December 19, 2009
Ever since I’ve grown to be able to listen to foreign news broadcast and scan the web for global updates, any mention of Nigeria has more often than not been linked with disasters, accidents, corruption, decay, fraud, murder, militancy, kidnapping, and the like. In my early encounter with such negatives I learned to discount them and align myself with tale, home-grown yet unfounded tale that foreign nations are deliberately distorting facts and employing ‘undiplomatic lies’ to discredit a rising star, the giant of Africa and a world leading oil exporter – Nigeria.
I was soon to learn that ours is a nation in perpetual decline. A nation with no radar. A nation with a malfunctioning compass. A country so endowed yet so unblessed. Pre-independence offered a promise of goodies and comfort. But 49 years on, past, present and passing generations have continued to wait and hope and endure. For every report of corruption there’s a fact before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission or the police or any other agency so involved in investigation and prosecution. For every case of kidnapping, there is a missing person begging to be ransomed. For every footage of squalor, Nigerians can identify the images as a vivid capture of their neighbourhood. For every depiction of life of penury, hundreds of thousands of Niger Delta residents locate themselves with precision. In no time, Nigeria has become a bad product that has defied branding, debranding and rebranding efforts. It’s now a country synonymous with all the evils codified and contemplated by the various holy books and thoughts.
It was with haste and high hopes that our fathers sent packing the vestiges of the Lord Luggards. The euphoria at independence was however short-lived. The early years of independence betrayed the spirit of greed, inhumanity, visionlessness and pursuit of naked tyrannical power by political leaders such that putschists had to breeze in because such violent change had become inevitable and perhaps desirable to return the locomotive of a budding nation to rail track. Our choice not to learn from our past and unite for good intentions led us into the senseless killings and destructions that attended the 1967 civil war, coming within a decade of self rule. All attempts to return to civilian democracy failed for many reasons; politicians being the main cause more than the military. The political elite wanted power; they wanted civil rule; they wanted democracy; not in the fashion of emulative world democracies but in a contrived model to serve their interest and plunge the majority of the people into perpetual slavery and servitude. That was exactly what they succeeded in doing between 1979 and 1984 before the military gave them a good chase for the second time. But they were soon to regroup. They claimed to have matured over the years and capable of offering the purposeful leadership that was necessary to make the difference. The opportunity came again in 1999, offering hopes and promises. Ten years after, Nigeria and indeed Nigerians are as a matter of fact worse than ever in the nation’s history.
The profligacy that has attended the management of state resources and revenues in the last one decade has made a child’s play of what all the military rulers plundered in the many years of dictatorship. Let’s try some meaningful benchmarking: how was it under the colonial masters; how have we fared under the military; and how well have the modern day political plunderers and shameless thieves succeeded in criminalising virtues and dignifying vices?
As alien as the ways and styles of the colonial masters were, our antagonism of their leadership lay more in the fact that they did not belong here and should not harness our human and material resources for the development of their lands. It was not for lack of vision, neither was it for lack of direction nor for corruption, and other vices that today define our nationhood. But whatever their benefit was from our land was the price we had to pay for their able leadership and guidance; for taking us from the pit of barbarism to the path of modernism and civilisation. They paid the price, and we did, too.
Under the military, we had no collective voice. A few spoke for us and insisted they represented our interests and forced themselves on us, claiming that it was the best thing they could offer their beloved nation to save it from total fall and its hijack by political wolves that the nation has the misfortune of being blessed with. But isn’t that what the politicians are? The military, we have claimed, stole and stole and stole. That is as good as it sounds. How many of them are standing trial in our law courts? In truth, we have not had any reason to take them to either Farida Waziri’s EFCC or Justice Emmanuel Ayoola’s Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission. The facts are just not there. Let someone tell us how much Yakubu Gowon, Aguiyi Ironsi, Murtala Muhammed, Olusegun Obasanjo as a military head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida and their lieutenants stole in the many years of military dictatorship. Maybe not as much as Ibrahim Mantu acquired as a deputy senate president and Obasanjo’s Third Term Chief Campaigner; maybe a fragment of what the James Iboris, Bola Tinubus, Chimaroke Nnamanis, Modu Sherifs and Peter Odilis amassed in less than half a decade. Yet, the enduring infrastructure in Lagos, Abuja, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto, Ibadan, Enugu were engineered by the military. The remarkable successes Nigerian can boast of in transport, sports development, education, health, manufacturing, commerce and industry, technology, poverty reduction, rural development, telecommunications, etc, were initiated by the military.
Commonsense suggests that democracy should be better and should offer more good things of life than the military is able to do. But what has the Nigerian experience offer other than woes? Everyday, EFCC is heading for court to seek the prosecution of thieving politicians. A serving Inspector-General of Police, Tafa Balogun was caught in the grand political mess. Party chief, Bode George is another living example of political convicts. It’s now open stealing and the political institutions already bastardised and corrupted to offer no hope of a sane society in the nearest future.
Nigerians have turned to God. Churches and Mosques and other places of worship are daily flooded but the more efforts we make in this direction, the more distant help seems from us. One common denominator in our attempt so seek solution is ‘revolution’. The institutional frameworks are not fashioned in a way to exhume the submerging nation from the belly of the ocean and put it on a pedestal of hope. The country is today making more money from oil than it had ever made in history yet poverty continues to sink into every tissue and every cell of Nigeria as a nation.
If not now, then when? Change has become crucial. Not only crucial, it is imperative, important, exigent, necessary, inevitable, desirable and unavoidable. Otherwise, Nigeria’ll be caught napping when the undertaker calls!
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