Faraway, friendly country

WELCOME TO NIGERIA - The Impossible Land: R. K. Raju; Allied Publishers Ltd., 751, Anna Salai, Chennai- 600002. Rs. 200.

MR. RAJU, WHO was for many years Special Correspondent of The Statesman in Delhi, had gone all over the world as a footloose newsman. He sustains the reader's interest right through this book on Nigeria coming in the wake of the books he had written earlier. He has traced the events in that country, which has been buffeted repeatedly from civilian to military rule.

Of considerable interest is his writing about the success story of the Rail India Technical and Engineering Services (RITES) which was assigned the management of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRS) in 1979. The RITES brought about a big leap in its passenger traffic by 200 per cent. Mr. Raju writes about the negative attitude of the World Bank which tried to dissuade the RITES from taking up this assignment. The cordial relations which India had with Nigeria ensured that it got unstinted support for this prestigious project from its Armed Forces Development Project. The first major step taken by the RITES was the placing of an order with the NRC for as many as 20 million blank tickets along with the introduction of monthly season tickets. Not the least important part of the project completed by the RITES was the repairing of over 70 locomotives which were in a very bad condition. Very little is known in India about this achievement of the RITES.

A particularly charming aspect of Nigerian culture and way of life, mentioned by him, is their love of music and dance and the drum as a medium of communication. The chapter he has set apart to this immediately stirs up thoughts about the drummers perched upon thickly covered branches in the African jungles making an instant relay of messages about what is happening to Phantom, the Ghost who walks, known beyond the jungle as Mr. Walker, created by Lee Falks. Such an African scenario emerging from this book makes it eerie and for that reason very inviting. The gay abandon with which the Nigerians take to dancing and singing recalls the scenes of swaying and swinging Africans from the Struggle for Africa, written in the 1950s by the British journalist, Vernon Bartlett.

Mr. Raju has brought a thoroughness to his writing about the swings between civil and military rule in Nigeria punctuated by house arrests and even by executions. He also writes about the travails which Biafra had gone through. While writing about how Nigerians were ``enamoured with the British'', he mentions that this could be said of both India and Pakistan. ``We had Field Marshal Cariappa, who was both in dress and speech, very British in outlook. Field Marshal Ayub Khan enjoyed his sundowners even during Ramzan, according to Rajeshwar Dayal, a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.'' But he should have known that unlike Ayub Khan, Cariappa scrupulously remained a soldier with unflinching loyalty to democracy and its civilian governments and was wholly free from the grip of ambitions which led to the smothering of democracy in Pakistan by Ayub Khan and later by other generals.

He draws attention to the several causes mentioned by a Nigerian scholar, Anthony Enahoro, for the failure of democracy to take root in Nigeria. It is doubtful whether recurring military coups would have been possible not only in Nigeria but also in neighbouring Pakistan had the armies of these countries not been so very disproportionately large to fill them with ideas about their generals being in a position to take over whenever they wished to.

Apart from this, democracy could take roots in a country and have civilian leaders elected to power only if the political environment could throw up such leaders who could build a rapport with the people. Africa did have such leaders in Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Tanzania's Julius Nyerere. Nigeria has not fared as well as it should have with its big oil strikes and the huge increases in petroleum production.

The inflow of exchange earnings should have been much higher had some of the importing countries not been defaulting on payments. He has also reported a bizarre predicament in which executions ordered by the military junta could not be carried out or were delayed because there was no hanging equipment which had to be imported.

Mr. Raju's wife, Prof. Beula Mall Raju, distinguished herself as a specialist in Educational Planning Administration and Teacher Education in the Lagos University. She had also served as a UNESCO specialist in Kenya. She was the only non-Nigerian selected as a field specialist member of the All Nigerian Academic Planning Committee on the National Universities Commission. This very readable book is about a faraway country of friendly and lively people with a delightful sense of humour.

CVG

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