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To Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie: Wipe your tears, help, lies not with Biden or US…but
By Sunny Igboanugo
Reading through the letter of my dear sister, Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie to Joe Biden, the only plausible conclusion that I could make of it, is the popular adage of the mother hen, when the kite takes its chick away. It says the hysteria in flapping its wings, running around and shouting at the top of its voice, is for the world to hear its voice and not for the assailant to have pity and drop the baby or the hope for help.
Of course, our Joe, or Sleepy Joe, as Donald Trump would call him, would definitely read the letter. It would be part of the “briefings” his appointees on African Affairs, who have their eyes permanently glued on Nigeria, would file. But you can be sure that the issue of interest to him, would be completely different from the details Ngozi laboured to present. No, that would be a waste of time. You would be surprised that apart from enjoying the elegant prose and beauty of her language power, they would focus on the nuances rather than the substance of the issues she raised. It would not be about changing their mind in anyway, but to update her personal dossier. If not before, she has become a person of interest henceforth. She would be further trailed and profiled to determine how her actions and inaction would affect the US interest going forward. That’s the best her letter could attract.
I would be surprised if Ngozi, my sister does not understand that the people she wrote that letter to are not far ahead of her in piecing together what happened in the 2023 Nigerian general elections at whatever level. Every detail of that exercise, had already gathered, studied, analysed and filed to Washington, well in time before Nigerians woke up to the reality. In other words there is nothing they didn’t know or still don’t know.
So, outside shouting so that the world will hear her voice, there is nothing that letter will achieve. Absolutely nothing! America, just like their counterparts across the world, are fully on ground. You cannot even take it past them that they are not neck-deep or hand-deep into the construct that birthed that exercise, described aptly as the worst election in the history of Nigeria.
I’d rather charge my sister, Ngozi with the hysteric shouting of the mother hen, than accuse her of being naive, because, apart from being one of the richest minds that has come out of ala Igbo, Nigeria, Africa, and the world, she, as a citizen, stays close to them and could easily perceive the stench of their breath more than me.
Now, why does anyone believe that the US would want to help Nigeria, or indeed, Africa, secure a thriving democracy in which the votes would count and leaders would emerge freely out of people’s will? What would be the endgame of such a conduct? Wouldn’t that be suicidal and a complete betrayal of the legacy their forebears handed down to them?
Do you know what would happen the day, Africans began to elect their own leaders through credible process? Let’s start with Nigeria. It would mean the reduction of bad behaviour in governance if not complete eradication of same. It would mean that politicians would have something to fear from the polity. It would mean that portfolio-bearing foreigners would no longer come into the country, spread few dollars to the gatekeepers and have access to the top ogas in power, who would equip them with the power of ingress, to enable them insert hoses into the ground and begin to siphon the riches of the land.
It would mean that a whole shipload of oil, would no longer disappear from the creeks of the Niger Delta. It would mean that oil companies would no longer create multiple pipelines to tube the oil away leaving Nigeria with only a fraction of what they actually produced.
Yes! It would mean the disappearance of the Abachas of Nigeria and his mates all over Africa, who ferry catches of dollar-filled bags to America to deck their banks, would no longer have the chance of getting close to the public till because a vigilant and effective electorate will check them.
I could imagine the faces at the White House as they study that letter, as they zero in on her persona. How dangerous would she be to the US interest? Could this be another troublesome, irritant African? Who could best handle this? In fact, the next American you see in the local Abba market in Dunukofia Local Government Area of Anambra State, might not be a tourist coming to see how local marriages are conducted. He might as well be there to pick the minutest information on the Adichie family that would further help to profile their daughter.
How would anybody seized of good knowledge in global affairs and international politics particularly the relationship between the West and Africa believe that countries like the US would favour stability of a nation like Nigeria, the most influential and most important African nation. The day that happens would signal the end of the slumbering of the sleeping giant. Africa would wake up. How could the lion be gazing at an antelope with good intention? That is the question. The West would always want Africa for dinner.
Indeed, I pitied Peter Obi, Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, when he was telling his compatriots, to the hearing of these people, how he was going to transform Nigeria from consumption to production.
Of course they knew he was not bluffing. He governed Anambra, arguably the most difficult state in Nigeria not only without borrowing a kobo throughout eight years but with such success. If anything, his leaving behind a princely N75billion without stealing it, must also have helped to give him out as not a typical African in power. Because a non-thieving African, is a danger to the Western interest, it won’t be difficult for them to figure out what to do. He must have given them the jitters with those utterances issuing from his mouth.
Obi would be naive not to know what he was standing up against. But how else could he sprung it. How could he have connected with Nigerians particularly the youthful population, for whom he represented their future. Indeed, for as long as he toed the line ditching the old way, it was like shooting himself in the leg. Surely, he couldn’t have thought that those stealing Nigerian oil would go to sleep, hearing him say that the stealing would stop from the first day he takes office as President.
He couldn’t have thought that giving hope to the millions of youths in the North, who form the bulk of Boko Haram, Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP), and the bandits who go on rampage, kidnapping, killing and maiming people, to engage in productive ventures would be good music or earn him loving kisses from vested interests. What then happens to the syndicate they represent?
Didn’t he realise for instance that mouthing his popular mantra of transforming the vast areas of land in the North into serious production hubs for agricultural goods, would mean that the bandits in Niger and Borno, including Sambisa Forest would be forced to disappear?
Besides, apart from making Nigeria self-sufficient in food and therefore no longer a dumping ground of such items, many of them Genetically Modified, in the first place, what happens to bullet and guns the terrorists in those forests carry and their sources? That angle is also important.
It doesn’t have to take the wisest man on the earth to realise what the end-game would be. In fact, the moment there is no longer strife in Africa and the Middle East, where brothers continue to kill one another under the supervision of the suppliers of those guns and bullet, the result would be obvious. Nobody will buy the weapons anymore and that source of income will dry up. So, what happens to the factories that produce them? Are their owners going to eat the guns and bullets?
The moment you transform Sambisa from an axis of terror and a habitat for gunmen, mostly youths fed on drugs and other intoxicating substances, to a hub for the production of fattened cows that would produce fresh meat and rich milk, equivalent to what comes out of Holland or Australia or produce rice in such quantity that you no longer have to look towards China or Thailand, you not only make food available locally, but you also export to earn foreign exchange, which would set off a string of positive chain effects, and ultimately lead to the ultimate end of becoming a world power.
Would they watch you create that transformation? Who wants Nigeria as a world power. Who wants an African country as world power? That’s not even where it ends. The fact that the lion is a violent predator, which devours its prey with mindless brutality, doesn’t mean it has no right to food? Don’t those behind the syndicate stealing Nigerian oil deserve right to opulence and luxury – to own the latest yachts from the proceed their crime and cruise around the world? What does it mean even if millions die as sacrifice? Aren’t they even being benevolent by just mere stealing? Didn’t their fathers do worse by ship-loading your fathers to work in their sugarcane fields?
Now, who didn’t know that Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presented himself as the worst of the three major candidates in the 2023 election? He was the one without a clear identity, who just happened on the scene, without details of birth, parentage and education – all buried in mystery. He was the one who uttered incoherent and unrecognisable mumble-jumble at rallies, was the one who would raise his walking stick, while the National Anthem was being sung, the one to be supported by aides at the back, to prevent him from falling, who dodged debates and avoided interviews – he was the one who, against the run of play, chose to present a Muslim-Muslim ticket and above all, the one tainted with stories of dealing in drugs – one of the highest crimes in the world. Yet he “won.”
If you are still at sea as to the reason for this miraculous triumph over the others, it means you’re a learner. It means that you believe that those who killed Patris Lumumba and replaced him with Mobut Sese Seko have suddenly disappeared or changed from whom they are. It means that you believe that Congo DR, the richest country in the world in terms of mineral resources has remained a killing field till date because their people love the sight of blood.
It means you believe that Muammar Gaddafi, who made every Libyan practically walk on pure gold, was killed by his compatriots, because “he was killing his people,” as Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and his NATO forces who, with glee, bombed down some of the world’s most renowned histories and forced the once thriving and robust enclave into a shadow of itself with fiefdoms of fighting warlords on hand to finish the job, told you. Then, your name is, Sorry.
So, my dear sister, Ngozi, hara wa, nne. Ebezina. Wipe your tears! We know how you feel. But we also know that where you’re looking for help, is where the predator is actually lurking behind the grass. The State Department, wouldn’t have issued the congratulatory message in the first place without the say-so of Biden. That he’s not given his personal endorsement yet, is all part of the game. Pretend that you care. But go for the kill.
Don’t also worry yourself about the UK. Julius Malema, the South African activist, put it clearly, recently. The Pounds is the strongest currency in the world today, because of the gold backing. England has the highest gold reserves in the world without a single goldmine. How come? That’s the catch! Figure it out. If you thought the worst has again happened, think again. Haven’t we seen and conquered worse?
We know Tinubu didn’t win the election. So, you’re not alone. So, fichaa anya, nne. There is still one place to run for shelter – A Just God! You never know what He’s thinking. For His ways are not our ways. Don’t forget, He’s still the author and finisher. Ya diba!
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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