Sorry Chimamanda, We Need The Single Story Of Our Failures!

I have painstakingly watched the beautifully delivered speech by Ms Chimamanda Adichie on “the Dangers of a Single Story”. The main point of her speech is that Europeans have mainly propagated a single story of Africa which is always about our poverty, wars and in short, all about negative things. She basically wants the rest of the world to also acknowledge good things about Africa, especially the fact that not everybody in Africa is starving.
I greatly admire Ms Adichie’s beauty and achievement, but I do not agree with her views in this speech! I find it hard to agree that just for the "feel good desires" of a very few fortunate Africans like her that the world should not be constantly reminded of our inexcusable failures!
I think from the speech that Ms Adichie unfortunately belongs to the group of Nigerians and Black Africans who like to feel good always despite the fact that the realities suggest that we should not!
I believe that supposedly enlightened Black Africans who moan too much about too many negative stories about Africa are doing us no good because we really need more negative news about us to force us all to face our failures and possibly act to change our situations.
I believe there is not even enough negative news about Black Africa and Nigeria in particular and that we need more and more negative news that highlight every senseless deaths in Nigeria, every act of shamelessness, every Aondoaka scandal, every incident of police brutality, human rights abuses and man inhumanity against man in Nigeria, leaving the so-called middleclass or upper-class Nigerians with no place to hide from the shame of being Nigerians.
I believe in telling the truth about Nigeria and the Black race rather than in trying to re-write history like Ms Adichie probably advocates.
I know it is particularly difficult for successful Nigerian individuals and in particular “fortunate” children of both genuinely and dubiously affluent Nigerians in the Europe and America to bear negative news about Nigeria and Africa, but the truth still remains that Black Africa is the most backward continent. We are so backward that the best parts of the best cities in Nigeria do not enjoy a quality and standard of life comparable to the poorest neighbourhood in Western Europe. We all know that some Black individuals who see themselves as very successful want to feel good about themselves by telling good stories about Black Africa, but the truth is that Black Africa (not individuals) is an absolute failure and our failure cannot be remedied by falsehood.
I have met a number of European individuals who apparently had Nigerian friends of affluent backgrounds and thus were given the impression that the average Nigerian lives in the kind of houses you find in posh areas of Victoria Island and Maitama Abuja. I remember telling an English girl in early 2007 that her Nigerian friend might be a daughter of a big thief. I told her the truth that 99% of those that live in the kind of big house she described to me were more likely to be thieves than hard working people. I specifically informed her that there are only two groups of Nigerians who would paint good pictures of life in Nigeria to the outside world – the rogues and the idiots!
My determination in presenting the true picture of Nigeria is not out of hatred for my country, but purely out of passion for genuine development. I passionately want my country to become the economic and technological giant it should be for the upliftment of the physical and mental wellbeing of the Black race!
I do not fail to appreciate that Nigerian individuals are very highly talented and intelligent individuals, but I will never ever suggest that any progress is being made in Nigeria in terms of development. I will never like Ms Adichie say that what they call Nollywood, an epitome of modern Nigerian imperfection, low standard and laziness is a great success simply because Black Africa’s illiterate and semi-illiterate populations patronise their poorly cooked films. I refuse to see anything impressive about Nollywood not because I do not like to appreciate and support a Nigerian industry, but because I desire a Nollywood or any wood from Nigeria that aspires to equate with Hollywood in all respect! I passionately want the best and not half measure out of Nigerian art. Glorifying incompetence and mediocrity simply because you have to support your own or because you want to feel good is to me most ignorant and or insincere!
I believe enlightened Nigerians and Black individuals should be taking the lead in telling more and more negative stories about us to the world because the world really needs to know the full details of our failures in order to understand us better! I believe the world needs to know that Nigeria has no healthy hospital that can be compared with the poorest hospital in Western Europe. I believe the world should know that the worst prison in England is far more habitable than the best university halls of residence in Nigeria. I believe the world should know that Nigerian railway remains at the level Britain left it in 1960. I believe the world needs to know that our failure is such that if we should experience any major natural disaster that our people would die like animals because there are no hospitals and no emergency services and nothing works well in Nigeria.
We cannot continue to hide our failures because we are facing a real danger of another slavery and colonialism!
If you are a Black person and you call yourself enlightened, but are unaware that Black people (Ne gros) are the only major racial group that has failed to prove itself, I doubt your enlightenment!
If you are an educated Black person and you are unaware and or unconcerned about the fact that there is no successful and or organised society of Black people like us anywhere on this planet and none in the pipeline, you probably lack proper education!
Escapism by educated or supposedly enlightened Nigerians and Africans will not bring about the change we desire to take us out of our shameful situation.
We must learn how to wash our dirty linens in public especially when everyone is aware that all our linens are dirty anyway.
Perhaps, one of the greatest lessons we can learn from the White world is the culture of open self criticism or if you like, washing of their dirty linens in public. Perhaps, slavery could have lasted longer than it did if European societies had not permitted internal criticism and enlightened White individuals had not spoken out forcefully against the evils of slave trade. That to me was an example of how the White race washed their dirty linens in public by globally condemning their own, instead of pretending that all was well.
Today, we still delight in western activists exposing every negative they can possibly gather about their countries in a bid to ensure transparency and further development.
We have seen that western governments are constantly striving to be clean because people are not afraid to expose the most negative stories about their countries.
Nigerians and Black Africans in Europe and America bear natural responsibilities for taking the good life we enjoy in our respective locations to Nigeria. The way to do this is not going to show off and or oppress people at home but by advocating for genuine development and we can only achieve genuine development if we stop shying away from our failures. Crying out against too many negative stories about Nigeria and Africa is a great disservice to the ever suffering people of Sudan, Nigeria, Haiti and the entire Black race!
It is an insult to the great majority of Black Africans languishing in poverty, diseases and human rights abuses to propagate good stories out of Nigeria and Black Africa. We must focus more and more on the negative stories as it is probably the only way we can survive!!

John Iteshi
London October 2009