AWF Kick-starts New Season With Ikeogu Oke - By Abubakar Abdullahi
The proactive Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) is set to kick-start its 2011 literary calendar with the poet Ikeogu Oke at the Pen and Pages Bookstore, venue of the highly-acclaimed Guest Writer Session on January 29, 2011. This comes in the wake of eventful 2010 literary season which featured readings by national and international writers, creative writing workshops, weekly critique sessions and the publication of Dugwe, an in-house literary journal of writings by AWF members and previous guest writers including Uche Umez, Igoni A, Barrett and Emeka Agbayi. Mr Oke whose second collection of poems, Salutes Without Guns (2009), was long-listed for the 2010 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and selected as one of the Books of the Year (2010) by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), hails from Akanu Ohafia in Abia State.

Since 1988 his poetry, fiction and scholarly essays have appeared in various publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In selecting Salutes Without Guns as one of the Books of the Year (2010) for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Nadine Gordimer, the eminent South Africa writer and winner of the 1991 Noble Prize in Literature, said of Oke: “Here is a writer who finds the metaphor for what has happened and continues, evolves, not often the way we want, in our lives in Africa and the world. He does so timelessly and tellingly, as perhaps only a poet can.” The remark was published on page 10 of the December 3, 2010, issue of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS).

Oke is also a performance poet with an international track record. On October 14, 2010, his performance of “My Country at Night,” was a major entertainment feature at the culminating dinner of the Presidential Retreat for Power Sector Investors held at the State House, Abuja. Prior to that, he had performed his poems at several local and international fora, including the Vodacom Complex, Gauteng, South Africa, where, on May 23, 2008, he performed "A Savage Writes Back" and "The Palm wine Ode" as a special guest of the wRites associates (http://www.writeassociates.co.za/) during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe organised by the wRites associates.

A product of University of Calabar and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, graduating with a BA in English and Literary Studies and an MA in Literature, respectively He currently works as a Technical Adviser (Media and Communication) in the Presidential Task Force on Power (PTFP), Abuja.

There will be the usual side-attraction of mini-art exhibition, performance poetry, live music and an improved raffle-draw. Other AWF programmes for the 2011 literary season will be duly announced. The Abuja Writer’s Forum meets three Sundays each month and hosts a reading on every last Saturday at the International Institute of Journalism and Pen and Pages respectively.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bringing Back The Book Through CSR - Emman Usman Shehu
We of the Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) are very skeptical about this whole Bring Back The Book Campaign. We have reluctantly agreed to be part of today’s programme. Our pessimism is not difficult to explain. Nigeria is a country that thrives on gimmickery and hypocrisy . This present campaign is not the first of its type in the country. Indeed, this same administration in its earlier configuration had been involved in what was described as the Read Campaign. In late May, 2008, the then, according to a newspaper report, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua had called on state governors and local council chairmen to raise the poor standard of education in the nation by implementing the recently unveiled “Read Campaign” of the Federal Ministry of Education.

Yar’Adua said it was part of the administration’s effort to reawaken reading culture among Nigerians and reduce illiteracy, which at that time stood at 57 per cent. But that campaign did not go beyond the inaugural dinner. With hindsight, it is safe to assume that the administration only did that as a gimmick to curry public sympathy given that it was battling with a credibility problem. Fast forward two years later and the campaign conveniently wears a new toga against another political background heralded by a tailor-made media event without even the outline of a roadmap. Bringing back the book, especially in Nigeria today requires more than the President reading a few pages of A book on television, when even copies of that particular book can hardly be found all over the country.

A proper roadmap begins with according respect for the writer. For too long the producer of the book has been treated contemptuously and nothing typifies this than the recent arrest of Okey Ndibe only a few weeks after the highly hyped Bring Back The Book Teleshow. It is very shocking that a writer, scholar and public intellectual, like Ndibe, whose only weapons are the words he weaves and hurls at those, who, by their actions and inactions, assault our collective conscience, could be arrested, detained and released while the evil perpetrators of the bomb explosions that have rocked our cities for many months, killed and maimed scores of our innocent people are footloose on our country's streets. Ndibe is a public intellectual and as such, he draws the critical mass to the democratic alternatives open to them and to those possibilities that make a New Nigeria possible through the book.

Is engaging the critical mass an offence? We say an emphatic NO. Ndibe is not a bomber. Ndibe is a ‘bloody writer’, a phrase that underlines the utter disrespect the officialdom holds Nigerian writers, whose weapon and shield are his pen and the words flowing from his fecund mind. In our world, the pen and the written words serve too little as shields against the onslaughts of mindless security and intelligence agents, as well as visionless and self-serving politicians. In the light of the foregoing, the Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) condemns the very act of arresting and detaining Okey Ndibe. We demand that a public apology be issued by the administration to Ndibe and to all Nigerian writers for the embarrassment its action has caused. The book cannot be brought back without writers being respected.

The next thing is to declare a state of emergency in the education division and design a specific programme of economic aid for the reconstruction of the book sector. Part of this Marshall Plan should include a means of encouraging or enforcing organizations and institutions, whether public or private, to map out a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy. CSR is generally defined as the “ economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time”(Carroll and Buchholtz 2003). This implies that organizations have moral, ethical, and philanthropic responsibilities in addition to their responsibilities to earn a fair return for investors and comply with the law. In other words, this is a way of giving back to the society by funding a specific project for the communal good.

A possible model that AWF envisages is the establishment of a BookTrust in every state. Such a BookTrust would be partly funded through CSR by organizations and institutions within and outside the state. This not only eliminates over reliance on funding from government but ensures a consistency that would open up a variety of possibilities. Another possibility is for libraries to be created and supported through a CSR network. The CSR approach in Nigeria has not worked thus far because there is a general reluctance by organizations and institutions to fulfill their obligations in this area. So a strategy of awareness and enforcement must be designed. CSR has worked in other parts of the world and there is no reason why it cannot serve as one of the platforms for bringing back the book in Nigeria.

Back to the Top