With the diminishing of our nation in key theatres of daily existence, with the dark augury of a slow but steady decline, it is increasingly becoming tempting - if not inevitable - to recall the sobering words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Giving a lecture at Harvard decades ago, the Russian-born Nobel laureate in literature had prophesied: ‘There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen.’
True, the Russian writer spoke at a different time and space. But from whichever angle it is viewed, his words surely bear a disturbing resonance with the Nigerian condition today. In soccer, arts, diplomacy and world ranking, Nigeria is clearly in deficits; down, down from the Olympian height of the past.
This leads us to the next question: why? The simple answer truth is that mediocrity is an infectious plague; give it space and it festers. When leadership is incompetent, the nation’s Titanic only becomes captive to the vagaries, the zig-zag of the tide.
It then becomes easier to understand why the latest progress report of the influential Mo Ibrahim Foundation on Governance in Africa made public last week ranks Nigeria 35th in the survey of 53 countries, far beneath the likes of Mauritius, South Africa and Cape Verde; only slightly above basket cases like Somalia and Zimbabwe. How are the mighty fallen indeed!
The yardstick employed by the continental foundation is transparent and easily verifiable: safety and rule of law; participation and human rights; sustainable economic opportunity and human development.
For a government otherwise quick at making a fetish of its ‘upholding’ of rule of law (as if the question had not been settled by Frenchman Baron Montesquieu in ‘The Spirit of the Law’ in the eighteenth century!), it is quite uncharacteristic that none of Aso Rock’s platoon of intellectual hit men and other volunteers has thought it strategic so far to respond to what is clearly a bare-knuckle strike at the core of the sepulchre they invented and had always guarded jealously all this while. To the Abuja cheerleaders, the standard rule of engagement is to read ‘international conspiracy’ to any report considered unfavourable. But, in the present circumstance, the truth is that the body’s facts are unassailable.
Against such squalid backcloth, it then becomes difficult to fault those who now argue that the only ‘progress’ that the nation has recorded in the last twenty-nine months of the so-called ‘civilian-to- civilian transition’ is merely substituting Obasanjo’s diabolical hyper-activity with the systemic coma under Yar’Adua. More and more, the little gains of yesterday are being frittered away on account of poverty of thinking or lack of presence of our present ruler.
For instance, the United Nations Peace Mission in Darfur hardly batted an eyelid before removing Nigeria’s General Martin Luther Agwai (in fact, once our Chief of Defence Staff), replacing him with lower-ranking officer from equally smaller nation of Rwanda, Lt-General Patrick Nyanvumba. Before our very eyes, the latter now calls the shots at UNAMID. To imagine that the Rwandan officer was only a cadet at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) in Kaduna when Agwai and other Nigerian officers currently at UNAMID were already officers!
It was Nigeria’s vanishing clout that was also exposed not too long ago with the bungling of the diplomatic posting to a mission as key as the United States. First, an international scandal of an epic scale, quite unprecedented in the annals of world diplomacy, had blown open following a letter war between the then ambassador and the foreign minister over a matter no less obscene than a sordid mortgage deal in Washington. To save further national embarrassment, the envoy was recalled. But yet another sleaze blew forth almost immediately following a discovery that the ambassadorial substitute is someone with too huge a marital baggage with the prospect of being, in fact, waylaid at any US airport to bear testimony in a case of genital indiscretion starring one of his sons.
Again, poor sense of political judgement was on display last month when, whereas every sensible leader showed up at the United Nations General Assembly obviously to canvass issues that would benefit his or her country, our own president only thought it wise to head for Saudi to, according to him, attend the opening ceremony of a provincial university. Now, some spin doctors have the temerity to tell us that our president deliberately chose not to attend that UN summit in protest of Obama’s choice of Ghana over Nigeria as his destination in his last visit to the African continent. How more syrupy can a spin be?
Taken together, older Nigerians can hardly remember when last the quality of official thinking got this poor within living memory. To the extent that a new joke has begun to circulate to illustrate this perceived leadership deficit.
Actually, the drama sketch centres on an exchange at a Mama Put joint, the roadside restaurant frequented largely by the hoi polloi. The matron had thought her customer had gone out of his mind by adding ‘Yar’Adua’ to the already long list of assorted meat ordered.
‘Wetin you say you want?’
‘I say gime one Yar’Adua abeg,’ came the casual reply from the other side of the food counter.
As the story goes, the buka operator’s confusion continued until a third party educated that that is the new name for snail in street parlance! No prize for guessing how that came about… Ah Nigerians! How subversively creative, linguistically desperate they could get to voice unspeakable feelings.
To begin with, the rank of those that would otherwise have been looked up to as Nigeria’s emerging statesmen on Solzhenitsyn’s scale has severely been depleted on account of the exposition of moral bankruptcies in high places in the recent past. This dilemma is hardly helped by the common awareness that at the helms of affairs sits a president who himself had admitted that his mandate derived from a corrupted process. A presidency chaperoned by men of shady characters. So, by and large, the national landscape is now only left with a very few good men, but a surplus of political wheeler-dealers with little or no moral stature.
And not materially equipped to compete favourably with the rest of the world in the science realm, the nation used to, at least, pride herself as a formidable contender in the arts. But even there, the earth seems to be slipping off fast beneath her feet. The annual NNLG Award Night would end penultimate Friday without a winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature out of the initial shortlist of nine writers. The award panel did not find any of the works submitted worthy enough.
The tragedy of it all can be seen in the fact literature is supposed to be the summation of a people’s existence. It feeds the narrative of general decline. Among other shortcomings, the award panel observed a drop in the quality of writing: ‘Poets should be protectors of language and defenders of good writing’. This surely mirrors the destitution of the Nigerian letter. It speaks ill of a tradition that yet gave Africa its first Nobel Prize winner in Literature in Wole Soyinka among a host of other literary luminaries like Chinua Achebe.
The perceptive couldn’t have missed the shadow of this plaque in the dismal performance of both our senior and junior national at the international arena lately. The Flying Eagles fumbled and wobbled to the opening of the second round of the just-concluded junior World Cup in Egypt before crashing out in disgrace. Now, after another mediocre performance last Sunday on Abuja soil in which the home team only managed to score a goal in the dying minute, the senior national team, Super Eagles, are only left to bank on luck to remain in contention for the 2010 World Cup.
We’ve never had it so bad.
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