It was about three years or so ago that I first encountered this individual, Mr. Chris(topher/tian) Abani on a TED webcast. At the time, there were a couple of things—both of them awkward—that struck me as dysfunctional about him.
It was about three years or so ago that I first encountered this individual, Mr. Chris(topher/tian) Abani on a TED webcast. At the time, there were a couple of things—both of them awkward—that struck me as dysfunctional about him.
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The first was his physique, the second was the diabolical joke that he cracked on that program about his father—it was something like: “…if you knew my father, you’d want to poison him”. That sounded uncomfortably odd to me then because I’m not used to people who crack such expensive joke their parents. The one episode I still recall was a guy, I think he’s Itsekiri, who lived next door to me at Nsukka when I was an undergraduate, who claimed he took his not-so-rich father who was struggling to put him and several of his siblings through the university at the same time in the early 1980s over why he couldn’t summon the courage to use one of them, his children for wealth yielding traditional medicine, which could have saved him the agonizing financial hardship he was going through then.
Don’t get me wrong on my mention of Abani’s physique as striking me as awkward, because my intention is not to impugn how he was molded by his Creator and nature. I’m simply trying to convey the fact that prior to the time when I beheld him, although I was born and raised in Igboland in the main, I don’t recall being familiar with any other individual Igbo who was endowed with that small-sized skull atop a barrel-shaped trunk that tapers off down into a disproportionately-shaped set of legs. There were only two other individuals I knew of who were endowed with a similar physique. The one, was one of Kenya’s notoriously corrupt politicians—I can’t pick his name off the top of my head now—but I read about him twice or so sometime in the 1980s in either Ralph Uwechue’s now defunct AFRICA magazine, or Peter Enahoro’s also defunct Africa Now magazine, which was a split off from the former. The other individual was the late Illinois machine politics Congressman, Dan Rostenkowski, who was convicted in the House Post Office check fraud, and lost both his seat and chairmanship of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee in the 1990s.
Abani’s narrative in that TED webcast that his maiden novel, a thriller, written when he was sixteen earned him arrest and prolonged detention in the hands of Nigeria’s amateurish State Security Service (SSS) gave me a head spin that night because that was the very first time I heard his story. You can imagine how I felt at the time particularly because even though I pride myself as a life long avid consumer of mass media products, such a juicy and epoch making episode that took place while I was actively in Nigeria, still eluded me. I couldn’t forgive myself.
The other aspect of the unfolding Abani scam saga, which still tickles me even as I write this is that until Ikhide R. Ikheloa’s lamentful expository piece played on this medium, SaharaReporteres.com last week, it never even occurred to me to bring Abani up in any of my frequent conversations with friends who are also, sufficiently tuned in on the Nigeria project and issues that are associated with it. Ikheloa’s piece gave me cause to bring him up in a conversation with one such friend who went beyond Ikheloa’s piece and gave me an earful on some of the specifics of the infinite strings of tall tales that Abani characteristically spins consistently about himself as well as some of his artful dodging exploits with a long line of individuals that stretch from back home all the way to the UK and up to here in the US. One episode of such scam involved abandoning his mother in a restaurant after a reading event when he sensed that he was about to be outed as regards his serial scams. Who would say that scammers ever have peace? In all, one finds Abani’s brazen penchant and capacity to take advantage of the goodwill of unsuspecting people and public, frightening, to say the least.
But unlike Ikheloa, who is rightly troubled by the additional damage, which Abani’s deceitful life course of serial lies would inflict on the already soiled image of the Nigeria project, my assessment is that Abani is as pathetic as the Nigeria project itself. The inference that some people might be tempted to draw and use as excuse on his behalf is that he is the sad product of a broken matrimony. To me, that, is not even a license for him to engage in the sort of cheap pimping, which is associated with him, all in the rat race to get ahead, I’m pained more by the fact that the Nigeria project has bred and will continue to breed countless others like Abani. They are all over the place. Except that in his own case, he took his own unworthy exploits off shore, I don’t see the difference between Abani in terms of what he thrives by and the likes of Goodluck Jonathan, Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua, Andy Uba, Nuhu Ribadu, El Rufai, Dimeji Bankole, C. C. Soludo—the space here is simply insufficient for the roll call.
The other thing that perplexes me about Abani is that he chose the wrong trade—creative writing—as the medium through which he perpetrates his confidence tricks on the world. Although the trade gives its practitioners the creative license to fictionalize their perception of reality about society, such license always backfires big time whenever anyone has taken the liberty to extend it to the realm in which Abani thrives. You won’t lack material if you choose to develop a list of individuals who met that fate when they tried to pull off such stunts in the past. If you’re in doubt, I suggest that you google the name Quincy Troupe, and tell me what pops up after you read it.
A friend likened Abani to a slave dealer who is also into writing poetry. I might as well add at the same time that slave dealers who tried to make a mark in writing poetry have been known to fail woefully as poets. Those of them—including the late Mamman Vatsa—who went out of their way to try even so hard, still flunked out or ended up unsung. As for the Nigeria project—a burnt out case—please, let no one waste his or her tears. It is destined to frizzle out as well.
●E. C. Ejiogu, PhD; is a political sociologist and the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria, published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
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