By Bruce Malogo
Those with greater insight into these matters would likely offer the following counsel: If you find yourself in a certain state of disquiet and can’t make head or tail of it, look for parallels in books. The idea is simple — within their pages lies a wealth of parallels from which you can begin to glean, or even understand what you’re sparring with; or what it is that you might be ailing from. By “books,” I wager that anyone who would have given such a counsel would have their mind on novels of the literary kind. And rightly so. In those works, you’ll find an abundance of such parallels. You read a story and a sense of déjà vu hits you — or not quite déjà vu, but the feeling of being present as a witness or a participant.
I don’t have the habit of re-reading books, except if a book is a study or research material, or sometimes when a quick reference is required. But by some quaint fascination, I have read Franz Kafka’s The Trial three times – the latest was last month, April. I am constantly drawn to this book because I see a Nigerian paradigm starkly depicted in it. Kafka, a Czech, wrote the novel in 1914 but it was published posthumously in 1925 by his friend Max Brod. It would appear, in fact, that in writing The Trial, Kafka was inspired by one of Nigeria’s odious aspects. I have in mind the bureaucratic structures that leave individuals feeling trapped, powerless, and unable to find reason or accountability within the system.
The philosophical underpinning of the book is, at once, absurdism and existentialism. In our context here, the former will do; it is more fitting for the issue at hand. Absurdism is the idea that we (humans) desperately seek meaning and order, but the universe responds with silence or indifference. That is, we keep assuming there must be a rational system, and the system keeps proving there is none. Related to this is another philosophical trope that draws from Kafka’s works but is built on the two above. It is known as Kafkaesque. It describes opaque, confusing and illogical situations driven by complex systems. It reflects modern struggles with the authority, lack of clarity, and emotional stress — a system that is nightmarish, weird, and excessively, if dishonestly, bureaucratic.
The Nigerian parallel is unmistakable in this book. But first, the story. The Trial is a story of a man who is accused but never told his crime. This should sound eerily familiar to Nigerians. Josef K. (the main character) wakes up on his bed on his thirtieth birthday to find two strange men in his room. “You’re under arrest,” they tell him. “For what?” he asks. They don’t answer, and that silence becomes the true horror. Josef K. is not taken to prison; he is allowed to go to work and he can walk freely through the city. But somewhere in hidden rooms and dusty attics, a mysterious court has already begun his trial. No charges, no evidence, no clarity. The officials speak in riddles, and courtrooms are crowded and suffocating.
Systems are endless, faceless and impossible to understand. Everyone seems connected to it; everyone seems to accept it. Except Josef K. He tries to defend, he hires a lawyer, he searches for answers, he demands justice. But the deeper he enters the system the more powerless he becomes, because this is not just a legal battle, it is a battle against the bureaucracy, against the authority, against an invisible force that controls everything and explains nothing.
Kafka creates a world that feels absurd, yet disturbingly familiar, a world where guilt exists without proof, where the individual is small, where the system is infinite and the most haunting question remains: Is Josef K. innocent or the trial is symbolic of something greater? In the end, there is no explanation, no comfort, only a chilling realisation that sometimes the system does not need evidence, it only needs obedience – total surrender. The book is not just a novel; it is, alongside its other didactic aims, a mirror.
Clearly, The Trial is profoundly resonant of the Nigerian bureaucratic system and its function, or as we might say, dysfunction. Josef K’s nightmare of courts, bureaucracy and powerlessness feels recognizably Nigerian. The absurdity isn’t abstract – it maps onto what Nigerians live and witness on a daily basis. Look at this: Josef K. gets arrested by a court he never sees, for a crime he never learns, by officials who won’t explain themselves. Here is a man who is squaring up with a faceless bureaucracy, a man who is presumed guilty without ever being accused. How uncannily familiar this is in Nigerian environment. As is their wont, state operatives will barge into a man’s house, seize and haul him away with brutal indignity.
Let the distraught and roughed-up man asks to know his crime, he’d be told: “You will know when you get to our office.” That is, if they want to be civil with their captor. Otherwise, he may not get to wherever it is they say they are taking him. In such circumstances, the devil always takes the rest. Truth is, a good number of these fellows in uniform can be nasty out of nonchalance, and they are. As I write, the country is still roiling from the murder of a young Nigerian by a police officer the other day in Effurun, Delta State. How the officer summarily executed the young man, identified as Mene Ogidi, with such pagan brutality and savage finality!
Think of a man who is up against faceless bureaucracy, and you might just be thinking of a Nigerian who has a mission in any government office – be it local, state or federal. Such a one, as you’d expect, would almost always return with anything but a quiet, satisfied frame of mind. He’d be harassed, galled and stripped of every streak of dignity. Even at that, there are endless queues; and somewhere from an inner office, some official is screaming a refrain that pears through the din outside: “Mister, I say, come back tomorrow!” Files disappear and officials blatantly, guilelessly ask to be “settled.” Every official is busy running around. It will look like the wheel is turning, but nothing gets done; only that the hapless visitor is the victim here, trapped in the grinding gears. The system runs, but no one claims responsibility.
It is the same story all through. One is guilty but never gets specifics. Josef K. spends the whole book trying to defend himself from a charge he can’t name. It is entirely a case of guilt without accusation. The Nigerian state officials would tell you that they have a petition against you without telling you the details of it or who the petitioner is. Arrests are made before investigations commence. Just as Josef K. can’t reach the real court, and has to deal with painters, lawyers and mistresses who claim to have influence, our lived experiences as Nigerians are even more unctuous, more absurd. The only way you may possibly parry that is this: Don’t get in the way of the system or the bureaucracy.
But the thing is, it’s hard to imagine any Nigerian adult who has not been shaken, sifted and crushed by the system; any adult Nigerian who has not been stressed and stretched – anyone who has not been bruised by the system. Touts and middlemen who work for the big people in the office will exhaust you even before you finally meet the “Oga” or the Madam. Most instances, you have to deal with a chain of connections – like knowing someone who knows someone who knows another that is close to the one who knows the main man or the main woman. Everything works through connections, fixes and other assortments of arrangers and facilitators who profit from the confusion and opaqueness.
And the courts? The courts in The Trial are dusty, sexualized and irrational – it is not about justice, it is simply about power itself. As it is in our clime, court cases drag on interminably; judges are absent and there are adjournments after adjournments. Courts of coordinate jurisdiction give conflicting judgments on the same matter. It’s all mare’s nest; a snake pit, actually. At the end of the day, it leaves you with the impression that this is a system built to punish. The point isn’t resolution, it’s showing who is in control, and what could be extracted from the maelstrom.
Ultimately, the system exhausts and in most cases, people throw up their hands in resignation. Josef K. is executed in the end. He is not executed because he is proven guilty. He is executed because he gets tired. The system wears him down until he stops fighting. In Nigeria, the defeated often resign themselves to fatalism, seeing it as the only response to the quiet violence of the system. How often we hear people who have been beaten by the system say in resignation, “It is God that will judge!” It can’t get more absurd.
Kafka wrote a Czech nightmare in 1914, but when we read it today in Nigeria of 2026, the courthouse smells the same. The paranoia, the run-around and the sense that invisible rules govern visible lives are unmistakably familiar. Put differently, Nigeria’s bureaucracy, like the system Kafka wrote about, can feel just as opaque, circular and Kafkaesque: hard to navigate, full of delays, unclear requirements and officials who seem to have power but no answer.
. Malogo is a Director at Oscar & Halliday Media Company and member of Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE)
