There had been no petrol in the country’s petrol stations for five months. The President was missing – and had been for months. The country was drifting aimlessly, on the brink. The country’s most powerful men and women were mostly involved in a grand conspiracy to shield the ailing and disappeared president from public scrutiny. Just as it is now, when newspapers bear little boxes counting the days since the Chibok girls were abducted, back then, the newspapers also counted how many days it had been since President Umaru Yar’Adua went missing without handing over power to his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan.
It was in those dire circumstances sometime towards the end of February 2010 – shortly after the First Lady, Turai, and her accomplices smuggled a comatose Yar’Adua back to Nigeria from Saudi Arabia in the dead of the night, without the knowledge of the Vice-President – that Chude Jideonwo, having been abroad for a few weeks, returned to Nigeria. As he writes in his book, “Are We The Turning Point Generation” (reviewed on this column on July 7, 2014), he came back with “the hope that by the time I returned, the days of spending a fortune buying fuel for my car and generator, after heavily tipping the mechanic to help join the frustrating queues, would have ended.”