated and well-meaning, but this group constitutes a tiny minority. And this minority hasn’t made any significant difference. Indeed, they have not distinguished themselves from the greedy and selfish bunch.  Lawmaking is not a joke. No country plays with it. We like to model ourselves after America. I was there to witness what happened when the Healthcare Bill was being passed. Ah! My God! You saw legislators that were genuinely  interested in the future of their country and the welfare of their people. The Democrats were fighting for the Bill;;  the Republicans against. Both sides came up with very cogent and intelligent reasons. December 24/25, the legislators were in the chamber until early hours of the morning, working, working. What came out eventually is over 1,000 pages—The American Healthcare Bill. President Obama himself had sleepless nights.  Those are legislators.

Those are people who govern a developed and developing country. What we have here is a bunch of greedy, self-centered, legislators, most of them with questionable levels of literacy.  They are not interested in you and me.  They are more interested in perquisites and emoluments. I would like us as Nigerians to be more interested in, more concerned about  how we are ruled. I would like us to ask: How much does a senator take home every month? How much does a rep take home every month?

How much does a state assembly man  take home every month? How much do the local government chairmen and their councillors  take home every month? What about their emoluments? What is the so-called constituency allocation? Where are the constituencies? Where are the constituents? To take a personal example, I am supposed to be a constituent of a constituency somewhere in Ekiti. When I get there, I do not see anything on the ground. How does my legislator spend the money that is supposed to be for us? Nigerians are not asking these questions.

Well ,there was a time,  4 or 5 weeks ago , when the senators were talking about their allocations being too small. They spoke about  a quarterly allocation of 56 million naira, or whatever. Some of them even wanted it to be raised to 100 million naira! The legislators treat constituency allowances exactly the same way governors treat security votes: a boon for the boys (and girls), a windfall in our jungle of permissive morality. These monies are never efficiently and transparently accounted for.

They are treated as spoils of office. Billions of naira! All this in a country where many workers remain unpaid, and where poverty is so widespread. Mark my word: if things are allowed to continue this way, Nigeria would be bankrupt in another five years. Some of the states already are. We spend far too much of our resources on the maintenance of an indolent, greedy, unproductive, and parasitic political class.

Nigeria has no lawmakers; what we have are  lawbreakers. What you saw in the House of Reps was an instance of that lawbreaking. It is as bad and as brutal and as barbaric as it could be. But what was the root cause of the brawl?  What about the over 2 billion scam the “progressives’ were screaming about?  Now nobody is talking about that. I think we have to get to the root of the problem. I saw the whole show of shame on  television. It was very dramatic.

When the ‘dissidents’  were being hounded out of the chambers, the Speaker sat glum and detached in his chair, pretending not to be touched by the melee, with the gavel in his hand. Nothing could have been more dramatic; nothing could have been more deceitful; nothing could have been more intolerable. He was the cause of the whole brouhaha, but he stood as if he was above the fray. That kind of drama is insulting to the people of this country. Now, we say:  Mr Speaker , speak out. Where did all that money go? Let us know the fact about the inflated invoices. On one or two occasions, I had been caught up in the traffic snarl  when the Speaker arrived in Lagos. I had to sweat and sweat because his convoy took over the whole road. A speaker of the House of Representatives, about twenty cars in his convoy! Some of them bulletproof! Costing billions of naira of Nigeria’s money! Who are they protecting themselves against? Now that is in Lagos. I’m sure that the convoy in Abuja must be something like that too. Now, if all these privileges belong to  the Speaker, I wonder what the Senate President’s own convoy must look like!  I wonder what the paraphernalia and the panoply of the vice president would be like. Do not talk about that of the president himself.

I say again, with a note of rueful warning: Nigeria spends too much of her earnings on the maintenance of a parasitic  political class. This country is going to go bankrupt.Our oil money is being squandered. Along with it, our very future. There must be an end to this prodigality and improvidence.

Professor Maurice Iwu has been removed as the INEC chairman with Professor Jega replacing him. Jega asserted that he would not be bought. With him as the INEC boss, do you believe that the votes of Nigerians will count in 2011?

I wish I could give a yes or no answer to that. But it is absolutely impossible. To begin with, I say to my comrade Attahiru Jega: Congratulations and condolences. I don’t know who railroaded Attahiru into this position and why he accepted it. We knew Jega as ASUU president. Iwu was his vice, the two of them worked together. Attahiru Jega actually came to be president of ASUU in the time of crisis. Then we were having problems during the Babangida era after our president, the irrepressible Festus Iyayi, had been hounded out of UNIBEN by the combined forces of Babangida and Professor Allele-Williams. He is a very likeable person. He is self-effacing, intelligent, intense, rational and a thorough - going intellectual. His records as vice chancellor at Bayero are his positive. He is a very good person.

But will the Attahiru Jega I knew as ASUU president  be different from Attahiru Jega who is going to be chair of INEC? ASUU is a well regulated and modulated body of intellectuals. In fact before you make it to the top in ASUU, you must have gone through the grindstone as it were. ASUU is essentially democratic. All the participating universities have their own delegates and no decision is made without carrying the majority of the branches along. We have been extremely lucky in the kind of leaders we’ve been having since the inauguration of ASUU in 1980. ASUU leadership has been exemplary because, among other factors, ASUU membership has been involved and vigilant. Our country has a lot to learn from this.

The electoral problem in Nigeria is so vast and multi-faceted. I do not know how much of a difference one man could make in all this mess. The banana peel is already there. To begin with, there is a terrible contradiction in the way Attahiru was appointed. He was a member of the Uwais Commission. The Commission did a good job, no doubt. One of the most important terms of its report has to do with the appointment of the chair of INEC. It is clearly stated there that one of the reasons for the corruption and corruptibility of INEC chairmen is the manner and nature of their appointment. When the president is the one who appoints the INEC chair, what you have is the situation of a player appointing the referee in a game in which he is a participant. It doesn’t stand the test of commonsense.

It is also immoral. President Yar’dua played games with the Uwais Report by sending  his White Paper on it to the House without that provision, thereby depriving it of one of its strong teeth.

Yar’Adua played really disingenuous,underhanded politics in his handling of that Report. We can only hope that President Jonathan would be more forthright with Nigerians on this very vital issue.

Jega has been appointed by this present president. This president has not told Nigerians whether he wants to run or not. Now what happens if he decides to run?
We would have come back to our point about a player appointing a referee in a game in which he is a participant. Electoral sanity is too vital to the corporate survival of Nigeria to be handled with the kind of chicanery we have been seeing.

And now the other important question: Who appoints the resident electoral commissioners? These officers are the people in the field. The INEC chairman is over there in the national capital overseeing them. Elections are not rigged physically in the office of the INEC chairman. They are rigged at the polling stations. The rigging of elections in this country, particularly in 2003 and 2007 was supervised by the resident electoral officers.

Who can forget in a hurry the role of the legendary  Ayoka Adebayo in the 2008 Ekiti re-run election? A woman who said “oh no no no, I cannot declare these figures because they are bogus and alarming and very much against my Christian conscience.” She disappeared, was summoned to Abuja a couple of days later, met with the INEC and PDP “stakeholders”, was intimidated, blackmailed, and coaxed into abandoning that “conscience”, coming out  eventually  to declare that : INEC is one family.  To think that a state governor was “elected” by this foul and evil means! No country that plays this kind of game can make progress. If you put garbage in, garbage is what you are going to get at the end. Anybody who has a conscience in this country should feel nauseated by what happened in Ekiti. How would Jega handle that kind of situation? I really do not know. Jega is not the one who appointed the resident electoral commissioners. Right? I understand the governors have a say in their appointments.

You know what that means. They are going to fill that place with their own puppets. The 2011 election is thus already being rigged even before  it ever takes place. How much power and control can Jega have over these government appointees?

The situation Jega is in reminds me very much of my encounter with our immortal Tai Solarin when he was given the post of Chairman of the People’s Bank. I went to him and said ‘Uncle Tai what is this I am hearing? Those who gave you this Greek gift are trying to destroy you and those who believe in you.  Please don’t let them.” He said “Well, I’ve always been for the people. This is an opportunity to serve them. A man of good faith, he meant well” I asked if he trusted the ones asking him to serve the people; how much of the people’s friends are they, really ?  “ We know you as a man of integrity”, I told him “But what happens to a sole man of integrity who finds himself in a moral desert?” This question pops back into focus as I consider the Jega appointment. I shudder when I remember that Nigeria’s moral roadside is littered with a crowd of “rubbished” professors.

Nigeria  has an uncanny way of rubbishing good men and women. In fact,  it’s as if this country is a cesspool and whoever is the leader will look at somebody whose clothe is still clean and do everything to drag that person into the mess. You have to have a lot of courage and integrity to be able to say no. I’m afraid Jega is being put  in a position in which he cannot exercise full   power, a situation that he cannot control. How will he control the security agents who collude in the snatching of ballot boxes?

We have seen so many instances, These agents are bribeable and easily corruptible. What about the wizards of the computer room who manipulate poll figures and conduct  virtual elections? What about pervasive pressures from the ruling party bent on turning Nigeria into a one-party state?

What pains me is that Professors have been used to clean up the mess so many times. I think Jega would be about the fifth professor to serve as boss of the electoral commission. The only professor that has left the place untarnished is Professor Eme  Awa and he ran away when he saw that he was being subjected to undue pressure. They harassed him, they intimidated him but he told them “I’m an old man; I want to go to my grave with the clean name that I’m noted for. Take your position.” They took their position. Whom did they give it to? It was another professor: Humphrey Nwosu. You remember what he did with it.

Now we have another professor as INEC chair. Professors are not trained to handle political thugs. Professors are not trained to superintend over corrupted electoral officers. How would Jega be able to do this? How many hands does Jega have? How many fingers are in each hand? How many heads stand on his shoulders? How many eyes does he have? The people who should be his eyes in the country, he does not have control over because they were not appointed by him. He has a gargantuan task ahead of him..

Only one election has succeeded in this country: the one of June 12, 1993. All the other elections were designed to fail. June 12 was designed to fail but it became a spirit as it were. It refused to die; it refused to fail. Because it refused to fail, Babangida and his clique killed it; they killed something about this country. Nigeria has not really recovered from June 12.

What about option A4 that succeeded so well on June 12, 1993? I was here, going from one polling station to another. I saw women with babies on their backs, singing, waving their ballot papers. That was democracy about to unfold. Nigeria was poised for progress. Babangida and his clique killed that dream. As I said before in another forum, if this were a true  country, people like Babangida would be in jail for crime against humanity and the Nigerian dream. No crime could have been greater than that. He was responsible for the deaths of so many Nigerians including those that were killed during the June 12 riot. But now he wants to rule again. Such unspeakable abomination!  Comrade Jega will need a miracle to succeed in this task. And I am no believer in miracles.

The House of Reps has approved pensionable benefits for former military heads of state. Earlier, they were excluded. Doesn’t this show that we are valorising our anachronistic past?
When I read on the internet that there was a bill in the making preventing those who came to power through non-democratic means from enjoying the kind of privileges you’ve mentioned, I said this is good. But I had my doubts.  Remember the Senate is headed by a member of a former military junta. I still remember very well the then Colonel David Mark as a triumphant member of the Babangida clique telling us that the telephone is not  for the  poor. I think many Nigerians still remember David Mark’s verdict that June 12 was dead. These were people who did everything to kill democracy.

Now they are legislators—triumphal legislators, new-born democrats.  Indeed, Nigeria is a huge joke.

If Nigeria were a play in the hands of a Greek tragedian, the tragic ironies would  be heavy enough to sink a ship! But it is a kind of tragedy that ends with bloodshed. We have had so much of it here. I said to myself: “My God! Obasanjo is a former military ruler; Buhari is a former military ruler; Babangida is a former military ruler; Abdulsalam is a former military ruler; Danjuma is a former military ruler; ‘Jerryboy’ Useni is a former military ruler. These are the big boys, very rich, very powerful.”These were the people who directly or indirectly sponsored  many of the legislators. I knew our great lawmakers would reverse themselves. And I have not been proved wrong. This is a typical Nigerian situation. I’m not going to shed a tear that they have done this. I don’t expect any change from the present group of lawbreakers who call themselves lawmakers. Nothing good can come from people whose hands are soiled by so many crimes.

Despite the huge investment in the Eagles, they crashed out of the World Cup in South Africa leading to the ban by the presidency, later changed. The Coach, Lars Lagerback, was paid a whopping sum of 90 million naira. Could you compare the attention given to education to football?
When was the year the Amokachi team won the prestigious contest? I think it was in 1994. It was a great day for Nigerians and for those boys and the willowy Kanu Nwankwo. We all celebrated them.

I remember asking my students in a class: “Do you know why Nigeria won that game? We came from three goals down, we levelled up and we beat the Brazilians; we had dispatched the Argentines earlier on, the top notchers in world football.” I said discipline, team work, discipline. There was a lot of synergy among the Nigerian team; there was science. Football is science. The problem with us in Nigeria is that we have banished science from everyday life and replaced it with superstition of all kinds. Two plus two will equal four in traditional Mathematics; well I don’t know what modern Mathematics has made of it. Putting an airplane in the sky and getting it to fly until it is time to put it back on the ground require science. The watch on my wrist has come to us through science. If rational planning and design do not go into it, it wouldn’t work. When you see Brazilians play whether they are playing to lose or to win, you will see the intelligence and artistry in their moves.

Science doesn’t just fall on your laps or  your shoulders. It is got through education and training. The practice in Nigeria is to scramble and put a team together four, five weeks to a soccer contest. This is a typical Nigerian way of misdoing things. I call it the  act-first, think-later, fire brigade approach. It is what has ruined our politics, education, and everything. That’s why Nigeria had eleven stars on the field but no team. This was the problem. Our team couldn’t co-ordinate very well. The secret of Argentina and Brazil is to catch them young. By the time the players are  on the world plane, they have already mastered each other’s psychology and style. This is where science comes in again.

Pele, the greatest footballer the world has ever known, revealed a ‘secret’ in an interview some years ago. When he had become a star and sure game-winner, the opposing team used to designate about three of its players to pin him down. He attempted to solve this through a stylish and dramatic passing of the ball to other members of his team. When asked why he was so sure there would be a fellow player to pick up his pass, he said he knew somebody would be there because he had been trained to be there.  “If I closed my eyes and I tipped the ball,”  he said, “I know it would go into the hands of a yellow jersey.” It is science, training, intelligence. Nigeria is not an intelligently governed country. No wonder we do not have intelligently managed sports.  Look at our politicians. The behaviour of the Super Eagles is a direct measure of the Nigerian factor. Our super stars couldn’t blend on the field just as the “gathering of tribes” we call Nigeria has been finding it difficult to achieve a corporate existence. Compare the Eagles to the Black Stars of Ghana, and you see the difference. Ghana has always ‘outshined’ Nigeria because of her greater cohesiveness and better organisation. In a desperate reaction to the dismal performance of the Eagles, President Jonathan decreed their banning from world competitions for two years. I say: hardly enough; we need to close down the entire country for five years for proper reorganisation and re-management.

Nigeria will be 50 in October this year; doesn’t this call for celebration?
I’m sure you know you are asking me a rhetorical question. There is absolutely nothing to celebrate. Every development indicator in this country is pointing  downward. When I was a secondary school student in the 1960s, we could go from Ibadan to Jos by train. It was joyful ride because at every station you saw different people and cultures. Where is the Nigerian railway today? It is gone. Where is the Nigerian Airways; where is the Nigerian shipping line? They are all gone. How many hours of electricity supply does a Nigerian enjoy in a month? Probably ten or twenty! There is no sense of Nigerianness.

Nigeria is going the way of the Congo. Perhaps we have been Mobutuised.  Mobutu ruled Congo for 32 years but he made sure Congo did not unite. If you had to go from Kinshasa to Kinsangani, you would have to use a helicopter because there were no roads. Look at the so - called expressway between Lagos and Ibadan. When you leave Ibadan for Lagos or vice versa, you get to your destination ‘whenever’. The eastern flank of the country has been literally severed from the rest of it as a result of impassable roads.

All the things that made us a country in the past have disappeared. What are we celebrating? We should spend October 1 this year as a day of national soberness, reflection, stock taking. Let nobody vote some 10 billion naira for the sponsoring of any jamboree. We should be too sad to dance. Let us sit down and ask: “Where did the rain begin to beat us?”

The Oba of Benin recommended that public officers should swear with totems representing indigenous deities before being sworn to office. Do you believe in the effectiveness of such?
The Oba has made an important observation. Some years ago, there was the case of a theft suspect who lied blatantly when he swore on the Bible. Because he was Christian with a Muslim name, he was also asked to swear on the Qur’an, and he also swore falsely. But when he was given the machete to swear by,  he trembled furiously and confessed his crime. Ogun was so grave, too real a power for him to swear falsely by.

Today, it is fashionable to say: “I have discarded Ifa; I’ve discarded Ogun. It is the Bible that I hold and believe.” But I have seen pastors going to consult the Babalawo. I have seen imams going to the traditional marabout for tira. What we have really is a combination of the two: the traditional and the so-called Western or Islamic. I believe that many of our people still fear Aiyelala, Ogun, Sango, and Saponna. And this does not prevent them from being Muslims or Christians.  The Oba’s recommendation  may be another way of making us to go back to our indigenous roots. The suggestion of the Oba of Benin must NOT be laughed out of context. We have strayed too far, too long from our way, and the result is the moral and spiritual anarchy that is the order of our present existence.

Let’s extend this beyond the here and now and go back to the past. Which leaders in the past would have behaved like our present rulers? Which of them would have plundered the communal treasury and mortgaged the social patrimony and got away with it? They wouldn’t have dared it because communal sanctions were there, and accountability was higher because society was bound by stronger moral and spiritual ethos. Nigeria today is a no-man’s land of thief-politicians and moral cripples.