Citation: Ibrahim Muhammad ABDULLAHI (2024). Political Corruption in Africa: A Reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Yobe Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (YOJOLLAC), Vol. 12, Number 1. Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria. ISSN 2449-0660
POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN AFRICA: A READING OF BEN
OKRI’S THE FAMISHED ROAD
By
Ibrahim Muhammad ABDULLAHI
Abstract
This paper aims to examine politics and
corruption in postcolonial Africa, through the lens of literature, particularly
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. The paper deploys the postcolonial theory as its
guiding principle and theoretical framework and, the qualitative text-based
method as its tool of analysis in the explication of political corruption in
post-independence Nigeria, as symbolic to Africa. This political evil is
demonstrated in the attitudes of the characters and the thematic concerns of
the novel. The paper reveals Okri’s use of the abiku myth and the magical
realist mode to expose the evils of political corruption as distinct from the
numerous postcolonial vices in Nigeria and in Africa. The novel captures
Nigeria as a neo-patrimonial or kleptocratic society where the magnitude of
corruption and other social vices are not only widespread but rapidly
increasing. It shows the forceful imposition of one group’s belief on the
other, and the struggles of the oppressed to counter the belief system of these
corrupt and self-imposing ruling elites. This paper, therefore, concludes that
Okri uses the intrinsic features of prose fiction to explicate the realities of
postcolonial Nigeria with the aim of ameliorating them. Literature should,
therefore, be given its necessary recognition in the national/continental
crusade against political corruption and other diabolical social vices in
Africa.
Keywords: Postcolonial, kliptocracy, Politics, Corruption, and Nigeria.
Introduction
Political corruption has been variously defined
by different scholars. Aristotle, the third-century Greek philosopher, has
defined it as the political practice by leaders who pursue the accumulation of
private wealth, instead of the pursuit of public interest. Recently, the term
has been defined as the official attitude of public/private sector officials
which infringes upon community morality. The most popular definition in the
early twenty-first century was conceived by Joseph S. Nye (1993). He defined political
corruption as the abuse of public office for personal enrichment. Okri (1991)
reveals that political corruption occurs in many forms: bribery, extortion,
embezzlement of public resources, violation of laws or legal procedures,
electoral fraud and arson.
Political corruption is often interconnected
with neo-patrimonial or kleptocratic governments. In these systems, the leader
personalises all public properties in the country. This attitude is
characteristic of autocratic and less economically developed regimes. However,
it suffices to say that political corruption is a common phenomenon in all
administrations around the world and, corruption has been present throughout
eternities. The difference is perhaps in the extent of its manifestation and
public tolerance. In his account of the history of bribery, John T. Noonan
(1987) asserts that corruption existed in ancient Egypt, modern America, Italy,
and India. Thus, indicting the entire world of corruption.
The menace of political corruption has muddled
up independence in Africa. The continent only experiences a transitory shift
from colonialism to imperialism through neocolonialism. Ngozi Chuma-Udeh (2011)
has aptly deprecated independence in Africa, saying:
It (independence) turned out that a group of
‘black power’ elite cult had stepped into the vacated seat of the colonial
masters. These leaders started where their masters stopped. Theirs was the
same, if not worse than the colonial pattern of politics. The ruling class was
the product of the same evil they fought against (p.131).
This dilemma of illusory freedom only
inaugurates heinous leaders from among the hypocritical African nationalists,
who ascend the saddle of governance only to vandalise the people, the economy,
and the nation/continent worse than their colonial predecessors. They gradually
metamorphosed into despotic dictators and marauders of the commonwealth.
Therefore, the situation resulted in the rise of national and continental
disillusionment as generated by unfulfilled political promises made to the
populace during the nationalist struggles. Therefore, to the ordinary Nigerian,
“the independence his country was supposed to have won was totally without
content. The old master was still in power. He had got himself a bunch of black
stooges to do his dirty work for a commission” (Achebe, 1970, p.136).
As literature reflects the realities of its
place, artists, in their individual responses to their situations, represent
those social vices that are inherent in the political attitudes of the elites.
The military, in spite of its ethical discipline, is even worse than the
civilian government it feigns to checkmate. Today, corruption is everywhere in
Africa. The act of governance is no longer constitutional. The essential
instruments of control: the police, the Central bank, the judiciary etc. are
manipulated as the personal properties of the president and his party.
Corruption is seemingly not a crime anymore. It is a game for the smartest
player of the unlawful play of shame, betrayal, and truncation of national
development. The Famished Road is Okri’s literary response to
these societal absurdities and the resulting public silences in the vain
expectation of a divine miracle that would salvage the situation. This attitude
has made bad governance a permanent feature of leadership in Africa. This ugly
and antisocial practice is sustained through the covert and tacit connivance of
the former coloniser, who takes the greatest economic benefit of the
mischievous strangulation of Africa’s socioeconomic and political progress by
providing legitimacy to this illegitimate process.
It is apparent that Africa is still grappling
with the problem of corrupt leadership. Whichever type of leaders Africa gets,
the story is always the same - corruption, embezzlement of public funds,
oppression of the masses, press censorship, lack of freedom of speech and
neglect or abuse of fundamental public needs. The current Nigerian political
situation, under what resembles a militia-democratic dictatorship is an
instance to note.
This paper therefore, seeks to examine politics
and corruption in postcolonial Africa, through the poetic lens of Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road as a literary response to and
critique of the proliferation of political corruption which destroys and
stagnates Africa.
Theoretical Framework
This paper deploys postcolonial theory as its
guiding principle. The postcolonial theory seeks to interrogate the validity of
the system of colonisation and its aftermath in the colonies. It allows for a
counter-discursive strategy in the quest for truth. As a critical approach,
postcolonialism also seeks to find meaning in a text through contextual
analysis of the prevailing ideas and social assumptions about colonial legacies
and, how these combine to create the subaltern condition of the subjected “other”.
This theory is relevant to this study as it seeks to highlight the role of
African fiction in addressing the menace posed by political corruption in
Africa as a postcolonial nuisance and legacy.
Literature and Political Corruption in Africa
Nnolim (2010) holds that the 21st-century
Nigerian novelists, as the African novelists, appear to be potentially removed
from political concerns in pursuit of opposing themes that pollute literary
practice. The new generation of writers has shunned sensitive concerns for more
licentious issues at the detriment of the more significant politico-economic
literary crusade against imperialism which creates and sustains political
corruption, disease and poverty in the continent. This artistic laxity creates
a big fissure in the African literary tradition. Nnolim (2010) decried that:
… in recent Nigerian fiction, with the
exceptions we noted among female writers, there is a corruption of the Nigerian
dream, there is absence of a national ethos, there is a sense of estrangement,
of cultural disinheritance and we have disinherited people who have abandoned
“home” and converged in Lagos (a no man’s land) searching for quintessential
pleasure, through sluice-gates of debauchery, drinking, motoring as doubtful
palliatives and suspect compensations in bars and brothels. In spite of the proliferation
of churches, God is dead in recent Nigerian fiction, completely edged out by
materialism and epicurean tendencies. Hedonism is the new non Sunday religion
(p. 217)
Nnolim (2010) is contemptuous of this new
diversionary fiction. However, this licentious thematic digression, as noted in
the collection of fiction described by Nnolim, reflects the characteristic
influence of modernity on the 21st-century African fiction and
society which “is adrift and the people are lost in the imbecilities of future
optimism” (Nnolim, 2006, p. 219). This is the true state of affairs in the
postmodern condition of perpetual cultural and value degeneration in the 21st century
in which, human history and the homogeneous enlightenment programme of
modernity is being distrusted and challenged. Modernity has brought with it
major modifications in all spheres of human endeavour which seeks to dismantle
the inherent rational organisations and cognitive processes in order to destroy
the universal, eternal and immutable essences in our acuity of reality. Alvin
Kernan (1990), in his book, The Death of Literature illustrates
this more clearly by saying that:
Rather than being near-sacred myths of the human
experience of the world and the self, the most prized possession of culture,
universal statements about an unchanging and essential human nature, literature
is increasingly treated as authoritarian and destructive of human freedom, the
ideology of patriarchy devised to instrument male, white hegemony over the
female and the “lesser breeds” (p. 2)
Since literature is by nature a mirror on
society, it is quite important to look at those dynamics that have made
Okri’s The Famished Road a unique and true representation of
true African values, aspirations and a poetic fight against political
corruption, injustice and advocacy for proactive democratisation and the rule
of law. Through the use of the Abiku myth motif, Okri portrays his metaphorical
Nigeria/Africa. He consequently interrogates Eurocentrism and the implications
of modernity on authentic African worldview and perceptions of reality. By
this, Okri has fulfilled his responsibility to society as a writer via his
grand narratives that restructure the discourse of modern religion, politics,
philosophy and science, while signifying how these work to suppress and control
the individual “by imposing a false sense of totality or universality on a set
of disparate things, actions, and events” (Reading, 1991, p. 11).
Postmodernism, is therefore, the critic of these grand narratives because they
are believed to mask the contradictions and instabilities that were inherent in
social organisations and practices. Mary Kleggs [2006] further explains the
repercussions of dismantling time-honoured orthodox views about society by
holding that:
Postmodernism in rejecting grand narratives,
favours mini narratives, stories that explain small practices, local events,
rather than large scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern mini
narratives are always situational, provisional, contingent and temporary,
making no claim to universality, truth, reason and stability (p. 169).
Political Corruption in the Famished Road
In African society today, the news of increasing
corruption and the involvement of individuals, officials, and even some
institutions in the corruption saga is becoming household and street talk. As
is shown in the novel, however, corruption can be categorised into three
classes: material – when it involves money and or object of material value.
Spiritual – when it involves the use of charms and other dubious and concealed
supernatural powers to influence and enforce compliance to illicit demands.
Lastly, psychological – when the victim is subjected to a malicious
psychological condition: fear, anxiety, uncertainty, etc. which forced
compliance in any way overt or covert. Therefore, in contemporary Africa,
kidnapping, malpractices, tribalism, breach of trust, armed robbery,
victimisation, favouritism, arson and looting of public funds by those
entrusted with its safety are common.
African literature reflects these issues of
amoralities as represented in the works of several authors: Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, T.M. Aluko, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Abubakar Gimba,
etc. in their various ways. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is
also a unique critique of this phenomenon.
Political corruption is the opposite of
political prudence. The latter produces good governance, abundance, increased
happiness, and democracy. There are many instances and levels of corruption in
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. It is either being perpetrated
against the individuals and or the society by powerful people in power or their
associates. This situation is demonstrated in the prevalence of mass suffering,
oppression, violence, election malpractices, witchcraft, and other forms of
corruption and human debasement. The powerful political elites have combined
forces with their cohorts to devastate the condition of the poor, the less
privileged, and consequently, the entire society.
The oppression and exploitation of the poor by
Madame Koto who uses spiritual means, the politicians who use thugs and the
police to intimidate the populace or, the landlord who uses threats of eviction
and rent increase are representations of the numerous forms of corruption which
tantamount to state suppression of the people and society. These characters act
like the agents of Azaro’s spirit companions whose mission is to subvert
society. Okri’s use of the magical realist mode allows him to represent human
vices with substituted weird beings like The Great King of Abiku, White Horse,
Boy King, Green Leopard, etc. These absurd beings collaborate with Madame Koto
to inflict pain on Dad, his family, and those poor, who patronise her bar.
However, Okri’s literary sensitivity is perhaps
in response to Tanuri Ojaide (1991)’s admonition enjoying African writers to
“draw sensitivity to ideas about the environment and society which concern
everybody” (p. 326) in their society. The majority of our writers have
demonstrated a high sense of responsibility and commitment to society in their
works.
Jasper Onuekwusi (2012) confirms that “current
Nigerian fiction writers (and by implication, African writers) have become even
more incensed with the level of … vices”, and that “they cannot but be socially
conscious” (p. 540-1). This certifies that contemporary novelists are upholding
“this age-long function of literature” because “a constant aspiration of
literature is to change people and institutions by passing them through actions
and events that expose vices and applaud virtues” (p. 540). Therefore, literature
has to expose corruption and other vices, including the possible consequences
of these on man and society, and propounding logical and feasible solutions.
Ontologically, this act serves both as a lesson and a deterrent to others.
According to Arnold Kettle, in every good fiction, “we must see its value as
the quality of its contribution to man’s freedom” (Kettle, as cited in
Onuekwusi, 2012, p. 213).
In Okri’s The Famished Road, spirits
and ghosts cohabit and even dominate the material and the mundane world. They
control and intimidate men and manifest in the form of animals, birds, beasts,
insects, and supernatural beings. This is what Azaro calls the story of “the
myths of beginnings” (TFR, 1991, p. 6). The quest for the origin of not only
our history or identity but, the beginning of these absurd circles of national
birth and death, characterised by metamorphosing corruption. The search for
beginning is linked to the genesis of spiritual essences of civilisation thus:
In the beginning, there was a river. The river
became a road and the road branched out to the world. And because the road was
once a river it was always hungry. In that land of beginnings, spirits mingled
with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds (TFR 3).
Okri’s use of the mythic mode enables him to
portray the complex absurdities in a society wherein, there are “birds with a
man’s hairy legs … an antelope with the face of a chaste woman” and “an old man
(that) emerged from the anthill that had been following me” (TFR 243). This old
man “had hooves for feet” (TFR 244), and “two heads”, one has good eyes and the
other has bad eyes with green liquids leaking off his blind eyes (TFR 320-1).
There is also the issue of Witchcraft in the
novel. A form of spiritual corruption. This is how Okri represents our
mischievous and secret collaboration with the evil spirits to maintain our
obnoxious hold on power and society. Witches, wizards, and other strange beings
roam the world of men as partners in the unnatural activities that man
perpetrates in society. Okri is here suggesting another dimension of corruption
via mystic collaboration with the spiritual forces: men and women join in
different secret cult formations to secure fame, wealth, power, and control.
For instance, Ade gives Azaro a spell which he throws into the ring during a
fight between Dad and Green Leopard which renders the leopard’s mystic powers
impotent. Ade tells Azaro: “My father gave me this strong spell. Throw it into
the ring” (TFR 396). A witch hangs the dried heads of an antelope and a tiger
and the skull of a boar including the paws of a dead lion on Madame Koto’s
door. Another witch disfigures an herbalist as we read: “A witch slapped the
herbalist, whose face turned blue and then red where he had been slapped” (TFR
420).
Madame Koto has scarified her face in a pottery
bowl in her room which contains cowries, lobes of kola-nuts, a sprouting bulb
of onion, feathers of a yellow bird, ancient coins, a razor and the teeth of a
jaguar. Next to the earthenware are three bottles of different contents and an
upturned turtle, its underside painted red. The man in a white suit “had
curious tattoos on his stomach and amulets round his neck” (TFR 473). The
policeman who took Azaro to his home after his involvement in an accident is a
secret cult member with other officers. They all swear an oath of secrecy as
they carry out their nefarious duties.
Okri’s The Famished Road is
deeply rooted in antediluvian mysteries and primeval practices of African
societies where the impossible takes place. To this end, corruption “… more or
less results of human underdevelopment found in various degrees among every
human society” (Nwodo, 2004, p. 8) and society grieves from various
exploitations by the ruling elites and their dubious cohorts. Madame Koto, the
landlord, politicians, and the police are agents of corruption in the story.
Madame Koto manipulates the destinies of the people of the ghetto, especially
her customers, to sustain their exploitation. Consequently, she frequents the
forest, offering sacrifices in invocative incantations against the people.
Azaro reveals that she even “extended her powers over the ghetto and sent her secret
emissaries into our bodies” (TFR 496). The gossiping ghetto women have
precisely described Madame Koto’s corruptive exploitation of the people as:
They said she was the real reason why the
children in the area didn’t grow, why they were always ill, why the men never
got promotions, and why the women in the area suffered miscarriages. They said
she was a bewitcher of husbands and a seducer of young boys and a poisoner of
children. They said she had a charmed beard and that she plucked one hair out
every day and dropped it into the palm wine she sold and into the pepper soup
she made so that the men would spend all their money in her bar and not care about
their starving families (TFR, 1991, pp. 100-1).
She mixes her soup with demons to compel
customers to partronise her business. She takes a particular spiritual evening
bath, rubs her entire body with a specially oiled concoction to stimulate her
evening customers. Madame Koto does all these to forcefully, like the
politicians, maintain her trade influence and the exploitation of the poor. She
can do anything for wealth and her image. Indeed, materialism is a serious
pandemic which afflicts man with the virus of greed, egocentrism, and the
obsession with excessive accumulation. This explains Madame Koto’s choice of
“the fastest means of social mobility and wealth” (Chukwuma, 2015, p. 49). This
is true of Nigerian society where politicians kill, perform one ritual or the
other to win elections, retain power, or remain the denizens of an office.
Politicians also corrupt the people with their
gifts, to buy support, rig elections or adulterate the voters’ minds. The
politicians have betrayed their ill motive by corrupting the masses with rotten
and poisonous milk. This is a corruption of the highest degree. Political thugs
combed the streets and homes where they beat up the dissenters or opponents and
loot their stalls for affiliating with the opposition party. Okri portrays this
through Dad, who complains: “Now they (politicians) want to know who you will
vote for before they let you carry their load … if you want to vote for the
party that supports the poor, they give you the heaviest load” (TFR 81).
The rotten milk the Party of the Rich shared
inflicts the people with dehydrating disease as a result of which “Men and
women queued up outside the toilet and everyone complained of stomach trouble …
A man heaved and threw-up beside the well … The compound people without
exception looked sick” (TFR 130). They, later, in a slave-like scenario, shared
garri with the teaming hungry masses, as thugs, whipping and clubbing the poor
in the commotion. This replicates the current disbursement of palliatives as evidence
of the ugly effect of corruption, and impoverishment. This also suggests that
violence is looming in the air as a reaction to long-term frustrations of hope.
This political thuggery expands to the market, with the thugs shouting: “If you
don’t belong to our party you don’t belong to this space in the market …
Everyone else in this part of the market is one of us” (TFR 321). In The
Famished Road, Okri argues that people ought to subscribe to certain secret
organisation or fraternities in order to be relevant, gain recognition and
finally succeed.
As earlier stated, Election malpractice is
another form of political corruption. In Africa, people are not free to vote
according to their consciences. Voters are intimidated and terrorised during
every election. Politicians do anything and everything to win elections:
unleashing violence on the electorates, using hunting dogs – thugs who scare
people away or force them to vote against their free will. Okri demonstrates an
instance of this act of violence when, Dad narrowly escapes death in the hands
of thugs for refusing to vote for the Party of the Rich. Dad recounts his ugly
experience: “They were drunk. They asked who he was voting for. He said no one.
They set upon him, took his money, were about to do something worse when the
women appeared” (TFR, 1001, p. 284).
Azaro demonstrates how ruthless these
politicians can be thus: “In great numbers the thugs … poured over the road of
our vulnerability, wounding the night with axes, rampaging our sleep, rousing
the earth, attacking compounds, tearing down doors, destroying rooftops” (TFR,
1991, p. 178). Therefore, “Post-colonial politics are invariably based on a
substratum of violence, an acceptable weapon in the fight for power”
(Maianguwa, 1979, p. 78). Accordingly, Okri depicts violence as an unreasonable
weapon of political corruption.
A more serious issue is the direct use of state
security agents against political opponents. The police, like the thugs, also
unleashed terror on the people as they brutalise the innocent voters. These
agents of the state security and rule of law, partake in torturing the people
in the pretense of maintaining law, peace, and order. They display and apply
excessive force on the helpless citizens. Thus, inflicting serious injuries,
pains, and suffering on the armless poor at no causal provocation.
The police force is the tool with which the rich
and powerful suppress all opposition and rig elections. For instance, the
Landlord ordered the police to beat up the tenants for resisting the party of
the rich. This is confirmed by a tenant’s testimony in the novel that, upon a
false allegation of a plan to burn down his house, the Landlord “hurried away
and returned an hour later with three policemen. They fell on us and flogged us
with whips and cracked our skulls with batons” (TFR, 1991, p. 10). This sparked
off a revolt against police brutality by the people before they got crushed,
with many of them dispersed and missing.
Mum searches around for her husband, Dad, after
the revolt and finds him in “a police station … imprisoned for taking part in
the riots … He had been beaten by the police and there was an ugly cut on his
forehead, bruises on his face and his arm hung beside him like a diseased
appendage” (TFR, 1991, pp. 29-30). The photographer is also arrested and is
accused of unlawfully burning down a party vehicle. Azaro narrates that, “He
waved at us as they dragged him away” and after three days of incarceration, he
narrates his ordeal: “He said he had been tortured in prison … He told us
stories of his imprisonment and of how he had survived fiendish methods of
torture inflicted on him to get out the names of collaborators, planners of
riots, destabilisers of the Imperial Government and enemies of the party” (TFR,
1991, pp. 155-6). Commenting on political and social corruption in Nigeria, as
signifying Africa, Onuekwusi (2012) mentions that:
Immediately there was political independence,
the stories again became lamentations of the humiliation, instabilities of
governments, the vicious circles of corruption, bribery, nepotism, and
generally man’s inhumanity to man brought into our society by an elite class
that abdicated its responsibility (p. 85).
Therefore, the main responsibilities of the
writer are to firmly standby the society and, through his/her writings, expose
all sinisters contrived to mar society and its development. Kolawole Ogungbesan
(1979) asserts that the novelist must function “to protect a future which will
redeem not brutalise, the masses …” (p. 7). Similarly, Chinua Achebe (1978)
strengthens this when he adds that the writer’s duty is “to explore in depth
the human condition” (p. 8) so that “the permanent values - justice, freedom,
human dignity” (p. 5) are restored. Hence, literature restores these universal
values and upholds the moral standards of society.
Human societies are an admixture of good as well
as bad elements. The society is good when the good components are greater and
dispense of human affairs in like manner. Therefore, Dad, Mum, and the
photographer are symbols of hope, love, fraternity, and development.
Conclusion
It suffices from the forgone discussion that
Okri’s The Famished Road embodies a literary critique of the
malevolent effect of political corruption on society and the populace. There is
neither justice nor attention to the poor. No one listens to their stories or
cries. Okri lends his novelistic voice in defense of the weak, the oppressed,
and the voiceless. Okri as an artist, goes beyond educating, enlightening, and
entertaining the public. To him, literature is a powerful tool for correcting
the man’s human follies. As a humanising agent, literature reawakens our sense
of order, restraint, discipline, and imparting in us a sense of humility.
Therefore, Okri employs the medium of art to raise national consciousness on
the fading glories of his culture, nation, and religion.
Nigeria and by implication Africa, revealed in
Okri’s The Famished Road is undeniably in like abiku’s circle
of birth-death-birth bondage. The people are choked by the vicious grip of
sustained political corruption that leads to several crimes, delinquent
behaviours and national insecurity that threaten the cooperate existence of
Nigeria as a sovereign. As a mirror, literature reflects the actual image of
society with the hope of salvaging or improving it.
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