For many, it is impossible to sing the Lord’s song during this Christmas season. Such people see no way out of the economic blind alley into which they have been pushed.
Promise Adiele
It is exactly six days to the revered Christmas day, a day Christians all over the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. For many, it represents a time of family reunion, when people from around the world return to their roots to be merry and jocular. For others, it is a time to connect with their ancestral roots, meet old friends, take chieftaincy titles, find a wife or a husband and indeed revel in the season. For children, it is a time for new clothes, nice dishes, permitted indulgences, when the boundaries of discipline are either collapsed or slacked.
While many celebrate with reckless abandon, the wise celebrate with caution, looking ahead to the almighty month of January when school fees and sundry bills will be ready to pounce. At the heels of Christmas also comes the New Year which makes it a double celebration. Unfortunately, many who will celebrate Christmas may not live to see the New Year. Such is the unpredictable nature of human existence, a constant dialectics of innumerable possibilities. Caution, therefore, should be the watchword. Caution in driving, caution in association, caution in eating and caution in an overt display of wealth and splendor.
While some celebrate Christmas in Nigeria, many are in anguish and languor. Many families are deprived of any reason to celebrate given the prevailing emasculating, economic conditions in the country. Those who have lost their jobs will certainly not have a good Christmas, therefore cannot partake in singing the Lord’s song since they have become captives living in a strange land in their own country. As I grapple with the issues in Nigeria, the muse reminds me of that sensational musical track by the group, Bonny M, Rivers of Babylon. The song laments how a set of unidentified wicked people carried another set of oppressed and conquered people into captivity. Their experience in captivity apparently requires them to sing a song. However, the captives query the possibility to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Watching this song on YouTube, I am almost brought to tears thinking about many Nigerians who fit into the narrative. At no time in the history of this country have many people been made poorer, thrown out of jobs, embraced despair and suicide than in the present era. At no time, except perhaps during the searing crucible of the civil war years, have feelings of despondency and regret cascaded the land than in the present era. Nigerians are in pains. Many are battling in the conspicuous and ever familiar labyrinth of filth, denial, penury, putrefaction and discarded trivia. For many, it is impossible to sing the Lord’s song during this Christmas season. Such people see no way out of the economic blind alley into which they have been pushed.
Given the above scenario, it is my wish to create an awareness, to commence a redemptive process for the recovery of undeserved economic misery inflicted on the people. The APC’s four years in power have made a child’s play of PDP’s sixteen years of organized banditry in terms of the living conditions of millions of Nigerians. I do not, in any way recommend a return to those sixteen years. That decision is left to Nigerians who, in having APC and PDP as choices, have found themselves between the rock and the hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea. I have provided an alternative in my previous essays and therefore will not repeat it here. Today, it is clear to mortar and pestle, that Nigeria has fared worse under the APC government. The transition into captivity has been total. Yes, Nigerians are in captivity and therefore, to sing the Lord’s song in this Christmas season is difficult.
There are certain things that defy explanation or even objective scrutiny. When I think of the present administration’s policy to share money (N10,000) to market women, I flinch in disgust and bewilderment. What, in the name of the Almighty can that amount of money achieve in terms of business investment given the rate of the naira in the international market? Can we kindly convert that amount of money to the dollar? It is ridiculous and laughable. It is easy to see through the economic canard which provides no answer to the multiple challenges that confront Nigerians. Indeed, it is difficult to understand some of the economic policies of this government. One begins to wonder if there is a deliberate attempt to establish poverty permanently in every Nigerian home.
It is even more difficult to reconcile one’s consciousness with some of the statements credited to principal officers of this government. The minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola last week in Abuja, while speaking at the Nextier Power Dialogue submitted that “if you don’t have power, it is not the government’s problem”. It is this kind of insensitivity, such implied indifference to the plight of the people that breeds hate and loathsomeness towards the government.
I am yet to recover from Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s declaration during the Nigerian-German Investment Dialogue in Berlin, Germany that Nigeria now produces 10 million metric tonnes of rice annually while importing only 2% of the rice we need. According to him “Today we produce locally 10 million metric tonnes of paddy rice annually. And we are importing only two percent of our rice consumption now,”. That declaration by the Vice President describing a country that accommodates more impoverished people, devastated to their bare bones more than any other country in the world, reveals a malfunction in the propaganda machinery of this administration. How indeed did the venerated man of faith, the cerebral professor come by such distorted, absolute conclusions? What is the price of a bag of rice today compared to pre-2015 before APC came to power? In this Christmas season, how many Nigerians can afford a bag of rice and sing the Lord’s song with fanfare? It is important we are alive to such misrepresentations, such mendacity so that we are able to see through the tissues of government affirmation to the present inertia.
Indeed, it is difficult for one not to be repulsed by the economic circumstances in Nigeria, especially if one is committed to engaging the multilayered, endemic issues that confront our country. In my inevitable capitulation to economic tensions of tragic dimensions in our country, I admit, like many Nigerians, to being apprehended by various economic significations which have bred poverty for which our country has become popular. It is difficult to refrain from imposing a deprecatory label on ineffectual leadership and other structures of political signpost erected by the present government. It is more painful that the feeble attempt to obfuscate the issues, which undermine our nightmarish experience, receives approval from brainwashed fellow victims of hardship. While we celebrate Christmas, whether we are able to sing the Lord’s song or not, every Nigerian has a responsibility in the present milieu that confronts our country and to this, we should all be committed.
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Adiele writes from Department of English University of Lagos via [email protected]