Title: When the Chips are Down
Author: Ezenwanka Macdonald Chijioke
Year: 2O15
Pages: 264
Publisher: Njigod Printing Press
Reviewer: Ezugwu Okike
Expo 1977 by Chukwuemeka Ike was the first major screaming satire to take Nigerian education system to the cleaners. Expo… ended with an indictment of every facet of the Nigerian society. Parents, teachers, students and even the government all had a hand in the pie. Expo… told a tale of a society peopled with offenders.
But the novel got outpaced as time marched. Writers are historians, and Ike being just one, recorded the deeds prevalent in his time. Weeping publications in the class of Expo 77 did little to correct these damaging ills. Patriots will be saddened to know that these evils assaulting our education system have undergone astronomical increase since the publication of Expo… and other writings targeted at healing our sick education system. Their sophistication has advanced. The ills got bloated and have acquired sturdier root.
Ezenwaka Macdonald Chijjoke explores this more than most writers before him. He did not just pick up his cane to flog a dead horse. When the Chips are Down crafted off by Macdonald was thorough and pitiless as it slashed through the complex anatomy of decay in our institutions of learning. It is penetrating, encyclopedic and can frankly take pride in leaving no stone unturned
It is an unsparing story of university life set in the fictitious country of Ngari. It portrays everyone as victim and a good number as perpetrators of the dark immoralities bedeviling our institutions of learning. The good student who came into the university with the earnest intention of seeking academic light is turned against the wild.
He is left without options in the face of a brutal jungle. If he stands aloof, he soon finds out that the fence is a precarious place to sit on. If he becomes a member of a fraternity, his predicament is doubled as he hunts and gets hunted. He now needs in his arsenal weapons of both attack and defense. If he strikes neutral he is consistently hunted and preyed upon. He stands between a pitiless devil and an unfeeling blue sea. His tale is that of a turbulent existence.
Another helpless victim is the beautiful female student. Incontinent lecturers hover around her with vesture’s greed. It is not worth a beetle if she has something up stairs. She must play by the dirty rule of a dirty game which chiefly consist in throwing open her legs. Rivals clash over her as she helplessly stands as a piece of bone flung into the midst of desperate dogs. She is dazed and befuddled.
University administration is hijacked by a syndicate which percolates and involves the university’s top echelon. This syndicate kidnaps, hold hostages and keeps the academic community in terror. The air is fear-suffused.
The cloud gathers and culminates in a rain of crises with confraternities conflicting and shooting on sight; the hunted firing back and security agents contributing their own inferno to the cross fire. An academic tale that should have ended in inventions, breakthroughs and colorful titles is capped with injuries, incarcerations and death.
Richard is our chief character whose story provides us with a window into these dark crimes. Richard fought his way through the ranks of the dreadful leopards. He later fled out with scars from a starry battle to instruct us on what our education system has become.
When this book left the printing machine, I was privileged to be possessed of a copy. Reading through it, one thing stood out for me. The narration has an insider’s authority. The complexity of crimes as revealed by the author may make an outsider in a sane clime construe it in the light of a crime fiction. But we shall credit this to an uncommon gift of imagination and long- spanning period of eagle-eyed study of the society
In this era that we pretend to fight corruption, When the Chips are Down is a story of the revolution. The school system is the fountain irrigating the rest of the society. If the school system is contaminated then the society is way too close in harm’s way.
With the current bill before the senate seeking to increase the gravity of sexual harassment of female students by those who teach them, the spirit of hopefulness is abroad. But there is a sad side even to this. The sad side is that the Nigerian problem was not initially caused by the paucity or non-availability of laws. It is caused by the abject want of will for enforcement. It is our uneasy hope this bill when it matures into law wouldn’t just be pursuing its way into our curious collection of lame and redundant laws. We need to protect and preserve the dignity of all Ezenwaka’s Angels in our midst. I recommend this book for everybody.
Ezeugwu Emmanuel Okike is a social commentator and literary enthusiast.