This weekend should be important to the country and the reasons are very clear. The federal government under President Muhammadu Buhari should be celebrating five years in power. Four years of the first tenure and one year into the second. Last Friday, May 29 was it but by midweek when I got cracking with this discourse, the atmosphere was still filled with fear of COVID-19 and debates whether a President elected by the people, who has done first four years and was through the fifth in his second term was indeed in control of his regime or not. Definitely something that is not working right may have been responsible for introducing this kind of perception. Perception we know has roots. Let me that there.
Many of the governors within this period are also marking five years as re-election has become such a routine in our political culture going by the already established trend we have seen. Elected public officers only drop off the queue when they fail to play well the game of ingratiation especially with the power brokers; once they do, the processes and momentum associated with it are aligned to take them past an electorate already rendered prostrate and extremely vulnerable by poor and wicked governance system which has little or nothing about life lifting in it. Even the sovereignty which should offer them some hope and sense of worth is taken away from the people through the back door in the form of terrible conspiratorial collusion between the tyrants masquerading as democrats, cronies disguised as independent electoral umpires and agencies designated to police the processes.
Others, who are not celebrating five years, would be hooked up with one year anniversary. Anniversary as a concept is a great thing, it is a phenomenon. Its marking may not necessarily be expensive and wasteful, it can be hallmarked by soberness and deep retrospection. Given what is at stake and entity involved, it may make greater sense to roll out the drums and get everybody to dance to fine rhymes and celebrate resolute determination to enter and walk on the path of sound moral rectitude and sustainable progress that usually would follow.
Put clearly societies ought to mark and celebrate anniversaries of their existence and progress. One thing this does is fostering a sense of oneness. It bonds people with their environment, this more so for pluralistic entities like ours where very strong and distinct empires were joined together by colonialists against their wish. The second point would be that celebrations afford the people in the union opportunity to undertake a realistic assessment of the journey so far, ascertain if the vision is clear and still relevant and convince themselves that the roadmap is worthy of continuous adherence to it.
Our atmosphere is not reflecting either celebration or even the more tedious one: introspection. The reason for this forlorn attitude is easy to identify. In 60 years of independence, mind you I didn’t say nationhood, because there is a big difference. We have left things people who want to build nations do and have remained glued to things that tear people apart and make nonsense of concepts of building a viable entity.
Let us start from the less complicated. Every sane country has a National Day usually the day the country became independent probably from colonial power. They keep that day and celebrate the task of nation building. Now check out ours, 60 years after attaining independence none of us can say whether our National Day is now October 1, the day British overlords gave us Independence or May 29, a day military usurpers returned us to government of the people after raping the country, plundering its wealth and foisting a reign of mediocrity, nepotism, tyranny and aberrations or June 12, the day MKO Abiola won what is generally acknowledged as the freest presidential election in 1993, organised by Prof Humphrey Nwosu, an Igbo man, but which was truncated and annulled by the military on clearly spurious grounds.
The above is one example of our inability to effectively handle simple tasks, and at the broader level, the example is symptomatic of all that has been wrong with our journey to nationhood. Simply, 60 solid years after independence, our society has no vision of the destination it wants to reach. Each leader and the group he represents gets to power one way or the other and all they do is begin a rain of criticisms and demonization, from there to an agenda suitable for only their cohorts and to a lesser extent people of their tribe and religion, then it ends there and before we spell Ralph Egbu, eight years in the life of the people and society are thrown down the drain with massive material human resources attached to all of those years.
We say ours is a federal government but in actuality we run a unitary administration, which is a terrible fallout of this obvious abnormality is having one government that wants to create a modern competitive nation working from one point; it is stiffening creativity and proving counter-productive yet our leaders hold tight to it because the dominion of one over the rest must be upheld. Yet, the roof is about to collapse on every one’s head and those who should have learnt from history refuse to take a look in. We don’t have a constitution, what we throw about is a military contraption. It may have been coupled together by civilians yet the many contradictions in it attest that the soul and spirit are those of the military comprising mainly of officers from just a section of the country.
Today, it is difficult to say if our country is capitalist or whether we subscribe to welfare system. We say government has no business being in business, we want to privatise everything. Now we sell public power company and turn around to give away trillions to funds to the same private business. Meanwhile, the choice has left us worse than when government ran the show. We spend trillions to fund agriculture and yet we are singing private initiative. Health and education are in bad shape and where you find any it is priced beyond the reach of 80 per cent of citizens. Inflation, unemployment, import dependence, scramble over forex, non-productive economy, poor social infrastructure, all running high yet the state makes free money from oil sells and spends humongous amounts on projects, still we remain suffocated with the pangs of worse kinds of underdevelopment. Where did the funds go to?
So much dissonance in what should be near one directional movement in terms of vision and development. As it is each tier of government is doing different things from the others, many of their projects at variance to the core needs of the people and things that can make a society modern country. Imagine for a moment if all tiers faced road construction, health and education for a specified period. Picture if they all face rail, water, food, industrialization, doing so with world standard and aesthetics that go with it. They go abroad and see things, compare quality of what they do here with what we see in other places.
Trust our leaders, they will celebrate, highlight buildings producing nothing, roads not well made linking to nowhere. They will talk of security even when their acts promote same. By now we should be ashamed we talk about religion, almajirai, no electricity, lack of potable water, new prices for petroleum products, nepotism becoming state policy, at a time we should be running after vision, merit and high level productivity. I am sad but I will celebrate, celebrating optimism that nature has a way of sorting out contradictions. Happy anniversary to our President and the governors! I love you all.