Digesting John Onyeukwu’s latest egusi soup ( not “Palaver sauce”)
Cornelius Hamelberg
Digesting John Onyeukwu’s latest egusi soup ( not “Palaver sauce”)
Stockholm
Sweden
Peoples Planet
25th November, 2025
“Miss November I detect a frown
Close your eyes and turn it upside down”
First things first ; John’s latest seems to have been provoked by that Piers Morgan Uncensored which had as its main aim driving the last nail into the coffin of the claim -the big lie - that there’s an ongoing Genocide of Christians in Nigeria.
Yusuf Tuggar Nigeria's Minister of Foreign Affairs did a decent job dispelling some of the misunderstandings.
But it’s a very bleak picture indeed, the way that the situation is being presented in much of the media. Perhaps it’s time to declare a state of Emergency in some areas in Nigeria? Or a state of national emergency ?
In this order, I have just listened to
BBC : Nigerian government under pressure over kidnapping crisis
Dele Farotimi lambasting his fatherland in The Nation of Liars
There's No Country Anymore': Sowore, Aisha Yesufu React To State Of Nigeria | Inside Sources…
And from the bad news Channels Television for a change here they are trying to sound a little upbeat:
Insecurity: My Mission Is To Stop Blood Flow, Deviate Outlaws From Evil - Sheikh Gumi
As every African and non-African politician knows, it's easier to criticise the government when your behind is comfortably perched on the opposition benches. From there it’s easier to announce the glorious policies you would have been implementing, actually putting into action for the benefit of the people, if you were in POWER !
I don’t know about you, but even at the risk of sounding like a Yoruba praise-singer let me say that for me, reading John Onyeukwu is sometimes like reading the venerable Jiddu Krishnamurti , as I did back then and must have read his total output, definitely before the 4th of July 1976 when I found myself in New York for a couple of months, celebrating the 200th Anniversary of US Independence.
The thing about Krishnamurti is that sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph you find yourself congenially agreeing with him, his almost every word making complete, sometimes amiable sense, but by the time you get to the end of the book, you may find yourself scratching your head in puzzlement and asking yourself, “Exactly what was that guy saying, again seff ?” Just ask yourself to write a two-paragraph summary and you would soon find out. Like a very eventful dream you had and can’t remember all its contents when you wake up. Schalom told me,” Just hold on to the tail end of the dream, and work yourself up, like ascending ( or descending) a ladder”. Schalom could remember his dreams, in minute detail. And what happens with surrealistic dreams, and when you can’t remember the “tail end “ or even the beginning, how do you make sense out of them ? Maybe, no matter what Joseph Campbell or Anthony Burgess says, only you can interpret them.That probably also holds true for nightmares and other deep-seated fears.
Not so with e.g. any of the essays of Bertrand Russell. They are so straightforward that they don't need any interpretation. To begin with, although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 , in Russell you don’t find any of the jaw-breaking Bigi English that the poor illiterati like me find themselves being overwhelmed by, as for instance being occasionally overwhelmed by the Professor of Buckingham Palace’s tortuous Bigi Grammar which he learned over there in the Bayero which is in Louisiana,but not overwhelmed by Hugh Trevor-Roper's Letters From Oxford
From Oxford, indeed.
Back in 1970, at the Chalets in Ghana, my neighbour Eboe Hutchful told me that's where Ghana’s Prime Minister Kofi Busia had left his brain. Eboe ” George “ had just accosted Kofi B in downtown Accra and told him off for driving a Mercedes Benz. Back then there was that kind of freedom of speech for Ghanaians, but not for someone like Jeff Holden.
You can’t help but appreciate how civilised all of John’s critiques and policy suggestions are - it’s never any kind of uncouth and brutal speaking truth to power. And even there, I suppose that charged with sedition,in a Nigerian Court of Law, John would do his very best to charm the chief prosecutor and the Chief Justice.
I daresay that with John, the fundamentals boil down to good governance being based on accountability to the people and the rule of law -a rule of law which implies that no one, not even Nnamdi Kanu should be above the law….
John Onyeukwu’s articles in Policy and Reform column of Business a.m. newspaper,could be collected (collated?) and edited under the heading, “Everything that’s wrong with Nigeria and how to completely fix the nation ” - with the sub-heading - don’t expect a quick fix - because progress is a process that occurs in the present continuous tense only , and there’s nothing instantaneous about counting the years, as the procrastinators say, Rome wasn’t built in a day, speak less of “metamorphosis”, exactly what Muhammadu Buhari meant by Don't expect miracles - miracles, another metaphor .As Jesus said, “only an evil and adulterous generation” is forever hankering after miracles
When we should be building - some people are hellbent on destruction ;talk about unity and the same people vow disunity and are dedicated to separation and secession although their people are all over the place ( I mean are all over Nigeria…
Associative thinking: Mention “process” and at this very moment Kafka's The Process - famously translated into English as The Trial comes to mind - rather, invades my mind and so does the non-fictional character Nnamdi Kanu who like Kafka’s protagonist Josef K would like us to believe that he does not know what crime he was being tried for, except that in Kanu’s case the crimes are many and one of his prominent indigenous Igbo people has had this to say about Nnamdi Kanu the self-proclaimed “ leader of the indigenous people of Biafra” and even without anything like a military background or training, probably at this very moment being stripped naked up there in Sokoto ( as in the emperor wears no clothes) because he romantically sees himself as the inheritor of the mantle worn by the late great Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.
Well, his fellow Indigenous Igbo tribesman Senator Orji Uzor Kalu who he claims to be a leader of, has this to say about the self-appointed IPOB commander-in-Chief :
Senator Orji Uzor Kalu says that over 30,000 killed due to Nnamdi Kanu’s agitation
In his latest star article why doesn’t John mention this singularly important factor which sticks in the eye as contributing to the general collapse of authority and morality in Nigeria, has contributed to the widespread lawlessness and terror, all at the disservice of making what the losers once vowed, making Nigeria ungovernable.
A simple understanding of the complex mess is that Nigeria is a big, vast country and the security apparatus is outstretched. How do we begin to fix that ? More money to patrolling and to law enforcement of course. Should the lawlessness, ransom-kidnapping etc escalate to the climax point that overwhelmed Haiti not too long ago, namely Gang Rule in Haiti, a Haiti , our Haiti that seems all but forgotten but for the recent good news for which the resilience and fighting spirit of Haitians deserves our heartiest congratulations: even at the height of the disaster after the gangs took over, Haiti has qualified for the FIFA 2026 World Cup ( whilst most disappointingly , symptomatically, Mighty Nigeria is out - and the only reason for both Mighty Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and the Okuru dog not qualifying for the world football jamboree cannot be attributed to the lame excuse that just like the world, so too “the ball is round” ?
It wasnät so long ago that history recorded the American Declaration of Independence - and just look where they are, how much they have achieved since 4th July 1776; -there was The American Civil War ( 1861 - 1865) which culminated in The Abolition of Slavery in the United States eight months later….You can also measure progress 1885 -1965 and 1965 - 2025…
Back to the future, about Trump preparing for the invasion of Nigeria, with just a little poetic imagination you can imagine another vision of history, another version of history “reality”, John would call it, when chanting “ Forces Of Viktry” a more advanced civilisation , the greatest civilization that the world has ever known, “The United States of Africa” sent some Liberation Forces to the remnants of what was once Trump’s America, to liberate the oppressed masses trapped in The prison-industrial complex there.
Nation is a very important concept, when nation is a reality. For example, I more or less misread this sentence : “The Minister’s tweet is an important reminder that Nigeria is not a simple country to analyse or govern.” What I read - better still, what my mind photographed as a cluster - since I did not read John’s article word by word , or one word after the other, perhaps racing ahead as I sometimes do, what I read was “ The Minister’s tweet is an important reminder that Nigeria is not a SINGLE country to analyse or govern.” - and that too would also be true, because as these ethnic maps of Nigeria show, the composite Nigeria is an amalgamation of many nations welded together into what we now celebrate and some discontents denigrate as the Federal Republic of Nigeria…