Jonathan E Ifeanyi

Black Nation Jonathan E Ifeanyi

Chino returns from the University of Nigeria and prepares for his journey to Negro State in northern Nigeria where he has just been posted for the National Youth Service Corps. The next day, he goes to the North with a patriotic zeal to serve his fatherland even though his parents, out of fear, object to his mission. Months later comes the time for the general elections. Youth corps members are employed by the Independent National Electoral Commission as ad hoc staff members but then, the election is being rigged in favour of the ruling party. Chino faces the challenge of defying and resisting the riggers but realises his loneliness. The opposition he encounters, from the riggers and even from his very colleagues, terrifies him and changes his political mentality altogether. Then it dawns on him that the world of politics is a world driven by propaganda, in which public perception is king, and what we perceive to be reality may be radically different from what "the people" perceive and the truth may be stranger than fiction. Now, at the end, following the rigging of the presidential election in favour of President Taminobi's ruling party, the brutal slaughtering of his colleagues and innocent citizens by both the angry thug-supporters of the opposition party presidential candidate-Mohammadu Dauda-and the terrorists named Kokoko, a genocide never before seen in the nation's history apart from the Biafra saga, as well as his unjust imprisonment, leaves him sorrowful, devastated, and a changed man.