Beyond History, Toward Speculative Repair
Speculative Repair: Healing Nigeria’s Deepest Wounds
The story of Nigeria is often told as a sequence of events—dates, battles, political maneuvers. But what of the unresolved echoes? What of the living memory that shapes today’s tensions and tomorrow’s possibilities? My novel does not emerge from a vacuum. It is born from the urgent, unresolved chords of our present, a deliberate act of what I call “speculative repair.” Here is why this work exists, and why its moment is now.
1. The Unsettled Agitation: More Than Noise
The persistent call for self-determination, championed by movements like IPOB, is often reduced in mainstream discourse to mere separatist clamour or political nuisance. This novel moves beyond the headlines to explore the rooted grief and generational yearning that fuels such agitation. It asks: What historical soil breeds this relentless demand? By stepping into the interior worlds of characters shaped by this reality, the fiction seeks not to endorse a position, but to humanize a profound and often misunderstood political expression, making its persistence comprehensible to all sides.
2. The Toxicity of Suspicion: A Nation Trapped
The high wall of suspicion between Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities is our collective prison. It ensures that our political arena is not a marketplace of ideas, but a gladiatorial pit of ethnic allegiance. This toxicity actively blocks the emergence of competent, compassionate leadership, as merit is forever sacrificed at the altar of origin. My novel dramatizes this cage, showing how suspicion corrupts every interaction—from the national assembly to the village square—and imagines what first, fragile steps out of it might look like.
3. Confronting a Denied Trauma
For the Igbo people, the deepest wound is often not the original atrocity of the civil war, but the sustained, systemic denial of that atrocity by the Nigerian state. A trauma unacknowledged is a trauma that festers, transforming into a spectral force that haunts the national psyche. This book explicitly recognises that trauma. It gives narrative space to the psychological and social legacy of that denial, not to dwell in victimhood, but to assert a fundamental principle of healing: you cannot repair what you will not first acknowledge.
4. The War That Never Ended: Marginalization as Policy
The declaration of “No victor, no vanquished” rings hollow against the reality of deliberate political and infrastructural marginalization. When key appointments, federal projects, and national symbolism consistently exclude a major ethnic group, it perpetuates a cold war by other means. The novel illustrates this not through dry analysis, but through the lived experience of characters navigating a system designed to limit their horizons, asking the reader to feel the weight of a peace that feels like a prolonged defeat.
5. Beyond “Victimhood”: A Call for Empathetic Awareness
A common retort to Igbo complaints is an accusation of playing the victim. This novel challenges every Nigerian from other ethnicities to look past this easy dismissal. It constructs a mirror showing how narratives of victimhood are forged in the furnace of real, sustained experience. The goal is to foster awareness—to replace accusation with curiosity, and dismissal with the question: “If this were my reality, how would I feel? What would I demand?”
6. The Blueprint for a Shared Future: Unity Through Understanding
Ultimately, this is a novel aimed at foundation-laying. Its highest purpose is to foster the mutual understanding and respect without which true unity is a facade. By humanizing all sides of this complex national equation, it seeks to clear the toxic air and make space for a new, progressive patriotism. It imagines a Nigeria where loyalty is to justice and shared prosperity, not just to ethnic survival.
7. The Unanswered Question: From Analysis to Speculative Solution
Many brilliant works have documented our war and dissected its aftermath. Historians and analysts have provided essential diagnosis. But a diagnosis alone is not a cure. This novel enters the space where most stop: the space of imaginative, practical solution-building. It dares to ask, “What if?” What if we addressed these roots with courage? What political architecture could emerge? This is the core of speculative repair: using the power of narrative not just to recount the break, but to actively imagine—and model—the mend.
This novel is more than a story. It is an invitation to a crucial national conversation we have postponed for generations. It is a belief that fiction, in its deepest speculative form, can be a workshop for tomorrow’s politics.
It is for everyone who has felt the uneasy silence after the news segment ends, for everyone who yearns for a Nigeria that lives up to its promise, and for everyone brave enough to believe that understanding our deepest wounds is the first step toward healing them.
The discussion begins not in the halls of power, but in the imagination. This book is my opening statement.
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