Chimamanda Adichie used her prodigious talents to the wrong end in her open letter to President Biden. Those who subsequently attacked her with strong invectives yet little logic or substance also performed a disservice. The issues on the table are too important to be treated by well-written but uninformed analysis or by long-winded castigation.
Had Adichie simply written that she preferred Peter Obi she would have been on more honest, if not firmer, ground. However, she detoured from honesty by basically asserting that the election was tainted because her favored candidate lost. In her letter she cites “the polls” leading to the election had Obi ahead. This simply is untrue. We leave it to her to tell us whether the incorrect statement results from shoddy homework or something more poignant. True, some polls had Obi ahead. Some had Tinubu. Others had Atiku.
Many that picked Obi were skewed ab initio toward a certain result. Polls focused on southern voters and youth who populate the social media favored Obi. One poll that received much press was exclusively by telephone. Any serious student of polling in Nigeria knows such a poll risked accuracy for the sake of quickness or ease. To rely on such polling is as imprecise as relying on a roadmap of London to navigate the streets of Lagos. The result will not be as you expect.
One of the polls that likely excited Adichie has a terrible track record on presidential elections. It has always gone against the APC candidate and has always proven incorrect. That polling organization should be sued for malpractice, not cited as evidence.
Here we get to the crux of the matter. Underlying Adichie’s missive is a subtle but dangerous snobbery. She would have the American president believe that in her and those like her resides the expressed will of an entire and diverse nation. However, most of the nation she claims to speak for has little in common with her.
She is a member of a finite and small elite. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Trouble comes when a member of that small group projects herself as representative of the majority of people. Elites do this all the time, the world over, with varying degrees of inaccuracy and damage to the average person. Perhaps no time is more fraught with the prospect of inaccuracy than when a member of a narrow elite sells their privileged viewpoint of an election as the prevailing public opinion.
Adichie writes great fictional works of depth and eloquence. But that gives her no greater insight into the mind of the common voter than the insights of the average market woman or wheelbarrow boy. Perhaps it renders her an even reliable measure. More Nigerians will listen to the nation’s top radio stations in one hour than will read her novels in her entire lifetime. This is no knock on her exemplary work. This is just the shape of things and the way of the world.
Thus, she oversteps propriety by assuming her literary achievements affords her a superior if not preternatural knowledge regarding national electoral politics. Despite all the fine words she has written in her career, her vote is no more valuable than that of a rural farmer in Jigawa. By the way, there are more rural farmers in Jigawa than there are Adichie’s writing open letters to western presidents. An election is not won by the eloquence of one supporter but by the number of supporters a candidate has. Defeat or victory in an election is a matter of numbers not of words.
Adichie’s tendentiousness is not one of overt hatred or prejudice. It is of more subtle variety. Ironically, she is guilty of the very type of bias she abhors in the western world. She thinks her cultural outlook unquestionably superior to that of other Nigerians. Thus, she can dismiss as a harmless political hyperbole the overt religious bias in Obi’s Trump-like statements that “we must take back our country.” She fails to see that other Nigerians may find such statements disquieting to say the least.
That Peter Obi secreted away millions of dollars as uncovered by the Pandora Papers mattered nothing to her because she was not voting for Obi the man of flesh, bone, and flaws. She was voting for the symbol she and others had turned Obi into. And how could anyone not like a symbol she authored and liked? She evidently has yet to come to grips with the fact that others did not care for the symbols she thought important.
They assessed her candidate as the flawed man he is and found him wanting in the extreme.
Logically, it is difficult to picture Obi as the favorite when his support in the north was almost nonexistent. Did Adichie ever ponder the significance of the meager attendance that followed Obi’s northern campaign engagements. Large crowds at campaign events don’t mean popularity. Wily candidates can purchase attendance. However, small crowds always augur doom. Obi ran an especially religious and ethnically based campaign. And that strategy told on him in the North.
To say Obi should have won is to say the Northern voter should not have counted. Obi played at that game and lost. Now Adichie wants to continue the fiction all the way to the White House. The current tenant of that edifice would be wise not to listen to her counsel. The only way Obi could have won the election was through an unprecedented turnout of largely Igbo voters in the Southeast and a turnout of Northern voters that would have registered among the lowest in the history of elections anywhere. Such a thing is imaginable to those with fertile imaginations. However, depositing unwavering faith in such a longshot means one has taken a vacation from logics and prudence.
In the end, the election showed a democracy moving in a promising direction. Atiku ran the anachronistic race of a political insider. His public campaign was sparse and uninspired. Instead, he relied on striking backroom deals with big men and retired generals. He lost as a result. Obi ran as a religious and ethnic populist in the main. His appeal to youth generally followed these narrow lines more than it was a universal phenomenon among that portion of the electorate.
Tinubu ran a campaign with its share of flaws. However, he worked hard and went almost everywhere. When he said it was “his turn,” he put off many people who saw it as an expression of arrogance. However, he never overtly appealed to or rejected any religion or ethnic group. He more or less held together enough of the coalition that had previously elected Buhari. Atiku lost because he did not realize the political system had advanced beyond back room politicking. Obi lost because he did not realize the limitations of running on factors that would exclude the majority of the population, especially Northern Muslims.
Tinubu’s victory may not have been a literary masterpiece with a pristine heroic figure atop a great stead coming to the rescue. It was an example of successful, pragmatic nuts-and-bolts electoral politics in an increasingly democratic setting.
To maintain Nigeria as a democracy, moving in the right, means those who have launched personal attacks against Adichie should refrain from their misbehavior. She is not to be ridiculed and pilloried for stating an opinion adverse to yours. In doing so, you are guilty of the very crime of which you accuse her. Because she asserted a position adverse to yours, you batter her with insults and curses. The one thing to learn from the mistakes of others is not to repeat them. It would have been better had you bested her with superior facts and logic. Instead, anger and hatred got in the way.
Democracy can be untidy and fluid. But we must be careful so that it does not stray toward demonization. When we attack the basic humanity and decency of others, we lay siege to the foundations of our democracy even more so. If that becomes the way we treat each other, Adichie will have to write something much more somber than an open letter. She will be tasked to write the obituary of our democratic way of life. That is one piece none should want to see, no matter how well written it might be.