Political and biographical background

Nigeria attained independence in 1960. Twenty-three years later author, poet and essayist Chinua Achebe published this extended essay briskly summarising the problems his nation faced. Before we get to the text, there’s some interesting biography to point out. Achebe had published his last novel, A Man of The People in 1966, so what had he been doing between 1966 and this publication 16 years later?

Soon after the publication of A Man of The People Nigeria experienced the 1966 military coup. This in turn led to the Nigerian Civil War, triggered when the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967.  In fact some in the military thought the ending of A Man of The People so closely paralleled the real-life coup that he must have had some foreknowledge so he had to flee to Biafra to escape arrest. Achebe supported Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the new state, travelling to European and North American cities to drum up support. He helped draft a declaration of principles for the new country. The Achebe family narrowly escaped disaster several times during the war, including a bombing of their house. The general disruption favoured the form of poetry and in 1971 he published the collection ‘Beware, Soul Brother.

With the end of the war, he returned to the family home in Ogidi only to find it destroyed. His passport was revoked. He took up a teaching post at the University of Nigeria. In 1971 he helped set up two literary magazines. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories, ‘Girls At War’.

In 1972 he took up a teaching post at the University of Amherst, later adding a visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut. It was at Amherst in 1975 that he gave his famous lecture accusing Joseph Conrad of being a ‘racist’.

Achebe returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976, where he held a chair in English until his retirement in 1981. He edited the literary journal Okike and became active with the left-leaning People’s Redemption Party (PRP). In 1983, he became the party’s deputy national vice-president and it was now, after 17 busy, traumatic, and globetrotting years, that he published the pamphlet under review, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. Its publication was timed to coincide with the upcoming elections i.e. it was a direct and controversial intervention in Nigerian politics by someone who was, by now, a veteran of political commentary.

The Trouble with Nigeria

In this brief pamphlet Achebe set out to enumerate Nigeria’s many problems and suggest solutions. His stated aim was to challenge the resignation and negativity of his fellow Nigerians ‘which cripple our aspiration and inhibit our chances of becoming a modern and attractive country’. He aimed to inspire them to reject the old habits which, in his opinion, prevented Nigeria from becoming a modern country.

The book became famous because it attributed the fundamental failure of Nigeria on its disastrously bad leadership. With the right leadership he thought the country could resolve its many problems such as: tribalism, lack of patriotism, social injustice, the cult of mediocrity indiscipline and, of course, corruption. The essay is divided into ten parts.

Rather than give a long conclusion at the end I’ll comment on the points he raises chapter by chapter.

1. Where the problem lies (3 pages)

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of great leadership. (p.22)

Change is possible but it requires ‘a radical programme of social and economic reorganisation’.

I believe that Nigeria is a nation favoured by Providence. I believe there are individuals as well as nations who, on account of peculiar gifts and circumstances, are commandeered by history to facilitate mankind’s advancement. Nigeria is such a nation…the fear that should haunt our leaders (but does not) is that they may already have betrayed Nigeria’s high destiny. (p.24)

I find it hard to take this overblow rhetoric seriously. There is no Providence. There is no guiding hand. ‘History’ is not a force in the world, it is just the record of what we’ve done. There is no ‘high destiny’. There is no God or law saying mankind will ‘advance’ in any particular direction – what a ridiculous idea.

Throughout his career Achebe railed against Western misconceptions about Africa and yet here he is spouting just such 19th century, positivistic rhetoric about the forward march of humanity etc etc. Population growth is out of control. We are burning the world and destroying the habitats we rely on for our survival. Russia bombs maternity hospitals. Israel bombs refugee camps. The Sudanese massacre each other. Famine is coming in Ethiopia. What advancement of mankind?

Right here, right at the start of the pamphlet, Achebe reveals that he is more attached to high-sounding rhetoric than any kind of detailed analysis of the geography, agriculture, resources or economy of Nigeria, and this tone of lofty generalisation characterises most of the essay.

He is closer to reality when he says Nigeria benefited from an oil boom which should have been invested to modernise the country but instead Nigeria’s leaders have stolen or embezzled huge sums, and squandered the rest on importing expensive fancy foreign goods.

2. Tribalism (4 pages)

Achebe dates the triumph of tribalism in politics, and the death of a pan-Nigerian dream, to the moment in 1951 (when the country was still nominally owned and run by Britain) when Chief Obafemi Awolowo stole the leadership of Western Nigeria from Dr Nnamdi Azikwe (aka Zik). This is interesting to readers of his novels because it seems to be the basis for the similar cabinet coup described at the start of A Man of The People.

Achebe blames the fact that the national anthem was written by a British woman for perpetuating the idea of tribe and goes on to describe how, after 1966, another national anthem was adopted.

Achebe skims through a work of academic discussion and defines tribalism as ‘discrimination against a citizen because of his place of birth’, gives examples of how this discrimination operates at the time of the essay. He points to the American example where, in the specific example of filling out forms to apply to university, specifying a person’s state of origin is forbidden precisely to eliminate discrimination. Nigeria should do the same.

And that’s it on the issue of tribalism, one of the most complex and difficult problems facing almost every African country. Not exactly a thorough analysis, maybe – and it’s so typical of a writer to think that the key to such a super-complex social and political issue can be found in a couple of poems, and an official form. It feels like he lacks the academic training or background in the subject to engage with it properly.

3. False image of ourselves (2 and a half pages)

One of the commonest manifestations of under-development is a tendency among the ruling elite to live in a world of make-believe and unrealistic expectations. (p.29)

In Achebe’s view, Nigeran leaders spout high-sounding rhetoric to inspire their auditors and make themselves sound big by, for example, going on and on about Nigeria being a great country. Whereas Achebe, being an ordinary (albeit literary and articulate) citizen, is able to tell the truth.

Nigeria is not a great country, it is one of the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun…It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth. (p.30)

Achebe is straight-talking like this throughout the essay and it’s fun. Even if he then ruins the effect with the empty, hackneyed phrases of his ‘solution’:

Nigeria is not absolutely beyond redemption. Critical, yes, but not hopeless. But every single day of continued neglect brings her ever closer to the brink of the abyss. To pull her back and turn her around is clearly beyond the contrivance of mediocre leadership. It calls for greatness. (p.31)

Greatness? Unfortunately much of his argumentation consists of a rhetorical exaggeration of Nigeria’s plight, so that he can then propose surprisingly windy and rhetorical solution.

Achebe’s negativism about Nigeria is a kind of mirror image of its leaders overblown boosterism: both are just fine-sounding words, both fail to engage with the horribly complex realities on the ground.

4. Leadership, Nigeria-style (1 page)

Achebe accuses the founding fathers of Nigeria of lacking intellectual rigour, of a tendency to ‘pious materialistic woolliness and self-centred pedestrianism’. As you’ve read, I detect exactly that kind of ‘woolliness and lack of intellectual rigour in Achebe’s own discourse. He is himself part of the problem he claims to be finding a solution for.

On Unity and Faith (one and a half pages)

Leaders call loudly for unity. The word is on the Nigerian coat of arms. But Achebe says unity is only valuable if it’s for a good purpose. The mafia is united. Also on the Nigerian coat of arms is the word Faith. So he also asks, faith in what? Answering these questions:

calls for a habit of mental rigour, for which, unfortunately, Nigerians are not famous. (p.33)

(You can’t help thinking this is the kind of sweeping statement about an entire people that Achebe can make, but any white author would be cancelled for.)

Anyway, the really interesting question is why the founding fathers chose Unity and Faith at all, given that they are such vague and ill-defined terms, rather than, say Justice and Honesty and Truth, which are for more clear and definable. Is it because the founding fathers didn’t think Nigerians could live up to those harder ideals?

5. Patriotism (3 and a half pages)

Nigerians are among the world’s most unpatriotic people. (p.34)

This is because patriotism requires trust or belief in a country’s leaders and Nigerians don’t have that. A patriot, he says, is someone who truly loves their country, who holds it to the highest standards and demands the best. Is that right?

Quite clearly patriotism is not going to be easy in a country as badly run as Nigeria. (p.35)

What Nigeria abounds in is the spurious patriotism of its ruling class. True patriotism can only exist when a country is ruled well by leaders who have the welfare of the majority at heart and not the material gain of the few. In other words, a country’s leaders have to give its population something to be patriotic about.

6. Social injustice and the cult of mediocrity (8 pages)

The worst impact of tribalism is injustice in awarding jobs to mediocre or incompetent candidates who come from ‘the right tribe’. It multiplies incompetence in the system and demoralisation among the victims. Thus Nigeria is a country where it’s difficult to point to even one job which is done by the best available candidate. Consistently picking a third or fourth eleven means Nigeria will never make it into the world league. This explains why the public services are so dire:

Look at our collapsing public utilities, our inefficient and wasteful parastatals and state-owned companies. If you want electricity, you buy your own generator; if you want water, you sink your own bore-hole; if you want to travel, you set up your own airline. (p.39)

But it’s not just the inefficiency and waste which promoting mediocrities to run everything badly leads to. The bigger issue is the enormous disparity between the class of people who manage things, in effect a managerial elite, who award each other huge pay packets and perks, and the vast majority of the population who remain dirt poor.

Even if the perks and luxuries and payoffs are a legacy of the colonial system, Nigerians have had two decades to reform them instead of which they’ve made the problem ten times worse.

What is the purpose of government? Surely there are two:

1. to maintain peace and security
2. to establish social justice, a sense of fairness and equality

Peace and stability depends on a sense of fairness. If people’s sense of unfairness and injustice is pushed to breaking point, you get revolution. All the talk about ministers and perks and chief executives ignores the fact of the tens of millions scraping a living from infertile soil, living under flyovers, scavenging on waste dumps, ‘the wretched of the earth’.

He is fully aware that most of the conversations of intellectuals or the political or business elite are incredibly aloof and disconnected from the great mass of the population.

7. Indiscipline (12 pages)

He defines indiscipline as:

a failure or refusal to submit one’s desires and actions to the restraints of orderly social conduct in recognition of the rights and desires of others. (p.45)

As a parent I know another way of saying this is acting like a grown-up and not a spoilt child. He himself says lack of self discipline is a sign of immaturity. He says lack of self discipline blights the majority of Nigerians and helps make the place a madhouse.

You can see it most clearly in the behaviour of the traffic on the roads, which Achebe has a real bee in his bonnet about. He comes back again and again to Nigerians’ terrible behaviour on the road and uses it as an example of the way Nigerians have given themselves entirely over to ‘rampaging selfishness’ (p.49).

Leaders are, among other things, role models. If a country’s leaders are selfish and greedy, lacking all restraint and self discipline, then it creates a climate of indiscipline in which millions of their countrymen think it’s OK to be like them.

Not only that but the leaders’ indiscipline also exacerbates the divide between the Big Man who has flunkeys and police and journalists falling over themselves to please him, and everybody else who has to get used to being browbeaten, insulted and extorted by every petty official (like the corrupt tax inspectors and police who victimise Odilo’s father in A Man of the People).

I don’t know any other country where you can find such brazen insensitivity and arrogant selfishness among those who lay claim to leadership and education. (p.53)

The siren mentality: he gives this name to the tendency of Nigerian officials of every rank to be accompanied everywhere by fleets of security and police cars all with sirens blaring to terrify everyone out of the way. Achebe says it is typical of Nigeria to have turned an invention of serious-minded people into:

a childish and cacophonous instrument for the celebration of status. (p.54)

‘Childish’ was the word I used to characterise the worldview and events of A Man of The People, feeling a bit nervous about accusing such an eminent author of dealing in such superficial characters and discussions – so I’m pleased to have the concept explicitly backed up by Achebe himself.

I also commented on the short temper, quickness to anger and general air of physical violence which soaks A Man of The People. Here, in the section about the siren mentality, Achebe associates the use of bombastic sirens broadcast by convoys of VIP’s cars with a kind of psychological violence, with:

• the brutal aggressiveness which precedes a leader’s train
• the violence of power
• official thuggery

He calls Nigeria a ‘mentally underdeveloped’ country which ‘indulges in the celebration and brandishing of power’. Its leaders have created a mystique around themselves when a) they’re such fools they’re hardly worthy of it and b) this only creates a yawning divide between the elite class and everyone else, cowering and quivering by the side of the road as yet another cavalcade of VIPs roars past, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Undisciplined. Self centred. Childish.

8. Corruption (8 pages)

Keeping an average Nigerian from being corrupt is like keeping a goat from eating yam (1983 newspaper headline)

Nigerians are no different from other nations.

Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable; they will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and inconvenient. (p.58)

Achebe makes an important point which is that the exercise of corruption is intimately associated with the wielding of power; people in power have far more opportunity for corruption than the masses.

He has heard the figure that 60% of Nigeria’s wealth is consumed by corruption (p.61). He gives a couple of egregious examples of corruption scams from today’s newspapers. He explains the different types of corruption associated with big expensive building projects and refers to ‘political patronage on an unprecedented scale’ (p.63). With the result that:

Nigeria is without any shadow of doubt one of the most corrupt nations in the world… (p.63)

The only cure is for leaders to set an example, to put principle ahead of greed. A good leader would rid his administration of anyone suspected of corruption or bribery and ban them from public life.

(Just reading this passage you can see why it will never happen. In Nigeria as in most African countries corruption isn’t a blight on the system, it is the system.)

9. The Igbo problem (7 pages)

The title of this section is satirical, presumably a bitter reference to ‘the Jewish problem’, as Achebe is himself Igbo.

He explains something I didn’t know which is that the Igbo, within Nigeria, are often caricatured as aggressive, arrogant, clannish and greedy, which sounds like the worst stereotyping of the Jews.

Achebe himself calls Igbo culture ‘individualistic and highly competitive’. It is not held back by the wary religion of the other main tribal groups in Nigeria, the Hausa and Faluni, or the traditional hierarchies of the Yoruba. Igbo culture can display ‘noisy exhibitionism’ (p.67). Here’s Martin Meredith in his 2011 book The State of Africa explaining the same thing.

In the Eastern region, on the other side of the Niger river, the Igbo, occupying the poorest, most densely populated region of Nigeria, had become the best educated population, swarming out of their homeland to find work elsewhere as clerks, artisans, traders and labourers, forming sizeable minority groups in towns across the country. Their growing presence there created ethnic tensions both in the North and among the Yoruba in the West. Unlike the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba, the Igbo possessed no political kingdom and central authority but functioned on the basis of autonomous village societies, accustomed to a high degree of individual assertion and achievement. (p.76)

It was the tide of anti-Igbo violence which swept across northern Nigeria in reaction to the 1966 military coup, which led Igbo leaders to conceive the idea of seceding and setting up the separatist state of Biafra in 1967.

Achebe discusses the importance of the Town Union phenomenon. This seems to be the idea that the Igbo had networks of influence via their Town Union associations, which extended into clannish networks criss-crossing the nation. For political reasons leaders of other groups played on this fact to suggest Elders of Zion-style Igbo conspiracies to take other groups’ jobs, houses etc.

The reality, Achebe asserts, was exactly the opposite, the Igbo lacked strong centralised leadership. Instead, ruffians and upstarts were appointed by the British colonial authorities (as described in Achebe’s book Arrow of God) and then, since independence, hundreds and hundreds of ludicrously local ‘kings’ have sprung up like mushrooms (p.68).

Achebe mentions official policies of social, economic and political discrimination which the Igbo still labour under and pleads for them to be removed so the Igbo can play their full role in Nigerian society. In exchange the Igbo must learn to be less abrasive and more tactful.

He closes with some detailed examples of what he takes to be federal discrimination against the Igbo, namely the siting of huge new steel mills in every region except Igboland.

10. The example of Aminu Kano (15 and a half pages)

The last and longest section is devoted to Mallam Amino Kanu who had, apparently, just died. Who he?

Mallam Aminu Kano (9 August 1920 to 17 April 1983) was a Muslim politician from Nigeria. In the 1940s he led a socialist movement in the northern part of the country in opposition to British rule. (Wikipedia)

Achebe repeats Kano’s great question: what is the purpose of political power? It is certainly not to turn the population of their country into victims.

For we are victims. The entire Nigerian populace constitutes on huge, helpless electoral dupe in the hands of the politician/victimiser. (p.73)

And it’s the people’s fault. For some reason the electorate votes time and again for crooks. Politicians exploit ethnic differences not just to win the backing of ethnic groups but because it divides the electorate and makes them less able to hold politicians to account.

He calls on educated Nigerians to rouse themselves from their cynicism and ‘bestir themselves to the patriotic action of proselytising for decent and civilised political values’ (p.74). Here is where Achebe makes it clearest that he is primarily addressing Nigeria’s intelligentsia or educated class, rather than the people at large. As a matter of interest, I wonder what percentage of the total population this amounts to? 1%? It’s the narcissism of all academics, graduates, people in the media, the commentariat and so on to believe that they represent ‘the nation’.

Achebe hoped that, when democracy was restored in 1979, Nigeria would have learned from the ruinous civil war and a decade of military rule but no, the country just started making the same old mistakes all over again.

We have turned out to be like a bunch of stage clowns who bump their heads into the same heavy obstacles again and again because they are too stupid to remember what hit them only a short while ago. (p.76)

In my opinion this is a profoundly wrong way of thinking about politics. It is a commentator’s mindset, expecting that because series of events A took place which you, personally, disapproved of and learned from, that therefore everyone will have ‘learned’ from it and avoid repeating it. No.

But politics and political commentary are just the narcissistic froth bobbing on the deep slow-moving forces of geography, climate, agriculture, technology, social changes, the economy and the social realities stemming from them – such as widespread poverty, illiteracy, lack of housing, amenities, education, lack of experience working in factories (sounds trivial but cited by Paul Collier as a prime cause of poverty in the poorest countries) or of creating a civil life without universal corruption: the granular structures which actually make up a country, these are almost impossible to change.

Achebe professes himself disappointed because he thought that during the decades since Independence ‘an enlightened electorate’ would have come into being – by which he, like thousands of liberal commentators in countries round the world, meant an electorate who thinks like him.

But electorates around the world consistently don’t think like the tiny percentage of the population which enjoyed a liberal college education thinks they ought to think. Trump. Brexit. Erdoğan. Bolsonaro. Milei. The continuing success of authoritarian populists don’t prove that electorates are ‘wrong’ – all they do is highlight the gulf between liberal commentators and the populations and countries they claim to know about or speak for.

The chapter is the longest in the book because Achebe goes into some detail about political developments between the end of military rule / the advent of the second republic in 1979, and the time of writing i.e. 1983. This section assumes familiarity with leading figures in Nigerian politics and their careers to date which I didn’t have, so I struggled to follow it.

What it does convey to the outsider is the central importance of ethnicity or at least regional allegiance in Nigeria’s politics. He discusses figures like Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo entirely in terms of the ethnic groups they represented and promoted. There isn’t anywhere in this final section anything about these politicians’ economic or social policies. They don’t appear to have had any except to bring home the loot to their region, for ‘their’ people. Here’s a typical passage:

Professor Eyo Atik was an Efik, and the brutally unfair treatment offered him in Enugu did not go unremarked in Calabar. It contributed in no small measure to the suspicion of the majority Igbo by their minority neighbours in Eastern Nigeria – a suspicion which far less attractive politicians than Eyo Ita fanned to red-hot virulence, and from which the Igbo have continued to reap enmity to this day. (p.82)

See what I mean by not a hint of any actual policies, and how political figures are interpreted 100% in the context of their tribal allegiances? 1) Invoking tribalism i.e. getting your tribe to support you and vilifying opponents in terms of their tribal enmity, and 2) offering to bring home the bacon to your people i.e. divert profitable state funding, new roads, water, electricity, factories etc to your region – these remain the two easiest ways to drum up support among a largely illiterate electorate. They are the tried and tested routes to power and success, to personal wealth and prestige, so why on earth would any practical politician ignore them? University professors of literature like Chinua Achebe can write all the pamphlets they like but will ever change that.

Instead, people like Achebe are doomed to perpetual disappointment that ‘the people’ just don’t seem to be educated enough to share their enlightened point of view. But they never will be. This is the sentence of perpetual frustration which every intellectual in a mass democracy is condemned to. In old-fashioned Marxist terms, the bourgeois intellectual, depressed by his complete alienation from the masses, is stuck on the outside of the historical process, tutting and disapproving, and completely ineffectual because unattached to anything like a mass party which could actually change anything.

Contemporary Nigeria

Here’s the view of Africa scholar John Philips writing in Africa Studies Review in 2005:

Nigeria remains one of the most important and fascinating countries in Africa, with abundant human and material resources. If these could be harnessed effectively, Nigeria could easily become one of the most influential countries in the world. The country has played a leadership role in everything from the liberation of southern Africa to the formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union, and the attempted stabilization of Liberia and other states in the region.

The decline of Nigeria, although not as severe as the decline and even collapse of other states in Africa, has saddened all who love her and disheartened all who had hoped for great things from independent Africa. Today Nigeria is better known for the ‘scam spam’ that clutters up internet mailboxes around the world than for its great authors, musicians, and other creative people.

Massive investments in industry have failed to industrialise the country; the hope of post-Biafra, oil-boom Nigeria has given way to cynicism, corruption, and despair. The great religiosity of Nigerians has become less a call to righteousness than a reason to murder followers of other religions. Who can ponder Confucius’s famous statement that ‘the material prosperity of a country does not consist in material prosperity, but in righteousness’ without thinking of Nigeria? Understanding the decline, if not quite yet fall, of Nigeria is one of the most important tasks facing Africanist scholars today.

Here are responses from readers on Amazon (I know it’s not scholarly opinion, but they often come from people with a special interest in the subject i.e. actual Nigerians):

Although the book is relatively old (published 1983) it continues to be distressingly relevant to the actual Nigeria. Military dictators have disappeared (again) and been replaced by democratically-elected presidents (again), but this has had little effect on the basic problems identified by this book. The author says things that only a Nigerian could get away with – and says them well, as you would expect of Achebe.

it was written in 1983 but all the issues & failures he highlights are just as relevant in 2008.

Nigerians know all about the trouble but still cannot figure out a solution and Achebe tried to sketch a route past the troubles. But alas, it is no casual ‘trouble’, it is a deeply-seated neurosis. The sad reality is that even over 3 decades later not much has changed in Nigeria – if anything it has changed for the worse in some ways – despite the passing of leadership from the illegitimate military rulers to elected civilians. Nigeria’s ruling class treat the country as an all-you-can-eat buffet while unconnected citizens are viewed as destitute serfs outside the gates. (Chris Emeka, 2014)

Material facts

As anyone familiar with my blog knows I enjoy intellectual activity and products, art and literature, very much indeed, but my belief system is based on an atheistic materialist view of the world, on the bedrock of material facts, on the biological realities of the body, on the theory of evolution, on the unpleasant realities of humans’ complete reliance on a viable environment.

People’s opinions are as changeable as their moods, even the best commentator’s interpretation is based on partial understanding, whereas the material facts can be measured and recorded. I’m not necessarily saying they’re the most important aspects of life, but objective, material facts are generally the decisive ones.

For example, you can have the most poetic thoughts in the world but if someone cuts off your head with a machete that’s the end of them. You can write reams about your splendid homeland and its historic destiny, but it’s not your fancy words, it’s the availability of food, water and energy which will determine its future. Thus:

• Climate change in Nigeria

Although it was published in 1983, all the commentators point out that the issues Achebe addressed in 1983 still challenge Nigeria in 2023. The most tangible difference is that in 1983 Nigeria’s population was 80 million and now it’s nearly three times that, at 223 million. By 2050 the population is predicted to reach 400 million. If the trend isn’t stopped, it will exceed 728 million by 2100.

Given that much agricultural and coastal land is set to be lost to climate change and environmental degradation over the same period, it’s hard not to conclude that Nigeria’s future will be catastrophic.

• Nigeria’s population boom: Path to poverty or prosperity?

John Oyefara, a professor of demography at the University of Lagos, is quoted as saying that unless this unprecedented population explosion is properly managed ‘there will be more crises, insurgency, poverty and insecurity.’ It’s difficult to detect the hand of Providence, history, high destiny or ‘mankind’s advancement’, of any of the windy highfalutin’ terms Achebe opened his essay with, in any of this.

Solutions

Achebe’s pamphlet is great fun, exuberantly written, eminently quotable and quite useless. Practical solutions can only be found in the complex economic and social analyses provided by the likes of:

• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (2006)
• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

Credit

The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe was published in 1983 by The Fourth Dimension Publishing Company. References are to the 2010 Penguin Books paperback volume ‘An Image of Africa.’

Related links

• The Trouble with Nigeria online [I can’t find an online version which is not only irritating but reprehensible. It’s a text of great public interest, surely it should be freely available]
• 2006 interview with Achebe
• Guardian Nigeria page

Chinua Achebe reviews

• Things Fall Apart (1958)
• No Longer at Ease (1960)
• Arrow of God (1964)
• Arrow of God: Sayings of Wisdom
• A Man of the People (1966)
• The Trouble with Nigeria (1983)
• Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

Africa reviews

• Africa reviews