As Nigeria slides into recession, countrymen have come to ask where the rain began to beat them. As if our condition was not bad enough, the Nigerian State has further made gloom of an already dark situation.
As Nigeria slides into recession, countrymen have come to ask where the rain began to beat them. As if our condition was not bad enough, the Nigerian State has further made gloom of an already dark situation.
Sullen by the amplification of economic woes and an attendant castration of the potentialities of the people, nationals appear to have found solace in the instruments of the sodden in labyrinthine defiance to the economic reality in the land. In a feel of natural aberration, the drunkard's progress moves in consonance with the grim consequences of a drunken leadership.
How Nigeria with abundant human and material resources fell into recession in less than a decade oil sold for over $100 a barrel should ordinarily compel the least enamoured to political participation to engage the leadership of the country.
With brilliant minds littered across the land, the mind that is yet to situate his or her citizenship in the right perspective must be a lost soul--not with the ubiquitousness of extra-judicial killings of men who are paid to protect us nor the renewed onslaught of the annihilatory criminals who shed limbs on the crescent!
In light of this development, every Nigerian left with an atom of consciousness ought to have been moved by that unseen part of man to query his place in this geographical expression. For no nation, not even those known for spiritual condemnation in Hoggish and Aping terms ever had it this bad.
For the tradition of dolce far niente of Nigeria's (s)elected representatives appears to have spiralled into an audacious orgy of madness in recent times.
With the plan to go to Germany for vocational training (what kind of training is vocational training?), our governors have taken impunity and democratic distortions to an all-time high.
No one seems spared in this shameless show of crass exhibitionism, not even the somewhat cerebral governor of Kaduna, Nasir el-Rufai.
And you read this in the news yet sees Nigerians go about their daily chores as though it concerns them not is in fact what makes the whole scenario perplexing. Where do one begin to instill consciousness in the minds of Fanon's wretched?
What kind of spell did the Nigerian hegemonic forces cast on the people that make them indifferent to the treacherous acts of the authority thieves? "A dumb populace,"Ọ̀wọ́adé Akinadé noted, "is the joy of a bad government".
With the president mincing no word to inform hegemonic irritants on the non-negotiability of the unity of the country, it is noteworthy to inform the stoic man from the forest of Daura that this country (his country) is nothing but a contraption of the slavemaster; a geographical expression carved by a pale-skinned boyfriend, christened by his pale-skinned girlfriend and left on the streets only for her diapers to be consistently changed by elements who prey on her vulnerability to supplant colonialism with neo-colonialism.
An orphan belongs to the orphanage. This is why Buhari’s dream of the inviolability of the Nigerian State is nothing short of a wet dream, an illusionary hold on to a virtual state of hopefulness of the betterment of an already battered civilian barracks.
At this time when states’ map are continuously redrawn in both soil and suffrage terms, the world watches in outstanding bewilderment at 21st century Nigerian leadership as it preaches the indivisibility of a country whose unity exists only in name.
With every tribe wanting every other in the cesspool of hate and scatterbrained religious mob doing theirs for the hereafter’s recompense, one wonders what motivates and keeps the president going in his drive to preserve the Lugardian legacy.
For a president who rode into the villa on a bank loan, the country still finds itself enmeshed in a festival of doddering confusion as three of the borrower’s children recently completed their studies beyond the blue ocean and red sea.
To Nigerians who see beyond the present, the mind pricks one to ask what is left of patriotism when a former head of state and four-time contestant for the presidency puts his ward outside of the Nigerian school system!
And this is why the nation revolves in a state of spiralling animation. The pictures of the Buharis being splashed on our collective consciousness is indicative of nothing but Mr. Buhari's non-belief in the redemptive power of the Nigerian state in both educational and pedagogic terms.
It is this isolationist tendency ingrained in the hearts of the elite that sprouts a hubristic character indicative of what Fanon calls "black skin, white mask".
Had Candidate Buhari reflected on the contradictions in celebrating the graduation of his foreign-schooled children at a time he sits as the visitor of at least forty universities, public shame would have restrained him from ditching our citadel for that of the white man. When you believe in the redemptive power of a system, you will stick to it in the spirit of faith and struggle in whatever capacity--leader or follower.
Unfortunately, had Dino's manhood not been busy in search of Remi's hymen, one would have asked him to moot a bill mandating public office holders (including aspirants) to consume our schools and teachers.
The institutionalized nature of the perfidy which has already consumed the CBN and FIRS now takes centre-stage in the guiding principles this government cajoled the people with--anti-corruption.
With the shielding of Minister Dambazzau, Chief of Army Staff Buratai, and a host of other political masturbaters, President Muhammadu Buhari has further retrenched Nigeria into a pit where the rules do not apply. Any surprise why the Ape has suddenly come in defence of the Goat?
Sandwiched between alcoholic tide and exhaled smoke during the Prohibition Era in the United States, Margaret Shrouder, a character in Terence Winter's Boardwalk Empire, whose fall into wholesome confusion over the vivid contradictions in the political prostitution and impunity amongst Atlantic City's leadership sought to box her hubby, County Treasurer Enoch Thompson into the moral corner. She got more than what she hoped for:
"... Knucky Thompson: If we'd only elected good men we never have leaders.
"Margaret Shrouder: If not good then what should they be?
"Knucky: Useful. To those who support them."
This is the summary of the change Nigerians voted for. The revolution is lost.
Modiu Olaguro writes from Badagry.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ModiuOlaguro
