Says country is worse now than 53 years ago
* Laments writers can't change politicians
* Declares govt moved capital from Lagos to
demobilise citizens
RENOWNED writer, Prof. John Pepper Clark-
Bekederemo, has decried the country's slow
development since independence in 1960.
According to the former university teacher,
the country is worse today than it was 53
years ago at that historic moment of self-rule
from its imperial powers, Britain.
In an unusually frank manner, Clark, whose
80th birthday celebrations spanned over three
days last week and ended at Freedom Park,
Lagos, with the Committee for Relevant Art's
Arthouse Party, lamented that Nigerian
writers have made little or no impact on the
political direction of the country despite
years of commitment through constructive
criticism and other methods of political
engagements.
Thus for Clark, what the country needs to
develop is a people's revolt like those of the
Arab world that are popularly known as the
'Arab Spring.'
The writer, who is also simply known as Prof.
J.P. Clark, said that despite the critical voices
Nigerian writers had lent to efforts at
developing the country by prodding political
leaders in the right direction, nothing seemed
to have happened to justify their
contributions to the task of nation-building.
Clark was also responding to another poet, Mr.
Odia Ofeimun's challenge that poetry does
make things happen, and that poets like Clark,
Wole Soyinka, the late Christopher Okigbo and
Chinua Achebe and himself, whose humanistic
efforts have nurtured the intellectual souls of
millions of young people across Nigeria, Africa
and beyond, do have "gifts to change the arts
of statesmen" to positive engagement. But
Clark disagreed, arguing that the
consciousness of those at the helm of
Nigeria's affairs had been too immature and
narrow to imbibe the humane positivity that
poetry and poets offer to realise a just and
egalitarian society.
In a fit of frustration at what Nigeria has
turned out to be since he started writing in
the 1960s, Clark declared: "We artists
(writers - poets, novelists, playwrights,
essayists) have not made anything happen in
this country. What is our Nigeria today? As
poets, have we changed anything? What have
we changed? If anything, things are worse
than 53 years ago; not even our poetry,
shouting, polemics, criticism have changed
anything. We have no gift to make the art of
statesmen change. It's something else that will
change the country.
"We have no gift to make Nigerian politicians
change. They are doing what they want to do
and that's why we have remained like this -
undeveloped! But by the time we have an Arab
Spring, with people rising in Nigeria, then it's
going to be different."
The first African to be named a professor of
English also spoke on the underlying reason
Nigeria's capital was moved from Lagos to
Abuja, saying it was the military's design to
demobilise Nigerians so that they could not
have a cohesive voice to rise up against their
oppression and effect positive change in their
condition. He said that this situation had
worked effectively to the advantage of those
at political leadership, both military and
political.
"It wasn't because of scarce land that the
capital was moved to Abuja," Clark said.
"Abuja has more bridges today than all the
creeks in the Niger Delta put together. So
that what happens in Lagos these days don't
affect other parts of Nigeria unlike before,
when the capital was in Lagos. We've been
demobilised by the military. I'm concerned
about the growth of this country, a country we
all want to be better than what it is.
"Probably if we had fought for our
independence from colonial rule, we should
have done better. We should have been
unearthing our gold. We are more blessed than
we have shown so far. Nigeria is too blessed to
be this poor."
The erudite scholar and lyrical poet pointed
out that he and writers of his generation like
Okigbo, Achebe and Soyinka were lucky to
have realised themselves very early in their
careers as writers and expressed gratitude to
millions of their admirers around the world. He
noted that when they started out in their
early days as writers in the 1960s, they didn't
realise how far they would go, but that he was
glad where they were.
He stated: "We didn't set out to be taught in
schools or subjects of examinations. We
realised what we were quite early. We were
lucky we realised ourselves very early. We are
very grateful, if I can speak as a group. Our
time was right. Talent and time find each
other, as they did to us. I leave criticism to
critics."

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