Award-winning Nigerian literary critic Ikhide Ikheloa, popularly known as ‘Pa Ikhide,’ has described the flagship Nigerian annual literary award, the NLNG Prize for Literature, as a waste of money.
The US-based retired education administrator made the comment during an exclusive interview with Rudolf Okonkwo in 90MinutesAfrica on Sunday.
“Why are we spending a hundred thousand dollars to honor the works of writers that, at most, only a thousand people have read? It’s a waste of money,” the 2022 recipient of the James Currey Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Criticism said.
“We are just like a mimic people. There is a Pulitzer Prize, so we’ve to have something similar, too. There is a Nobel Prize, and so we got to have one. We must step out of the box of orthodoxy in order to save several generations of young people. That’s just my concern.”
Ikhide lamented that the situation is so pathetic that one can hardly find any of the award winners over the years whose works have been read by 100 people.
He suggested that rather than giving such a huge amount for a book with just a few copies in print, part of the money should be used to buy the books and distribute them to secondary schools across the country to inculcate the reading culture in young people.
“If a book is good enough to get a hundred thousand dollars, we could take part of the money and buy thousands of the books and distribute them to secondary schools,” he said.
“There has to be something that the award is purposed for beyond just giving people money. It’s been 20 years, and I can’t even remember three people that had won the prize.
“They just get the money and disappear. Some even made great promises, like they would build a library, and that’s the end. You won’t hear from them again.”
The former presenter at Radio Kudirat also pointed out that given Nigeria’s circumstances, the $100,000 prize money is too much for an individual.
He argued that the unintended consequence is that people now see the award as a lottery.
“So they are not being necessarily creative. They just go in thinking they may just be lucky. So they’re throwing in, sometimes, hurriedly stapled pages into the mix and hoping they get the money. That’s the unintended consequence,” he explained.
The Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Prize for Literature is an annual literary award to celebrate literary artists in Nigeria.
The award was instituted in 2004 and rotated among four genres: poetry, fiction, drama, and children’s literature. This year’s award focused on children’s literature and was won by Olubunmi Familoni with his book “The Road Does Not End.”