A Great Plea for Ribadu: Wale Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots: the Story of a Nigerian Anti-Graft Czar
Although this tome is about Nuhu Ribadu, the founding chairman and nurturer of one of the world’s most famous anti-graft agencies, the EFCC, and current presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the biographical subject happens not to be the protagonist of the narrative. That position goes to the incurable malfeasance of Nigeria’s leadership. This powerful and unassailable bug lives in the structure of Nigeria’s public service systems and overpowers whoever enters that realm. Adebanwi pictures the bug as a maggot and the environment that cuddles it as paradise. To this reviewer, the title sounds like an attempt to rename and reorient Nigeria’s--nay Africa’s--commanding manner of misnaming unearned wealth as nourishment: a bribe used to be called kolanut, a stimulant to be shared among friends; then it became hors d’oeuvres or egunje; thereafter, it grew into a full banquet of sumptuous eating in public, adulating glare. By conjuring up the unhealthy ecology of