Opinion

By Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo

OVER the past few days, following my tribute to Professor Femi Osofisan on his 80th birthday, several friends and writers have once again asked me the same question they have asked for more than two decades:

“When will you tell the story of how the Nigeria Prize for Literature was born?”

For twenty-two years, I have resisted the temptation.

Partly because I believed institutions should speak for themselves.

Partly because many of the individuals involved were still active in public life.

And partly because I was more interested in building the institution than talking about it.

I turned down several book offers from

Joop Jozef Berkhout, a high profile Dutch–Nigerian book publisher who was the founding managing director of Evans Brothers Limited in Nigeria, and founding executive chairman of Spectrum Books and Safari Books Limited, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Mr. Berhkout, once served on the Advisory Board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature.

I declined similar offers from Dilibe Onyeama, a renown Nigerian author and publishing executive, who founded the publishing company, Delta Publications (Nigeria) Limited.

Both men are gone; may God be kind to their souls.

I am however grateful that my refusals did not get in the way of our friendship.

Sad that I did not, share their enthusiasm to make money from the controversy that trailed the founding of the prize and it’s early beginnings. Joop described them to me as ‘perfect storm’. This is good business, he reminded me, time after time.

Controversies that unlock rare financial opportunities could be described as perfect storm.

In business, a chaotic market event or panic, regulatory changes, and public outrage often combine to create upsides for investors and companies.

My sincere apologies to my friends, Mr. Kunle Kasumu, presenter of Channels TV Book Club and

Adeleke Adeyemi (Mai Nasara) winner of The Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2011 for his children’s book, The Missing Clock. Both of them were commissioned by my former company to write the company’s view of the prize. I thought the story deserved better than a coffee table treatment.

But time has a way of changing perspectives.

Many of the pioneers who helped shape the prize are now elderly. Some have passed on. Memories fade. Documents disappear. Important details are forgotten.

Yet the story of how Nigeria’s foremost literature and science prizes came into being is worth preserving.

It is a story of ideas, persistence, setbacks, compromise, coalition-building, public criticism, and occasionally sheer stubbornness.

It is also a story about Nigeria.

In the coming weeks, I will share a series of personal reflections under the title Heavy Lifting.

These are not official histories. They are simply my recollections as one participant in a journey that began with a sleepless night in London and eventually became one of Nigeria’s most important intellectual institutions.

I hope the series contribute something useful to our understanding of how national institutions are built.

The first installment begins where the story truly started: a hotel room in London on an October night in 2001.

HEAVY LIFTING (Part One)

THE NIGHT I COULDN’T SLEEP

I arrived in London on October 17, 2001.

It was supposed to be a brief escape. A week carved out of a crowded calendar. Time to breathe, to think, to step away from the constant demands of work—and to honour a promise to spend time with my cousin, Nneka.

That evening, like millions of others scattered across time zones, I turned on the television.

The BBC was broadcasting the Booker Prize ceremony.

I had never watched it before.

Within minutes, I was completely absorbed.

The room glowed with quiet elegance. The air seemed charged with expectation. Names were spoken with reverence. Books were treated not as products, but as cultural monuments. Writers—living, breathing writers—were honoured like national treasures.

When Peter Carey was announced as the winner for *True History of the Kelly Gang*, the applause felt larger than the room, larger than the moment. It felt like a country affirming what it valued.

I watched everything. Every speech. Every pause. Every carefully chosen word.

And when it ended, I could not sleep.

I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, the question circling me, tightening its grip:

Why doesn’t Nigeria have something like this?

By then, Nigerian literature was not struggling for relevance. We had already given the world giants. We had produced a Nobel laureate. A Booker Prize winner. Our writers were studied, quoted, and celebrated far beyond our borders.

And yet, at home, there was nothing of comparable stature. No moment when the nation paused to listen. No grand stage where literature was lifted into the light.

For me, that absence was not abstract.

I had lived through a different reality.

I began my career in journalism as a Sub-Editor at *The Guardian* and rose to become Political Editor of *The Independent*. Even earlier, in 1983, I had been an intern with the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria in Enugu. My entire professional formation unfolded under military regimes—Major General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida, and General Sani Abacha.

These were years when writers and journalists were treated not as national assets, but as irritants—sometimes as enemies. Words were policed. Opinions were dangerous. Expression could carry consequences.

In that climate, the idea that a nation could gather, celebrate a writer, and elevate literature to the level of national pride was not just distant.

It was almost unfathomable.

Why?

The question refused to leave.

It followed me into the morning. It lingered through the week. It stayed with me for months, quietly insisting, demanding an answer.

What I did not know—lying awake in that London hotel room—was that this question would become a turning point. It would pull me into one of the most demanding, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding journeys of my professional life.

At the time, literature was the furthest thing from my immediate priorities.

I had just transitioned from Community Relations to Public Relations at Nigeria LNG. I had been brought in to help turn around the company’s poor public perception and to build a robust internal communications system. Both were considered urgent, and I attacked them with near-maniacal intensity.

At one point, I was overseeing the production of multiple publications simultaneously—*The Bond*, a monthly staff magazine; *NLNG*, the corporate flagship quarterly magazine; and *The Host*, a quarterly magazine focused on community relations. The pace was relentless.

In Community Relations role, I traveled constantly through the Niger Delta.

Emohua.

Abua.

Okrika.

Ikwerre.

Ahoada.

Each journey told the same story.

You did not need reports or data to understand it. You could see it in the roads, in the schools, in the faces of young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Poverty.

Unemployment.

Frustration that hung in the air like humidity.

And everywhere, well-meaning interventions that barely scratched the surface.

The company was donating about forty thousand naira for community development projects.

It sounded meaningful on paper.

In reality, it was a temporary fix. A leaking roof patched. A few desks placed in a classroom.

Useful, yes.

Transformational, no.

I began to feel a growing unease. A quiet conviction that what we were doing, though well intentioned, was fundamentally inadequate.

We were addressing symptoms, not causes.

What these communities needed was not token support, but real economic opportunity—something that could shift trajectories, not just ease discomfort.

That conviction would eventually lead to a difficult confrontation with the General Manager, Fred Smeenk—and, ultimately, to the creation of a major microcredit scheme.

I still remember the day the NLNG Board approved the five hundred million naira fund for host communities. I shed tears of joy. It remains one of the achievements I am most proud of.

But at the time, I did not yet see how this same philosophy would reach beyond economics.

Because literature, I would come to understand, was facing a similar problem.

It did not need gestures.

It needed structure.

It needed visibility.

It needed aspiration.

Writers needed more than admiration in private circles. They needed a platform powerful enough to command national attention. A moment that said: this matters.

The Booker Prize had shown me what was possible.

Now came the harder part.

Convincing others.

Because all I had was a question.

No budget.

No approval.

No mandate.

No roadmap.

And absolutely no idea where to begin.

To be continued…

***Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo, chief executive officer, CEO, Museums and Monuments Academy Lives in Montreal, Canada.

A.I