I had switched off my phone, an unusual practice, and gone to bed at midnight, two days after the start of the recent fuel subsidy protests in Nigeria. Barely two hours later, was I roused from sleep by the ringing of the same phone that I had switched off. And when I picked the call, it was Shuaibu waiting at the gate of the house to convey me to an unusual public lecture in Abuja. The organizers explained that the lecture was scheduled for that unusual hour of the day because of the prevailing circumstances in the country. The lecture had just started when I entered the hall and the lecturer was no other person than the most respected Mr. Mokwugo Okoye, a great scholar, historian, essayist, poet, radical analyst and rebel. It did not matter to me anymore the inconvenience that I endured to get to the venue nor what the lecture was meant commemorate as I quickly settled down to take in all that my hero had to offer. I was at the venue till 5.30 a.m. when the urge to visit the convenience forced me to switch on the bedside lamp. Hmmm…it was a dream. “What a lecture!” I managed to mutter to myself.
I had switched off my phone, an unusual practice, and gone to bed at midnight, two days after the start of the recent fuel subsidy protests in Nigeria. Barely two hours later, was I roused from sleep by the ringing of the same phone that I had switched off. And when I picked the call, it was Shuaibu waiting at the gate of the house to convey me to an unusual public lecture in Abuja. The organizers explained that the lecture was scheduled for that unusual hour of the day because of the prevailing circumstances in the country. The lecture had just started when I entered the hall and the lecturer was no other person than the most respected Mr. Mokwugo Okoye, a great scholar, historian, essayist, poet, radical analyst and rebel. It did not matter to me anymore the inconvenience that I endured to get to the venue nor what the lecture was meant commemorate as I quickly settled down to take in all that my hero had to offer. I was at the venue till 5.30 a.m. when the urge to visit the convenience forced me to switch on the bedside lamp. Hmmm…it was a dream. “What a lecture!” I managed to mutter to myself.
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What follows is the summary of the lecture in the words of the lecturer:
Although I have always had interest in ideas and a heightened consciousness of much that is wrong with the direction in which my country headed, there is no particular reason why I should be invited to speak on the topic of this lecture “Nigeria’s “Nascent” Democracy: How to Make it Work” considering that men and women in public office today do not consider public opinion the transmission belt of enduring democratic culture. Or why I should entangle myself with inanities of the Nigerian elite and trivialities of palace historians. But watching closely the conduct of present day political elite, it seems to me that it is necessary to share my thoughts with this august gathering if only to put on record my feelings about happenings in the polity.
Stricken, as I am, by the “palsy of candour”, I will endeavour to speak frankly on the current direction of things in our country, rather than in parables which could disguise my moral indignation over the economic banditry, intellectual dishonesty, political brigandage, and philistinism that I observed from my current vantage position.
In today’s Nigeria, it is not possible or desirable to accept A.E. Housman’s advice to “be still” and endure an hour and see injustice done” in the hope that “it is but for a season”. It is possible, I know, to tone down the language of this lecture to suit today’s fashionable love of euphemism and decorum, but for patriotic reasons and fidelity to truth and for my own feeling at this period, I have not thought it necessary to so do.
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There is, today, a feeling of despondency and disillusionment running through every stratum of our society because the hope of the people in the national-democratic freedom have been dashed by the big lie of pseudo-democracy – government of money for money; the pursuits of the old, dreary tricks of self-advancement – bribery and blackmail, flattery and gossip, playing off one section of the country against another. The leading men in politics today seem to have lost sight of the true duties of leaders in a democracy – the re-education of the masses in the spirit of freedom and the raising of their living standards.
Our politicians have forgotten that democracy is not realized merely because the people are allowed, at periodic intervals, to elect their rulers, but only when ministering to the needs of many are made the guiding principle of state policy and when people participate in power and property without which the dispossessed become dissatisfied and irresponsible and social stability is thereby endangered.
Freedom that our democracy presupposes does not mean merely the absence of restraint – that will be forest freedom at its best, the freedom to devour and defraud others. Freedom connotes the maximum opportunity for full creative life and not merely the passage of a Freedom of Information Act. It is a truism that a free tongue without a full stomach is weak, and democracy will be meaningless to one who has no work, no home, no education and no decent clothing. A change of person in government is not democracy anymore than a change of clothes denotes moral regeneration. What Nigerians need is a change of things, a better life for the masses for whom life has become so sad, so tawdry and so stagnant.
There is danger today in Nigeria that mass unemployment, tribalism and corruption might disrupt the social fabric. But these evils can be checked if the entire resources of the nation are mobilized to tackle them, if extensive public works and industrialization are pursued and comprehensive systems of cooperatives, trade and technical education are established and leading men set the highest example.
It is laughable that Nigeria politicians argue that the reason for our slow pace of development is lack of money because it should be clear enough to even the simplest of minds that what we need is neither Naira and kobo, US dollar nor British pound but trained men and women, for with knowledgeable cadres, our inexhaustible supplies of energy, roots, nuts, leaves and mineral resources will be turned into wealth.
Is it not a wonder that our governments at various levels have not thought seriously of integrating adult education with our Universal Basic Education and Community Development Schemes. For it is shortsighted to believe we can lift a child from the morass of ignorance and superstition without raising the levels of its home environment or the awareness of the parents; and without educating the masses on rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
There has been in Nigeria of today, a little too much “pragmatism”, a little too much dissembling and hypocrisy, a little too much patchwork and “covering up” of ineptitude and outmoded institutions. And it is a fact that in any society where a governing elite, faced with wide social inequality, mass poverty and conspicuous waste of limited resources, resorts to a systematic denial of its earlier pro-people slogans, such an elite class is bound to be challenged by a frustrated younger generation whose future is left in jeopardy. Herein lays the relevance of rise of different militant groups and militia men across Nigeria.
However, instead of laying the blame for the ethnic and religious tension pervading the land on the appropriate quarters the nation’s ruling elite prefers to play the ostrich and pretend to be finding solution where it does not reside. This deepening sense of helplessness and hopelessness resulting from the misrule of the various wings of the Nigeria ruling class since independence have been responsible for driving the country to the edge at various times thereby giving rise to uprisings that continue to task the unity of the country. Most of these uprisings, whether they are religious or ethnic, have succeeded in pitting the poor Nigerians against one another, while the sponsors of such conflicts continue to partake of love feasts, contract sharing, looting, company directorship, chieftaincies and the misguided application of our national patrimony.
If tomorrow must come, the task ahead of all patriots in the land is to partake in enlightening the predominantly illiterate people on the need for vigilance and continued education on the character of the so-called democracy being practised by the ruling elite with the view to understanding what it takes to build a national democratic culture. They must be brought to the consciousness that the ethnic and religious champions, either of the East, North, South or West have never defended and would never defend the oppressed Nigerians in their different enclaves against massive retrenchment, arbitrary laws, levies and taxes of all kinds.
In conclusion I will appeal to patriots in the land to rise against the misrule of the current ruling elite. They must strive to preserve the monolithic unity of the Nigerian nation and provide the fullest opportunity for all as essential conditions for social progress. We must struggle for provision of full employment of all available men and materials as well as de-vesting of the vested interests – the chiefs, landlords, legislators, members of the executive arm of government, feudalists and other agents of foreign capitals – without which democracy will be a sham, a regime of cats feeding on the rats. Democracy, its weal and its woe, is for all to share but even freedom is not enough without a fuller life for the masses which only mass participation in democracy can guarantee to them.
Dayo Olagunju, Ph. D
X6B Sunnyvale Homes,
Abuja.
[email protected]
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