“I think the time has come for everyone to work toward the Nigeria of our dream,” Adujie told the gathering. “It’s wrong to stay here and do nothing. So I’m ready to return home to contribute to the process of making the next election fair and credible.”
There was a loud applause and a smile sprouted from the edges of Adujie’s lips. He then proposed a motion that the group, which calls itself the Nigeria People’s Parliament in Diaspora, should arm a team with sophisticated gadgets and send it to Nigeria to monitor the poll. The motion was unanimously passed and he again beamed with smiles.
Adujie is now making his promise real. In November, (he is keeping the exact date close to his chest because he fears for his security), like a few other citizens abroad distressed by their country’s multifarious problems, the Nigerian will quit his lucrative job at one of New York’s biggest law firms and abandon the comfort of his posh home in Queens to lend a helping hand to his fragile country.
“We all need to get involved,” he said in an interview at a friend’s home in the Brooklyn district of New York one recent Friday evening.
“At this point in my life, I’m ready to allow myself be shot to death if that would bring about a better Nigeria. We all need to be catalysts for change as we try to fix our country. No one will do it for us,” said Adujie, relaxing on an armchair adjacent a twin bed in the spacious, well kept and slightly perfumed one-bedroom apartment.
Dressed in a black suit, a white striped shirt, a red tie and an ash-coloured bowler hat, Adujie’s demeanour alternated between animation and despondency.
For the years that Adujie has been away, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and the world’s most populous black nation, has made very little progress. Although the country has enormous oil resources, earning about $25 billion a year, according to the Revenue Watch Institute, it remains among the most poverty-stricken in the world, ranking 158th out of the 182 countries rated in the United Nation’s most recent Human Development Index. Corruption is rife. Basic infrastructures have broken down. And its elections are perpetually flawed, its leaders often lacking legitimacy.
The general election initially scheduled for January but now tentatively fixed for April, presents another opportunity for the West African nation to reinvent itself. But apprehension is mounting worldwide that the election might throw the country into another round of political crisis.
“Nigeria is in trouble,” wrote John Campbell, a former U.S ambassador to Nigeria, in a controversial article for the Council for Foreign Relations in September. “National elections scheduled for 2011 have the potential to undermine the country’s current precarious stability by exacerbating its serious internal ethnic, regional and religious divisions.”
Adujie, a tall, dark, stocky man, who refused to take up US citizenship for fear that it might dilute his ‘Nigerianness’, deeply loves his country. He is troubled by the problems confronting it and does not want predictions like Campbell’s to come true. And so, like, a few other Nigerians in the Diaspora, committed to seeing a fraud-free election in their country, the New York lawyer is packing his stuff and heading home. He says he is ready to commit everything he has got to the process of remaking his country.
“I am leaving my job and the comfort here not because I am not aware of the condition in Nigeria, not because I’m foolish,” he explained, trying to damp down his feeling of despair.
“I’m doing that because I love Nigeria. The Americans who go to Iraq and Afghanistan - 17, 18 years-old who join the army, the marine or the navy to fight on behalf of America - do so because they love their country.
“They do so because they have the dedication, the commitment and the passion, nationalism and patriotism for America. Why can’t I or other Nigerians make that commitment?”
Adujie does not plan to run for office in the election. Neither is he a supporter of any of the candidates in the polls. His primary concern is for the electorate to be sufficiently enlightened so they can make informed choices in the elections.
“If the electorate is able to measure the comparative qualities between the candidates or between the various political parties, whatever decision they then make would be an informed one, not one based on bags of rice, bags of salt, five naira (Nigerian currency) or such other short-term benefits that take them for granted and defeat their long term interest,” said the lawyer, punching the air for emphasis.
Adujie came to the US in December 1988, after completing a law degree at the University of Maiduguri.
He later attended the New York University and was admitted to the New York bar. Though 5269 miles away, the lawyer has kept tabs on events in his homeland. Early this year, he decided it was time to get directly involved in charting a fresh course for Nigerian politics. He shared his plans with friends and family members who warned him against the move. They reminded him of the insecurity, corruption, misgovernment and infrastructural breakdown back home.
Still, he is trudging ahead. When he arrives in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, in November, he plans to tour university campuses across the 36 states to speak to students and faculties about the need to vote for the right kind of leaders. He would also engage with major labour and professional bodies to persuade them not to sit on the fence before, during and after the elections.
Like Adujie, like Garrick
Mr Adujie is not the only New York-based Nigerian sacrificing his job and comfort and returning home to mobilize citizens for the elections.
In early November, 25-year-old Nosa Garrick, a freelance writer and desktop artist, will quit her job with Thomson Reuters and fly to Nigeria to help run Vote or Quench, a nonprofit for voters’ education she co-founded with four other young Nigerians based in the United States, France and Nigeria.
Ms Garrick’s family came to the US in 1998 when her father was transferred to the Nigerian embassy in Washington.
She studied French and Communication at St. John’s University in New York.
After a year teaching English in France, Garrick returned to New York in 2007.
She loved it here and with a green card already in her kitty, longed to live here for as long as possible.
Her plans suddenly changed one day last April. The Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, was on a visit to the US and was to appear on reporter Christiane Amanpour’s show on CNN.
A friend of Garrick’s, helping to produce the show, contacted her requesting a commentary on Nigeria. Her article titled “Dear leaders of Nigeria” and posted on Amanpour’s CNN blog, elicited 99 reactions, including some from Nigerian youths who challenged her to return home to help fix her country rather than pontificate from afar. Garrick was touched.
“For me, I thought there was no way I could turn around, not do anything and go on with my day,” Garrick, a smiling, tall, lanky, dark woman, said one recent Friday afternoon at a friend’s office in Manhattan, New York. She knew she needed to act, but she wasn’t sure how to proceed. So, she rang a few friends for ideas and before long, Vote or Quench - a social media-driven organization aimed at getting young Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora involved in elections and politics - was born.
The organisation now has a vibrant website and a lot of young people have signed on to the campaign, including Nneka Egbunna, a rising star, singer and songwriter, who now acts as the organisation’s spokesperson. Next month, Garrick will be on the ground in Nigeria to energize the campaign and work with other young people at home to insist on transparent and credible elections in their country.
“I want my kids to be able to go back to my country (she has no kids yet). I want to be able to live there and be okay, and not be afraid of kidnapping or of not having the basic infrastructures,” she said.
“I have realized that it’s wrong for me to stay here, see what’s going on and not do anything. If I am not part of the solution, then, I’m part of the problem.”
Nigeria, OPEC’s sixth largest producer of crude and one of America’s top supplier of crude, is notorious for fraudulent elections. Its last three elections fell far short of international standard and most western countries were outraged. Following widespread local and international condemnation of the 2007 poll, the government embarked on what it called a comprehensive electoral reform.
The head of the electoral agency and some of his commissioners have since been fired and replaced with a more credible team.
Adujie is hopeful that things would work well for his country this time around. “This is a time for rebirth and renewal for us as a country and as a people,” he said. “This is a chance for us to have the best president ever, the best governors ever, the best legislators ever.”
