In this important book - a work as poignantly fresh and controversial as his earlier books, including "Educated" to Feel Inferior (2003) and Nigeria: Real Problems, Real Solutions (2000) - Bedford Nwabueze Umez once again challenges our lopsided ways of looking at Nigeria as he critically recounts the angst of many Nigerians (and, in fact, many Africans) due to the shenanigans of the ruling class, and then offers a redeeming panacea. Your Excellency puts the present day Nigeria in a historical perspective; tracing the heady days when 65 Nigerian kobo readily fetched 1U.S. Dollar, and ending with a call for educated Africans to take over governance.

Dr. Umez's epistolary treatise, Your Excellency, is one of those exotic coincidences of literature, a medicine-man's admixture of personal memoir, social commentary, and random musings on Nigeria, Africa, and the world that is a kind of breezy, Orwellian-allegoric indictment of successive African leaders. This so-long-a-letter, eclectic and at times asking more questions than it answered, has an almost surprising cohesiveness typical of an author with a lot more to offer. The author seems to be dabbling in the realms of abracadabra as he combines an uncanny brilliance at analytical thought with a massive dose of psychological analyses of the topic at hand.

Your Excellency presents a running adumbration of the myriad ills that ail Nigeria. Using a series of jeremiad, Dr. Umez chronicles the all too-familiar usual suspects: water shortages, electricity outages, non-existing phone services, used and abused workers, rickety bridges, death-trap roadways, mortuarized hospitals, dilapidated schools and their work-for-free teachers, etc.

Section one of the book posits "the Nigerian number one killer at a glance." Quoting the pronouncements of Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz, - an Economics Nobel Laureate and a former World Bank Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, in a May 2004 edition of the Nigerian Vanguard, the book screams: "Nigerians have $100 billion (N13.7 trillion) stashed abroad and 25,000 doctors working in foreign countries because of the absence of an enabling environment at home." That is when number two really hit the fan. Dr. Umez asks Mr. Wazobia - the fictional main character in the book, "Who should bell the cat?" The metaphor here is referring to the need to "…put Nigeria back to a similar progressive road it was traveling when it was appropriately nicknamed the 'giant of Africa.'" There may be no takers willing to answer Dr. Umez's question.

Your Excellency, interspersed with anecdotal snippets, deep level insight and a hat-in-hand supplication, has one major conclusion: if leaders do not lead well, followers will not follow well. Dr. Umez is much too savvy a man to peddle such a simplistic notion. Sometimes, the cargo mentality expectations of the followers are responsible for most of the actions of the followed. His proposed solution, true education, is disappointingly vague and not thoroughly analyzed. The cynics among us might ask whether increased education leads to equalized social conditions. All the same, the book's scope and richness compensate for these omissions - one of those human deficiencies.

Reading Dr. Umez's Your Excellency is as entertaining as it is exasperating.