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The Oputa Panel’s report remains one of Nigeria’s most thorough official indictments of its own recent past and one of its most thoroughly ignored. After receiving more than 10,000 petitions and hearing only about 150 of them in public, the commission delivered a seven-volume catalogue of institutional failure that still reads like a national audit of impunity.
On the morning of August 6, 2017, gunmen stormed St. Philip’s Catholic Church in Ozubulu, Anambra State. When the gunfire ceased, at least a dozen worshippers lay dead on the pews, including the elderly father of the intended target.
There is a comfortable explanation for why Nigerian officials behave as though accountability is an imported eccentricity, like fondue or the metric system. The explanation runs roughly like this: Nigerians have an authoritarian political culture, inherited from precolonial kingship and reinforced by military rule, and this culture manufactures leaders who cannot be shamed because shame requires a moral vocabulary the culture never built.
The late Sam Mbakwe, first civilian governor of Imo State and a man whose impatience with mediocrity remains legendary, once declared that he would gladly invite the British back to rule Nigeria for another fifty years. Other politicians have echoed the sentiment over the decades, usually after another round of epileptic power, collapsed roads, or the discovery that the latest “transformation agenda” had transformed mainly the bank balances of its authors. The quip is usually delivered with a sigh, half-joke, half-confession: better the colonial taskmaster who at least kept the trains roughly on time than the indigenous ones who treat the national timetable as optional reading.
Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State was turning 58, and he has a shocking, counter-cultural request for his inner circle: Please, stop spending millions to paste my face on the front page of the newspapers. According to a poignant statement from his Chief Press Secretary, John Mayaki, the Governor was deeply worried about the plight of vulnerable street children. To fix this, he wanted his well-wishers to take the massive budgets usually reserved for full-page birthday spreads and donate them to the WeCare Trust orphanage.
