Nigeria is passing through more interesting times in this ‘change’ period. The change that people voted for seems to be taking a new dimension inversely against their expectations.
It is from the parent snake that the
baby snake inherits its venom.
– an African proverb
Nigeria is passing through more interesting times in this ‘change’ period. The change that people voted for seems to be taking a new dimension inversely against their expectations. There are now more questions than answers, and those who should provide answers seem not interested or better still, lack necessary answers. Where answers are provided, the mind of the provider seems miles away from the answers. Thus, the affairs of the nation morph into inconclusiveness.
‘Inconclusive’ is a new word that just arrived into our political lexicon in this country. Unlike the ‘doctrine of necessity’ propounded by the 6th senate assembly to open the door of the acting presidency to Goodluck Jonathan (the immediate past president), the author of the ‘inconclusive’ is the INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission). The testing ground of the inconclusive election was Taraba State. But it became more absurdly pronounced in Kogi State where INEC declared inconclusive the first gubernatorial election to be held in the tenure of newly appointed INEC Chairman, and the first of such since the opposition government claimed the national seat.
There has been a plethora of national debates and postulations on the unnecessary nature of the declaration that has left a big gap unknown to the existing electoral laws. Notwithstanding, perhaps to prove its independence over the feelings and perceptions of the electorate, irrespective of their genuineness, INEC went ahead to Bayelsa State to prove its commitment to inconclusiveness by declaring another gubernatorial election inconclusive, within a space of one month. Now in Bayelsa, the battle over who is right or wrong and what is correct or incorrect is still inconclusive.
I have however appraised the new position of the INEC arising from the inconclusive nature of the two elections it has so far held vis-à-vis other happenings in the country. Perhaps, INEC is correct after all. Perhaps, it is just pointing our attention to the inconclusive nature of this enclave called Nigeria, tasking us with the question: does Nigeria have a future?
However, the inconclusive nature on my mind is not what is being expressed now in the agitation of the ‘Biafran’ people. Although, the reality of their agitation is that, Nigeria remains an inconclusive project until all nationalities or parties are allowed a sense of security and active belonging is irresistible.
Since nobody can abate their rights to self-determination, a proviso that the agitators need to take to heart is that even if Nigeria is to go in pieces whence it can no longer hold together, it must be in peace achieved through a conclusive discussion. Hence, the beating of the drums of another war is unnecessary.
Nevertheless, my source of worry are the youths who have violently taken to the street of Onitsha and other parts of the South East, demanding the Republic of Biafra. There is no doubt that most of them know next to nothing of Biafra. Some of them might have read the accounts of many actors of and witnesses to the war, their interpretation is like reading fables of legends. Therefore, they could not have experienced the booming sound of a bazooka or that of the Ogbunigwe. Therefore, if these children are properly engaged in a well-planned future, could they have taken to an ideology that is alien to their generation?
It is interesting to note that these un-meaningfully engaged kids or youths are replicated in all parts of this country. They are those vandals you will find in the South-South, hiding under creeks to engage in oil bunkering and kidnapping. They are the area boys in the day and rapists and burglars at night that you find in the South-West, raiding motorists in the traffics.
They are the almajiris of the North who can wake up in any day to start burning houses and killing innocent people from other parts of the country. In all parts of the country, these species of youths are the political thugs, the armed robbers, the kidnappers, the ritual killers, the fraudsters, and the yahoo-yahoo internet fraudsters.
They are what they are today because their future has been clearly compromised a long time ago. Their hopes are hanging in the balance. They are products of a frustration foisted on them by the continuous rape of this nation.
We are now worried who the youths motivators are. Who are their mentors? And who are those modelling them? We ask these questions, not forgetting the adage that the horse going in the front has other ones following behind. In fact, it is realised now that the horse at the back is at galloping speed to outpace that in the front.
This reminds me of two accounts that some individuals narrated to me sometimes ago. The first one was by an elderly man I met at a gathering shortly after the 2007 elections. The man, who probably was a retired teacher, told me that a small secondary school girl came to him one day and asked him one question that led to another dangerous one.
The first question was, “should one cheat in an exam?” The man responded that it was not good and that if such person was caught, he or she would be expelled from the school and probably handed over to the police for prosecution. But the girl had not allowed the man finish answering when she immediately fired another shot, this time, a risky one. She asked, “what about Baba Obasanjo who rigs elections, is he not cheating?” The man said that he initially could not determine what should be his response but had to say something, “yes, it is not good to be rigging elections”. He then followed his response by going into lecturing the girl on ethics but failed to convince her. The girl left the man with an inconclusive conviction. But the man after the encounter had to reflect on the girl’s thought-provoking questions and concluded that what bothered him about the girl was the future of this nation. What is the future for this country?
The second related story was told to me by a student who was a candidate in a post UTME exam around that 2007 too. The exam centre was a university. In the exam hall, he discovered that a man came in company of a boy (of secondary school age). Both of them sat beside each other for the exam. When a lot of collaboration was going on between the man and the boy, one of the invigilators challenged them while another invigilator intervened that the other invigilator should not disturb them. The curiosity of the student was aroused and he investigated about the man after the exam. Then, he discovered that the man was a house of assembly member of the State of the exam centre. Therefore, the House of Assembly member deliberately came with a mercenary. The course for which he was writing the exam was law. Then the student wondered, “And this one is a role model in this country.” But what kind of role model is he?
Our airwaves, television screens, newsprint and social media are currently crowded with the mammoth revelations of huge loot of the national till. The new managers of our national affairs are busy exposing the dirty linens of the yesterday’s men of power who shared to themselves the fund meant for modern arms and ammunition for our soldiers who were sent on the game of death, to fight Boko Haram with ancient weapons. The high point of the dragnet of the exposure, this time, is its wideness to capture some media practitioners. As usual, we are agape at the titanic urge and conspiracy of our leaders for a heist. And the magnitude of the corruptions that are being rolled out, and the personalities involved, is sending us on the avalanche of questions. What values are our leaders promoting in this country? What foundation are they lying for tomorrow? What nation are they building? What is their goal? What is their thought or aim? What course are they charting? What characterizes their depth? Why are they behaving the way they do? Why are they sacrificing people on the altar of their own motives? But despite our demand, answers are never coming.
A current show of the abyss that this country has sunk is a video clip that went viral recently on the social media. A large number of people (mostly youths) is seen in the video exhuming buried frozen chickens at a dumpsite. Customs officers, I learnt, seized the frozen chickens from some smugglers and buried them at the dumpsite. Hardly the customs left the scene, and unmindful of the health implications of the buried chickens, some people stormed the dumpsite to dig them out for their consumption. This illustrates the poverty level that massive corruption, greed and unplanned future have reduced this country. Therefore, the damage of corruption is already here with us.
But we are still expecting much from a society that runs its economy and homes on electric generator set, that cannot provide potable water for its citizens, that cannot construct good roads, that cannot provide standard hospitals or good health care system, that cannot provide good schools or education for its children, that cannot give sufficient remuneration to its workers or employment to its teeming youths, and that cannot take care of the pensioners let alone the old and infirm. The atrocities cascade down endlessly all because of the corrupt penchant of the leaders.
Let us notwithstanding assess the solutions that our current leaders have brought to bear upon our challenges that corruption has engendered in our system and different arms of government have come up with varieties.
As an escapist solution, our governors, in their recent Nigeria Governors Forum meeting, looked for scapegoats in workers and concluded that they had to stop paying eighteen thousand (N18000.00) minimum wage to workers. This is a minimum wage that cannot take care of the most needed, minimum affairs of a Nigerian worker, with the abysmal level of the economic downtown today. However, another burden emerged from the federal government, arising from the lingering shortage of fuel supply, resulting in crowded filling stations again. As usual, people have to abandon their work or workplaces to queue up to buy fuel. The fuel pump prices range between 150 and 250, both at filling stations and black-markets. The Federal Government and ruling party’s leaders then return to the front burner the issue of oil subsidy and subtly canvassing for subsidy removal for the market forces to find a solution to the perennial fuel scarcity in the country. Then people wonder aloud in all the media (especially social media) that President Buhari, during his election campaigns, had assured Nigerians that fuel subsidy was a fraud and non-existent and that he would not abide by it. “Where has he swept the change he promised during his electioneering campaigns?” they queried.
This crisis of fuel scarcity has not ended (and is still on-going) when the same federal government spoke again through Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), the new Minister of Power, Works and Housing, it was a promise of electricity tariff increment and introduction of a toll on the roads. However, there is a judicial solution too, in a different perspective. The lawyer of the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, had gone to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, to appeal against the judgement of the lower court. This was to stop the Code of Conduct Tribunal from continuing with the trial of the senate president over the charges bordering on “corruption and false declaration of assets”. Supreme Court granted his prayer for a stay of proceedings at the Code of Conduct tribunal. But Femi Falana (SAN) cried foul against the ruling; that it would be a bad precedent for corruption trials in the nation; and that in any case, justice delayed is justice denied.
Amidst these variegated solutions, Senate has a different answer. And that answer has come through one of them, Senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah who has sponsored Frivolous Petition Bill otherwise known as Anti-Social Media Bill. This bill, essentially, is to cure the disease of all the ‘frivolous’ hue and cry of the people who are all over the media (especially social media) to condemn the anti-people policies of the government. Therefore, to the Senate, people are making too many noises that are clogging the wheel of the governments, particularly the federal government. However, House of Representatives becomes frustrated and disagrees with all the solutions being so far offered. Its frustration was expressed by its speaker, Hon. Yakubu Dogara who became overwhelmed that he categorically concluded like a clergy that it was only God who could solve the problems of this nation as if God were a human who can just descend from heaven to solve our nation’s secular problems. But was Dogara not aware of this before he contested his election?
It was Ibrahim Badamos Babangida, the former military president after he had institutionalised corruption, who first informed us that Nigerian problems defied all human solutions. With the Dogara’s statement, could Babangida be correct?
Meanwhile, Nigerians are still waiting when the government of change will declare a state of emergency in the health sector, education, employment, agriculture, housing etc. They are waiting to hear the president return the subsidy he removed from the education when he was the military head of state. They feel betrayed that government finds it convenient to talk about increased tariffs, fuel pump prices, reduce the value of naira, and invariably make life difficult for them.
The point here is that leaders are meant to solve problems not to offer excuses. The solutions, however, must be such that protect the interest of even the lowly in the society. Leaders cannot continue to celebrate wrong values and expect a different result from the young ones. When leaders provide a blueprint that lacks an exemplary direction for younger ones, they create an inconclusive future. Young people are the tomorrow, a reflection of the foundation the leaders lay today.
Does it, however, sound as I am making a case for crimes or criminal tendencies? This is not so. It is just that when leaders shirk their responsibilities to make provisions for the future, they give room to insecurity. With the way this country is being run, it will be hypocritical to be afraid of our children turning to suicide bombers, turning unemployed and unemployable, and hanging their hopes in foreign lands.
Steve Aborisade saw into my mind recently in his incisive lamentation on his Facebook page. He wondered very instructively as follows:
So there is this picture of a young boy picking the pockets of the dead in Zaria! One, the boy is in tune with the fact that the dead has no need for their material possessions anymore. On a second thought, it’s the picture of how rotten it is getting and of what to come if we are not careful. Only this time, boys and girls alike won’t wait for you to die before they make a go for your pockets. And it won’t be restricted to Zaria!
Should this be the verdict for tomorrow? And the younger ones are still watching, noting their lessons, and critically mastering the tactics and strategy in perfecting the art of the ‘masters’ in governance.
Amusan Johnson writes from Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria. Can be reached via Mobile no. 08060908181 and email [email protected]