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Apathy Is Haram By Joshua Adeoye

May 26, 2015

The Occupy Nigeria proved the protest Cliché to be untrue, and came dangerously close to bringing the government to its knees, in what could have been the first successful peaceful protest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Instructively, because the protest focused on the fuel price increase, instead of the societal and leadership ills that caused the increase, it buckled when it shouldn’t have; and our denial of reality continued. However, we now know that Nigerians can protest on the streets.

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I spent most of my childhood being reminded of what we, as Nigerians, could “never” do. My guess is that, if you are Nigerian, you heard those platitudes growing up too. Some were funny, others silly; but at the time, they all seemed true.

These “Nigerians cannot …” statements have now all but disappeared, as not one, but all these ‘truisms’ have been proven to be grossly untrue. What we thought was ‘not in our character’ has gradually become the norm… and this is the story of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

“Nigerians never commit suicide! We are the happiest people in the world…” was one of them. Believe it or not, up until Christmas day of 2009, when a certain Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab arose to shock our consciousness (remember him?), it was a ‘truism’. Now known as the “underwear bomber”, he was caught attempting to blow himself up with 289 others on a plane bound for Detroit.

We tried to explain away his actions by claiming that he was not ‘truly Nigerian’, that he was ‘privileged’ and had never really tasted real suffering - at least not the type available for free in slums, or the one inherited as a birthright in African villages. After all, his father was named one of Africa’s richest by the Times in 2009. We then proceeded to conveniently forget about him, especially as he was sentenced to four lifetimes in prison.

Boko Haram, however, started employing suicide bombers in June 2011, and Nigeria joined the same terror list as Iraq and Afghanistan. Now also, women “do what men cannot do” – blow up themselves wantonly. Nigerian women! Some may claim they have been ‘brainwashed’, but the “truism” has been dispelled; Nigerians are not too ‘happy’ to commit suicide after all.

“No Nigerian has time to leave his house or business and go protest on the street!” was another popular one that was brandished whenever news showed any large-scale protest elsewhere in the world. When the Arab spring started in 2010, a lot of Nigerians scoffed at those sleeping in the streets in Egypt et al, quickly noting that said spring ‘flowed’ through North Africa and even into the Middle East, but trickled nowhere near Sub-Saharan Africa.

On New Year’s Day 2012 however, President Jonathan chose to increase the pump price of Petrol by 100 percent, and the Occupy Nigeria protest in response, betrayed as it was by greed and lies, brought the majority of Nigerians harrumphing into the streets.

The Occupy Nigeria proved the protest Cliché to be untrue, and came dangerously close to bringing the government to its knees, in what could have been the first successful peaceful protest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Instructively, because the protest focused on the fuel price increase, instead of the societal and leadership ills that caused the increase, it buckled when it shouldn’t have; and our denial of reality continued. However, we now know that Nigerians can protest on the streets.

Yet, we did not protest when Boko Haram struck. We even scoffed at the few mothers who made an effort in Abuja, alluding to all kinds of political conspiracies. Nigerians in the Southern, Western and Eastern regions of the country, even those in the parts of the North sparingly involved in the Boko Haram attacks, turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed in the Northeast, and the even bigger savagery of the authorities and military top-brass playing politics with innocent people’s lives. This is because we have all developed an Apathy that has eroded our values, run our country and continent into the ground, and engaged us in a dance of shame with our consciences, our reflections in the mirror and even our Creator.

Apathy is defined as ‘a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation, and/or passion.’ “An apathetic individual has an absence of interest in, or concern about, emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical and/or physical life and the world. The apathetic lack a sense of purpose or meaning in their life.”

This definition is poignant because we, as Nigerians consider ourselves more spiritual than the angels, and every Ike, Ife and Abdul claims to be a Pastor, an Imam or both. Our Sunday-long church services and weekend-long spiritual retreats are legendary, and our ‘anointed’ Pastors talk as if they built the firmaments of the heavens. Our calls to prayer from Mosque minarets are so loud that they can be heard from space, and there are more Mosques than tarred roads in some regions of Nigeria.

I refer you to the definition of Apathy again. How can we feel so strongly about our religious affiliations, when, ab initio, our Apathy indicates a spiritual indifference to the world? Are we not become living zombies encased in a shell of hypocrisy?

For those in areas unaffected by Boko Haram, we invented cyclical arguments that apportioned blame to ‘Northern’ elements; prayed “things will get better”; or secretly thanked God that it was not happening in our backyard; hoping against reason that it would not get there.

For those in affected areas, we conveniently blamed the current leaders and refused to ask the right questions of the local politicians who grew and fed the organization, or the religious leaders that daily stoke the heated chasm between Islam and Christianity. And it still continues… everybody ignores his or her own roles – especially their silent assent - in the matter.

And, while our fallacies were obvious to the world, our apathy guaranteed that we were more comfortable ignoring the daily genocide than addressing it. We refused to demand restitution for our abducted kids; and we were indifferent to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the conflict. To top it off, a few months ago, while the whole world was outraged about 12 killed in France, our 2000 slain in Baga were pathetically ignored, and not just by the outside world. We, the leadership and the followership of the very country they belonged to, did not as much as give them a minute of silence. We all became silent terrorists.

The risk of continuing in this our Apathy is that we become purposeless as a “country”. If nobody cares about what goes on around, why not live as discrete individuals in the first place? Why bother with Governments… Rules… Roads… Malls? And if you think this “purposelessness” is putting it too strongly, ask yourself this: “Has it had any meaning to us as individuals that Nigeria is blessed with all the natural resources a country can want?” “Does our being the most populous black nation in the world benefit other African countries that need succor, or even embattled blacks in the Western world?” “Has our presence as a country mattered in a world that needs ALL countries to pull their weight?”

It is easy to blame everything on bad leadership, but, don’t a people deserve their leaders? Maybe we should ask ourselves why purposeless governments have ruled us since democracy began in Nigeria. All Nigerian leaders have ever cared about is being in power – Abacha and ‘Whom does the cap fit’; Babangida and his insulting quest for democratic validation; Obasanjo and his ‘third term agenda’; a sick Yaradua who, arguably, should have done something else other than contest for President; and most recently, a desperate Jonathan who was so willing to scuttle democracy totally if it meant he would be ousted via the polls?

Just as we became silent Boko Haram terrorists; guilty by association of all the innocent people killed - despite not having worn any bomb vests or carried any machetes, we became silent thieves too - willing looters from our treasury, but with no bank accounts and houses in Switzerland to show for our troubles.

So, what is to be done?

Stop the Apathy. This habit of not caring about goings-on in the larger society comes back to haunt one when the ills of the larger society settles in. And it doesn’t matter whether you flee abroad or not. You will forever be seen as being from a country where they treat themselves as animals. What do you think you will be called? A plant? A human? No, my country-people – You will be called an animal!

It also doesn’t matter if you ‘sensibly’ go and give birth to your kids abroad or not. They might be blissfully insulated as kids, but as adults, they will suffer the same discrimination that greets every alien. All of which could have been prevented if you fixed your country in the first place.

When we start holding ourselves to standards, we can then demand these same standards of our leaders. We hold our children up to standards. We send them to schools and expect them to not just survive, but to do well. Without those standards – expectations and examinations - how would they graduate? Of what use is their schooling? We further ask them to grow up and mature into adults that we can rely on at home. Isn’t this the same thing as holding them up to a standard - a standard of maturity above which they can be relied upon?

When in business, we seek to turn profits. That is literally setting the cost of running the business as the standard, above which that business must perform. If this is not achieved, we fire people or apportion blame. We thus hold our employees, or our business partners to some form of standard too.

Why not our leaders? Are they not public servants? Shouldn’t we have palpable improvement from year to year like our businesses? If improvement fails to come in societal indices, should we not fire those responsible (yes, I mean vote out incompetent councilors, legislators, governors and presidents), or apportion blame and seek to correct it (by demanding and getting the replacement of inept ministers and public servants)?

Standard setting is, however, not a one-way street. The leadership owes it to the followership to enforce standards, and that is where laws come in. The rule of law has been absent in Nigeria, and indeed Africa for far too long, and it is high time we reversed our sinking boat of a Continent.

To those who think this is a far-fetched concept; let me simplify it for you with just one example.

We once used to think Nigerians in Lagos could never obey traffic laws until Lagos State Transport Management Agency (LASTMA) came. Now, it is the norm rather than the rarity for traffic laws to be obeyed in Lagos, and this did not take decades to procure, it occurred within a year of LASTMA beginning operations.

The Nigerians at the opposite end of the country in Kano snickered at those in Lagos when the news of the effectiveness of LASTMA came through. How do you hope to enforce traffic laws in a state where motorcycles were more prevalent than flies? Which aptly described Kano state then). Then Kano State Road Transport Agency (KAROTA) came. It did not take 3 months for everybody to be whipped into shape, including the motorcyclists. I know this because I live in Kano.

Now, these are some of the largest cities in Nigeria. What is so special about Bauchi, Kogi or Bayelsa that they cannot be cleaned up or fixed? Citizens that were held to standards in truly metropolitan cities yielded. What is an urban or semi-urban locale compared to this?

We have apathetically nurtured so many societal ills with ghastly symptoms – not the least of which are political misbehavior, military and police brutality, and so on and so forth…

Continuing in this trend we are so relentlessly pursuing will soon make Nigeria itself ‘Haram’. For that not to happen, Apathy has to become Haram as we enter this new dispensation come May 29th.

 

Joshua Adeoye is currently studying at the Harvard School for Public Health, he can be reached at [email protected]

Topics
Politics