Denja Abdullahi: What makes you a
writer are the books you write
By Abubakar Adam Ibrahim | Publish
Date: Apr 10 2016 5:00AMSince his election as President of the Association of
Nigerian Authors, Malam Denja Abdullahi has had to contend with a number of
issues including the furore over the purported death of the Nigerian Writers
Series, accusations of sexual molestation leveled against a member of the
association and dealing with dissenting voices within the association. Daily
Trust sat down with the poet and playwright to discuss the challenges facing
the association.
Grappling with the beast of ANA and “unbundling” its
convention
We met in a bookshop in Garki. Surrounded and hemmed in by shelves loaded with books, it seemed a fitting place to discuss Nigerian writing and writers with the president of the Association of Nigeria Authors, ANA. Denja Abdullahi, tall and imposing, has been occupying that position in the last few months, since he was elected at the association’s annual convention in Kaduna last November.
Many people expected Denja’s administration to hit the ground running. He has been the vice president of the association in the last four years and the Secretary General in the previous four. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he threw his hat into the race to lead the association established by the likes of Chinua Achebe, who happened to be its first president.
“It has been very challenging,” Denja Abdullahi said, “this is an association that doesn’t have a stable source of finance because to do anything at all, you need to sacrifice your time and resources and put on hold your personal affairs.”
Booming voice fills the bookshop as he spoke for the next hour or so about the state of the association, the politics that has characterized and stifled it, allegations of sexual molestation brought against one of its members with another member thrown in jail for defamation while another is battling a film producer for allegedly stealing her story.
Denja did not shy away from these issues, taking them head on with gladiatorial verve. Perhaps it was this energy that most members expected to see when the new executive was elected in November. Denja Abdullahi is all too aware of this.
“At least this first year there must be a sign that we can deliver. We have to hit the ground running,” he said.
As a cultural administrator of many years standing, he knows that the success of any project will be hinged on the ground works, and this is what they have been working on, he said.
Already, he said, they have constituted a National Advisory Council, something that the association’s constitutions provides for, but which had never been utilized by previous executives.
The council has three former national presidents of the association and two “elder statesmen.”
Alongside these, they have set up a Strategic Planning Committee, whose objectives would be the review of ANA’s strengths and weaknesses, and come with a rolling plan for the next years.
“In the second quarter of the year, when we have funding, they will kick the ground rolling,” Denja said.
While running for the president of the association, Denja had proposed to “unbundle” the association’s flagship event, the ANA Convention. I asked him what he meant by that and he was quite clear of the answer, even if the details are still not clear.
“What we mean by unbundling the convention is that we are going to pull out some programmes from the convention because they have become difficult to sustain. The convention is usually choked up with events that some of them are not done properly. The plenary session is one of the ones we want to take out of the convention and see the possibility, maybe next year, if that is not possible this year, of holding a major conference to be held by ANA maybe in partnership with some universities - that will focus on contemporary realities of writing in Nigeria and Africa, or that will draw attention to critiquing Nigerian writers by diverting attention to the newer writers. So we are trying to pull that plenary session to stand on its own as a conference of Nigerian literature to be held annually,” he said.
The plenary session, which has always drawn academics from across Nigerian universities to present papers on literature, will not be the only one to go. Denja has grand plans for the convention drama as well.
“We hope to take the prize winning play, which will be staged and taken round schools or to different cities. These are ways of promoting contemporary writers and making the convention a purely writerly event,” he said.
The ANA Awards Night too will become a stand-alone event, where Denja hopes to draw sponsors to fete the writers like other prominent prize awards.
Making the convention a writerly event is key. The mix of politics and a tradition spanning some thirty-five years have conspired to make the ANA convention fairly predictable and consequently boring. There is drama every other year when the writers try to outdo the politicians as the association’s election come by.
The rise of international literary festivals across the country and the continent may have exposed writers to other ways of doing things. Denja Abdullahi realizes that though ANA needs to maintain its traditions, it will still have to make changes to remain relevant.
“We will not go the way of the literary festivals because I believe there should be varieties. ANA will maintain the fundamentals of the convention because we are an association and it is also a group devoted to promoting the writers’ welfare. What they do is also important because it glamourizes literature. Whatever we see that works with these festivals, we will also do it,” he said.
The plan is for these changes to kick off at this year’s convention. Denja knows it is a daunting challenge but one he is committed to. “We have started work on the convention; we won’t wait until August and September. We are trying to make those changes this year and if we can’t do it all, we will do most of it because this will be the 36th convention. It will no longer be a choked convention because we want this to be a convention that will celebrate the writers and the books that are available,” he said.
Documenting ANA’s history
Alongside these, are plans to premiere a documentary on the history of the association, which is being filmed at the moment. The lack of any historical account of the formation of the association is something that Denja is worried about.
“We are already doing a documentary on the history of ANA because we have discovered that no one has really told the story of ANA. Filming on the documentary has already started and we plan to premiere it at the convention,” he said. There should be a record of ANA, maybe even in a book form where people can know where the association started from, and where it is going. The book form may take a while so we have gone the audio visual way.”
On intellectual theft.
In December 2015, a few weeks after Denja took over the reins as ANA Chairman, a member of the association, Ify Asia Chiemeziem, took to social media to announce that Nollywood producer Reginald Ebere had stolen her work and adapted it into a film without her consent.
This caused discomfort within the writing sphere and many members felt that ANA didn’t come out to lead the charge on Chiemezlem’s behalf.
Denja Abdullahi disagrees, saying they have done a lot and they are still doing more.
“When this case came up, I quickly got in touch with her and said ANA will gladly take this up and I gave her links to intellectual property lawyers and have given her advice as to what steps to take and she has been doing that,” he said.
Beyond this work in the background, Denja said ANA will be going to war on the writer’s behalf. “The case is going to court very soon and what we will do is to join in the case to help see it through and insist on a judgment that will be of benefit to writers.”
The association, according to Denja is building relations with copyright bodies to protect the works of its members and ensure they get justice when there is an infringement.
“At the level of ANA, there should be a copyright committee where authors can lay formal complaints so that when members write in to notify us of any copyright infringement we can take it up.
“We are constantly in touch with the copyright commission. Only a few weeks back they wrote in to say they want to amend the copyright law and they sent us the draft. I gave it to our legal adviser who read it and wrote back more than 40 or 50 pages in response and they wrote back to thank us for our contribution,” he said.
It will be interesting to see this scenario play out and how far ANA is willing to go with this. What is important is that for the association to be relevant, it has to stick its neck out for its members who feel cheated.
And then there was sexual molestation
There are others too who need protection and they felt ANA couldn’t do that for them. When poet Chijioke Amu Nnadi was accused by a retinue of girls of sexual molestation, ANA towed a cautious line.
“We were conscious to avoid victimizing anyone,” Denja said.
It was important to be cautious in approaching the case which created quite a storm within the writing community, but perhaps it was this line of thinking that the victims had when the issue happened. This much Denja admitted.
“According to the report by the Whole Woman Network, which investigated the allegations, when the girls were asked why they didn’t report the molestations to ANA, they said they were afraid of patriarchal tendencies that may offer protection to the person commiting the crime than the victims.”
But he assured that the case has necessitated that ANA took another look at itself and made proper provisions for such eventualities while protecting younger members of the association.
“In the ANA constitution, there are disciplinary procedures and any one accused of misconduct would be investigated and measures will be taken. If such an allegation comes to us we would investigate it. Two or three years back, we were thinking of bringing out a separate code of conduct but we realized that the constitution has already taken care of this even if not fully. With the development of this case, it is an opportunity to put in place a code of conduct, even if to regulate the interactions between us, the public and the government,” he said.
But that does not imply that the association will sweep these allegations under the carpet. The report from Whole Woman Network has been formally submitted to ANA and Denja said the association will take measures, starting with sending the report to Mr. Amu Nnadi and asking for a response from him.
“When the report comes back from the accused, there is always a disciplinary committee that will sit down and recommend what needs to be done to sanction him if found guilty. If there are no sanctions, there must be justifiable reasons for not having them. We are not a law court but we must find ways to caution ourselves, discipline ourselves.”
Is the Nigerian Writers Series dying?
One other controversial issue that has been trending with regards to the association is the Nigerian Writers Series, inaugurated by the last administration. Under the series, ten novels by first time Nigerian writers were published by ANA in collaboration with four publishing houses with grants from the Niger State government.
There is no fund to run a second batch and Denja Abdullahi had in a separate interview indicated that the faith of the series is up in the air. This caused a furore among writers who wanted clarification from the president.
Denja said, “What happened was that when I took over, we contacted the publishers and asked them what the picture is like since we have saddled them with the responsibility of marketing and distributing the books. They wrote back formally and listed the copies ANA collected, the copies given to the authors and the copies that were sold. When the numbers came in, I saw a situation that is precarious if the series will be self-sustaining. If we use, say five million, to publish 10 books then we should make seven million or at the very least make our five million back for the business to be self-sustaining.
“So when they wrote back, the figures were nothing to write home about. We got back figures from two out of four publishers and what we have seen from the figures that have come in is that it is not sustainable unless we find ways of boosting sales, either by doing more for book promotion or getting the books on the syllabus of schools.
“The Nigerian Writers Series is not going moribund because the books are still there. They can still be sold so we can make a return on investment. When we are doing a second phase, we will have to reassess the model and possibly consider other genre. And we have been advised to go into something that is lucrative, which is children’s literature, which is easier to market.”
One thing the authors published under the series complained about was that ANA hadn’t done enough to push the book into the market. Denja realized this, but also admits that since ANA was not set up as a publishing house and doesn’t have a compliment of full time staff; it is quite a challenge to do that. But the realization that the association may not make its money back from the venture might be the push it needs to do more to promote these books.
What the debate about the Nigerian Writers’ Series threw up was the existence of a faction that intends to demand answers from the current executive. This is clearly a fall out from the acrimonious campaign that resulted in the emergence to the Denja Abdullahi-led administration with the elections.
“There was a public extension of goodwill and we intend to extend a hand of fellowship so that everyone will know that the time of politicking is over. There is no way we can work without involving everyone because this is voluntary work and we must work together to move forward.
“There is no point having someone who is competent and then deciding not to work with him because you don’t like his face. You have to work with the best hands.”
Denja said, “And those who didn’t win the election should also reciprocate when we reach out to them with hands of fellowship to accept and work with us because in ANA once elections are over, we come together to work. That is the pattern we expect. We also expect constructive criticism. What we don’t like is the trend that some people will form themselves into an opposition to actively oppose this administration. When Jerry Agada lost to Remi Raji four years ago, did he constitute himself into an opposition? He didn’t and his supporters kept their peace and allowed the government to work. But those who want to oppose me or oppose my administration, if they do that are only wasting their time. I know I have work to do for the association, and we are going to do it.”
One thing you can’t take away from ANA is the prevalence of politicking, sometimes at the detriment of the craft, of writing and promoting writing, Denja acknowledges this as well.
“People that think too much of politics may not even know what is happening in the association because if they do, they won’t be doing what they are doing. Being the president of ANA doesn’t mean it will have any direct bearing on my writing or that I will get a lucrative publishing deal or that I have huge resources at my disposal. People just want to attach portfolios to their names.
“In the end, what makes you a writer is the book you write so if you put politicking ahead of your craft, it will show in your work. If people read the association well, there won’t be any point in fighting.”
We met in a bookshop in Garki. Surrounded and hemmed in by shelves loaded with books, it seemed a fitting place to discuss Nigerian writing and writers with the president of the Association of Nigeria Authors, ANA. Denja Abdullahi, tall and imposing, has been occupying that position in the last few months, since he was elected at the association’s annual convention in Kaduna last November.
Many people expected Denja’s administration to hit the ground running. He has been the vice president of the association in the last four years and the Secretary General in the previous four. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he threw his hat into the race to lead the association established by the likes of Chinua Achebe, who happened to be its first president.
“It has been very challenging,” Denja Abdullahi said, “this is an association that doesn’t have a stable source of finance because to do anything at all, you need to sacrifice your time and resources and put on hold your personal affairs.”
Booming voice fills the bookshop as he spoke for the next hour or so about the state of the association, the politics that has characterized and stifled it, allegations of sexual molestation brought against one of its members with another member thrown in jail for defamation while another is battling a film producer for allegedly stealing her story.
Denja did not shy away from these issues, taking them head on with gladiatorial verve. Perhaps it was this energy that most members expected to see when the new executive was elected in November. Denja Abdullahi is all too aware of this.
“At least this first year there must be a sign that we can deliver. We have to hit the ground running,” he said.
As a cultural administrator of many years standing, he knows that the success of any project will be hinged on the ground works, and this is what they have been working on, he said.
Already, he said, they have constituted a National Advisory Council, something that the association’s constitutions provides for, but which had never been utilized by previous executives.
The council has three former national presidents of the association and two “elder statesmen.”
Alongside these, they have set up a Strategic Planning Committee, whose objectives would be the review of ANA’s strengths and weaknesses, and come with a rolling plan for the next years.
“In the second quarter of the year, when we have funding, they will kick the ground rolling,” Denja said.
While running for the president of the association, Denja had proposed to “unbundle” the association’s flagship event, the ANA Convention. I asked him what he meant by that and he was quite clear of the answer, even if the details are still not clear.
“What we mean by unbundling the convention is that we are going to pull out some programmes from the convention because they have become difficult to sustain. The convention is usually choked up with events that some of them are not done properly. The plenary session is one of the ones we want to take out of the convention and see the possibility, maybe next year, if that is not possible this year, of holding a major conference to be held by ANA maybe in partnership with some universities - that will focus on contemporary realities of writing in Nigeria and Africa, or that will draw attention to critiquing Nigerian writers by diverting attention to the newer writers. So we are trying to pull that plenary session to stand on its own as a conference of Nigerian literature to be held annually,” he said.
The plenary session, which has always drawn academics from across Nigerian universities to present papers on literature, will not be the only one to go. Denja has grand plans for the convention drama as well.
“We hope to take the prize winning play, which will be staged and taken round schools or to different cities. These are ways of promoting contemporary writers and making the convention a purely writerly event,” he said.
The ANA Awards Night too will become a stand-alone event, where Denja hopes to draw sponsors to fete the writers like other prominent prize awards.
Making the convention a writerly event is key. The mix of politics and a tradition spanning some thirty-five years have conspired to make the ANA convention fairly predictable and consequently boring. There is drama every other year when the writers try to outdo the politicians as the association’s election come by.
The rise of international literary festivals across the country and the continent may have exposed writers to other ways of doing things. Denja Abdullahi realizes that though ANA needs to maintain its traditions, it will still have to make changes to remain relevant.
“We will not go the way of the literary festivals because I believe there should be varieties. ANA will maintain the fundamentals of the convention because we are an association and it is also a group devoted to promoting the writers’ welfare. What they do is also important because it glamourizes literature. Whatever we see that works with these festivals, we will also do it,” he said.
The plan is for these changes to kick off at this year’s convention. Denja knows it is a daunting challenge but one he is committed to. “We have started work on the convention; we won’t wait until August and September. We are trying to make those changes this year and if we can’t do it all, we will do most of it because this will be the 36th convention. It will no longer be a choked convention because we want this to be a convention that will celebrate the writers and the books that are available,” he said.
Documenting ANA’s history
Alongside these, are plans to premiere a documentary on the history of the association, which is being filmed at the moment. The lack of any historical account of the formation of the association is something that Denja is worried about.
“We are already doing a documentary on the history of ANA because we have discovered that no one has really told the story of ANA. Filming on the documentary has already started and we plan to premiere it at the convention,” he said. There should be a record of ANA, maybe even in a book form where people can know where the association started from, and where it is going. The book form may take a while so we have gone the audio visual way.”
On intellectual theft.
In December 2015, a few weeks after Denja took over the reins as ANA Chairman, a member of the association, Ify Asia Chiemeziem, took to social media to announce that Nollywood producer Reginald Ebere had stolen her work and adapted it into a film without her consent.
This caused discomfort within the writing sphere and many members felt that ANA didn’t come out to lead the charge on Chiemezlem’s behalf.
Denja Abdullahi disagrees, saying they have done a lot and they are still doing more.
“When this case came up, I quickly got in touch with her and said ANA will gladly take this up and I gave her links to intellectual property lawyers and have given her advice as to what steps to take and she has been doing that,” he said.
Beyond this work in the background, Denja said ANA will be going to war on the writer’s behalf. “The case is going to court very soon and what we will do is to join in the case to help see it through and insist on a judgment that will be of benefit to writers.”
The association, according to Denja is building relations with copyright bodies to protect the works of its members and ensure they get justice when there is an infringement.
“At the level of ANA, there should be a copyright committee where authors can lay formal complaints so that when members write in to notify us of any copyright infringement we can take it up.
“We are constantly in touch with the copyright commission. Only a few weeks back they wrote in to say they want to amend the copyright law and they sent us the draft. I gave it to our legal adviser who read it and wrote back more than 40 or 50 pages in response and they wrote back to thank us for our contribution,” he said.
It will be interesting to see this scenario play out and how far ANA is willing to go with this. What is important is that for the association to be relevant, it has to stick its neck out for its members who feel cheated.
And then there was sexual molestation
There are others too who need protection and they felt ANA couldn’t do that for them. When poet Chijioke Amu Nnadi was accused by a retinue of girls of sexual molestation, ANA towed a cautious line.
“We were conscious to avoid victimizing anyone,” Denja said.
It was important to be cautious in approaching the case which created quite a storm within the writing community, but perhaps it was this line of thinking that the victims had when the issue happened. This much Denja admitted.
“According to the report by the Whole Woman Network, which investigated the allegations, when the girls were asked why they didn’t report the molestations to ANA, they said they were afraid of patriarchal tendencies that may offer protection to the person commiting the crime than the victims.”
But he assured that the case has necessitated that ANA took another look at itself and made proper provisions for such eventualities while protecting younger members of the association.
“In the ANA constitution, there are disciplinary procedures and any one accused of misconduct would be investigated and measures will be taken. If such an allegation comes to us we would investigate it. Two or three years back, we were thinking of bringing out a separate code of conduct but we realized that the constitution has already taken care of this even if not fully. With the development of this case, it is an opportunity to put in place a code of conduct, even if to regulate the interactions between us, the public and the government,” he said.
But that does not imply that the association will sweep these allegations under the carpet. The report from Whole Woman Network has been formally submitted to ANA and Denja said the association will take measures, starting with sending the report to Mr. Amu Nnadi and asking for a response from him.
“When the report comes back from the accused, there is always a disciplinary committee that will sit down and recommend what needs to be done to sanction him if found guilty. If there are no sanctions, there must be justifiable reasons for not having them. We are not a law court but we must find ways to caution ourselves, discipline ourselves.”
Is the Nigerian Writers Series dying?
One other controversial issue that has been trending with regards to the association is the Nigerian Writers Series, inaugurated by the last administration. Under the series, ten novels by first time Nigerian writers were published by ANA in collaboration with four publishing houses with grants from the Niger State government.
There is no fund to run a second batch and Denja Abdullahi had in a separate interview indicated that the faith of the series is up in the air. This caused a furore among writers who wanted clarification from the president.
Denja said, “What happened was that when I took over, we contacted the publishers and asked them what the picture is like since we have saddled them with the responsibility of marketing and distributing the books. They wrote back formally and listed the copies ANA collected, the copies given to the authors and the copies that were sold. When the numbers came in, I saw a situation that is precarious if the series will be self-sustaining. If we use, say five million, to publish 10 books then we should make seven million or at the very least make our five million back for the business to be self-sustaining.
“So when they wrote back, the figures were nothing to write home about. We got back figures from two out of four publishers and what we have seen from the figures that have come in is that it is not sustainable unless we find ways of boosting sales, either by doing more for book promotion or getting the books on the syllabus of schools.
“The Nigerian Writers Series is not going moribund because the books are still there. They can still be sold so we can make a return on investment. When we are doing a second phase, we will have to reassess the model and possibly consider other genre. And we have been advised to go into something that is lucrative, which is children’s literature, which is easier to market.”
One thing the authors published under the series complained about was that ANA hadn’t done enough to push the book into the market. Denja realized this, but also admits that since ANA was not set up as a publishing house and doesn’t have a compliment of full time staff; it is quite a challenge to do that. But the realization that the association may not make its money back from the venture might be the push it needs to do more to promote these books.
What the debate about the Nigerian Writers’ Series threw up was the existence of a faction that intends to demand answers from the current executive. This is clearly a fall out from the acrimonious campaign that resulted in the emergence to the Denja Abdullahi-led administration with the elections.
“There was a public extension of goodwill and we intend to extend a hand of fellowship so that everyone will know that the time of politicking is over. There is no way we can work without involving everyone because this is voluntary work and we must work together to move forward.
“There is no point having someone who is competent and then deciding not to work with him because you don’t like his face. You have to work with the best hands.”
Denja said, “And those who didn’t win the election should also reciprocate when we reach out to them with hands of fellowship to accept and work with us because in ANA once elections are over, we come together to work. That is the pattern we expect. We also expect constructive criticism. What we don’t like is the trend that some people will form themselves into an opposition to actively oppose this administration. When Jerry Agada lost to Remi Raji four years ago, did he constitute himself into an opposition? He didn’t and his supporters kept their peace and allowed the government to work. But those who want to oppose me or oppose my administration, if they do that are only wasting their time. I know I have work to do for the association, and we are going to do it.”
One thing you can’t take away from ANA is the prevalence of politicking, sometimes at the detriment of the craft, of writing and promoting writing, Denja acknowledges this as well.
“People that think too much of politics may not even know what is happening in the association because if they do, they won’t be doing what they are doing. Being the president of ANA doesn’t mean it will have any direct bearing on my writing or that I will get a lucrative publishing deal or that I have huge resources at my disposal. People just want to attach portfolios to their names.
“In the end, what makes you a writer is the book you write so if you put politicking ahead of your craft, it will show in your work. If people read the association well, there won’t be any point in fighting.”
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