On 14 October 2004, Achebe wrote from Bard College to President Obasanjo declining the Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) award. His letter — published the next day — read: 'Nigeria's condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence… A small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.' The 'small clique' was an unmissable reference to the Ngige–Uba conflict over the kidnapping of the Anambra Governor on 10 July 2003.
In September 2011, Achebe again declined the CFR, this time from Jonathan. The grounds were the same: 'the reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed, let alone solved.' Achebe never accepted any Nigerian national honour. The rejections are now read together as one of the clearest acts of conscientious public refusal in post-independence Nigerian letters, alongside Wole Soyinka's earlier rejection of the OFR in 1989. See Honours of the Republic for the formal architecture; the recipients-vs-rejecters debate is now standard in Nigerian civic-education syllabuses.