By Chris Anyokwu
People have always spoken of Nigeria’s legendary luck as though Lady Luck herself were a Nigerian. Such is the happy fate of Nigeria’s ruling elite that, since the reins of power were handed over to them by the erstwhile British colonisers in October 1960, they have always got away with everything, blue murder and all. For those who seek to rule and reign, there is no other crash programme on Leadership, particularly at the national level, than a cursory, desultory and atavistic glance at the series of the shattered dreams, the interrupted or botched expectations and the amputated potential of the citizenry which their (that is, prospective leaders’) predecessors, since Independence, have been able to chalk up as their track record of achievement and performance. This postcolonial eclipse of hope and optimism seemed to have blanketed the entirety of the so-called Dark Continent until very recently when few countries in Africa, such as South Africa, Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco started showing green shoots of resurgence. Although it can be reasonably argued that it is still far from Uhuru in these cases of hope in the continental sprawl of dark despair and deep disillusionment, it is, however, heart-warming that some organograms of visionary and transformational governance have firmly been established in these nation-states.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-British Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, in his 2021 novel entitled The Buried Giant might not have had Nigeria in mind when he was writing his tour-de-force, but the merest mention of the word “Giant” immediately brings our beleaguered and woe-begone nation to mind. Why so? We were accustomed to fancying ourselves as “The Giant of Africa”! And with good reason, at least in hindsight. Firstly, our geographical size. The sheer omnidirectional vastness of Nigeria strategically positioned as it is as “the trigger” in a gun-like configuration bestows natural leadership on the West African behemoth. Secondly, beyond land mass, the country boasts unique demographics imbricating a human population of over 200 million with its youth constituting its largest constituent. Thirdly, and arising from the statistics above, consider, for a moment, a nation blessed with such an oceanic reservoir of human capital and the potential to catalyse greatness that they carry docilely within! Oh, imagine what we could achieve if and only if we are able, at long last, finally, to create an environment conducive to the competitive flowering of dappled potentialities! Imagine how our social services will receive the much-needed oxygen of life: we are here talking about education, health-care, road infrastructure, security and power supply. How about the hope of the nation in the face of the dwindling fortunes of oil – Agriculture? Agriculture and agro-allied spin-offs will receive a massive boost with a people-oriented visionary government in place. The short of it is that Nigeria is a land rich, ridiculously rich, in natural resources such that the mineral resources in the northern part of Nigeria alone can, if properly harnessed, jumpstart the country into a First World nation, its citizens living in clover. And the southern part too, of course, is home to a superabundance of tropical munificence including timber, cocoa, rubber, livestock and seafood. Our seaports which are today gateways of sleaze and graft, veritable conduit-pipes of nation-erasing corruption, can play a vital role in repositioning the nation’s economy for long-term sustainability, if the right head sits on our collective neck. Also tourism and hospitality industries will receive a shot in the arm, thus becoming foreign exchange earners in our mono-cultural borrower nation.
The discovery, to our never-ending undoing, of oil in Oloibiri in 1956, which has appositely been described as a “mixed blessing” has continued to this day to rob leadership of the imaginative nous, that enterprising curiosity to alchemise raw, wild nature into finessed end-user products in a rapidly technologizing world (read: Culture). It is in this mind-bending context that the current fixation with an archaeology of old, pre-colonial cattle routes and the trade tracks of Mansa Musa makes abundant sense. Let’s be clear, a nation afflicted – as ours is universally acknowledged to be – with an Abiku DNA can only be true to type. Breaking its mind-forged manacles of improvidence and prodigality will take a lot of weeping and wailing and a lot of gnashing of teeth. And that’s exactly our story today. Whilst the beggarly country which borrows compulsively to service its mounting debt has resolutely turned its back on agriculture or, at best, pays half-hearted attention to it, its ruling elite have now almost utterly impoverished the nation via oil theft in the auspicious moment of windfall courtesy the Russia – Ukraine War! Why are we so blest? You could shred in a fit of rage a novel in which these horrific events are being enacted. But we are talking about real-life activities happening as you are reading this article! Yes, you are right: we, all of us, are deballed driftwood in the fast-moving current of history. And we shall soon end up, spent and voided, at the waiting sea… So much for our dog-eared and ragged mantra of diversification; so much for Gowon’s quip: “Money is not our problem; how to spend it, is”; so much for OBJ’s “Operation Feed the Nation” and Shagari’s “Green Revolution”; so much for Buhari – Idiagbon “War Against Indiscipline” (WAI) and IBB’s SAP – emasculated regime and its universal deregulation and equalisation of corruption and bad behaviour; so much for the Abacha Years of the Locusts and now the Fourth Republic of institutionalised kleptocracy. Now, picture Nigeria, “the Giant of Africa”, much like the baited bear in Macbeth, being pecked to slow death by its heartless and unpatriotic minders. Given these buffetings, blows and bludgeonings, these several seasons, how much more can this “Giant” take without giving out eventually? Small wonder, its colourful honorifics and cognomen as a Sleeping/Snoring/Slumbering Giant! Mr Big-For-Nothing! Yet, like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Buried Giant”, Nigeria is, essentially, a buried Giant, no thanks to decades of executive irresponsibility by successive regimes, particularly since the beginning of the current Fourth Republic. Firstly, you have what media commentators like to call the PDP 16 years of predation and pillage. Such was the in-your-face, devil-may-care insouciance of the squander-maniacs at the time that they had boasted to sink Nigeria in 60 years in the saddle! Whereupon for 16 horrendous years, the PDP had ridden roughshod over the bruised sensibilities of the masses, pillaging and plundering our collective patrimony at will. Who could stop them? Who could stay the plague spreading in the camp like a vile flood with the sword of righteous ire? Nobody! They were the Lords of the Manor; so all animals were equal but the PDP lotharios and sybarites, bulimic in their insatiable feeding frenzy, were more equal than others.
Under the PDP, living had lost its salt; life became meaningless. Then enter the messiahs with the New Brooms (apologies to Odia Ofeimun). You may call them the “Change Brigade”. We are referring to no other political organisation than the All Progressives Congress (the APC). Frankly, the less said on the storied depredations of the APC the better. But suffice to say, under the current administration, Nigerians’ fate has become NYSC: Now Your Suffering Continues! A catalogue of woe, just a few, will do in this regard. The APC has worked with meticulous care to make certain that, our own dear native land is the second most terrorised nation on planet Earth. The organisation called the APC has also seen to it that Nigeria is the world’s poverty capital, with over 18.5 million of her children roaming the streets, out of school, according to the UNESCO. This figure makes Nigeria the worst in the world regarding the out-of-school-children problem. What is more, the country at present has 53.40% youth unemployment. What shall we say of the ASUU-Federal Government war of attrition, which, to discerning observers, is down more to the puerile ego than to the paucity of funds on the part of the government? How about the Twitter and crypto ban which in effect muzzled for a time Nigeria’s youth?
The policy to close our borders, on the one hand, and impose visa-free entry into Nigeria, on the other, only exacerbated insecurity in Nigeria. The consensus is that bandits and terrorists murdering at will, raping and sacking communities are foreigners who entered our country illegally due specifically to this diplomatic clanger. To cap it up, with the unprecedented and endless borrowing spree of this government, the fear is that generations yet unborn have got their future mortgaged; stolen! A Sisyphean future awaits every child born to Nigerian parents today! So much for the happiest people on earth! Under the APC, the country has witnessed fraudulent oil subsidy payments, breaking all previous records (kindly listen to the Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Lecture on YouTube). Heartbreakingly, again, billions of naira are being spent on unproductive, functionally dead oil refineries. What’s Turn-Around-Maintenance (TAM) if not a shorthand for fabulous fraud? Recently, government promised that Nigeria would soon start refining her crude as some of her refineries would soon roar back to life. That will be the day. With corruption, finally, elevated to the rarefied level of state-craft, with rampant and rampaging terrorism, mass abductions, kidnappings-for-ransom and the scourge of the Unknown Gunmen (UGM) as well as a rubberstamp NASS and a deeply, deeply compromised judiciary, “from top to bottom”, Nigeria only seems to exist in name! Whither the Nigeria/n? Today the Nigerian seems all but gone. Poof! into thin air! What we have are ethnic nationalities: Yoruba, Igbo, Ika, Edo, Fulani, Hausa, Tiv, Urhobo, Nupe, Ijaw, etc. We have, sadly, our ruling class to thank for our widening fault-lines, our deep divisions, our mutual mistrust and bone-deep antagonisms and resentment.
The conflagration is barely below the surface, only requiring the spark of casual infraction or verbal interaction between, say, an Igbo and a Yoruba to ignite Armageddon. Go to the workplace, our schools, hospitals, streets, compounds and yards and even places of worship. They are all toxic with the stink of ethnicism and tribal bellyaching. Bad and admittedly hopeless as things are now, the question is: can Nigeria be salvaged? A cautious “yes”, with a big caveat, though. The earlier the people realise that the political class is united by the commonality of interest, greed and lust for power, the better. One party is the mirror-image of the other, in varying degrees. Speaking of class or interest, all the frontrunners are aggressively pursuing neo-liberal, Bretton-Wood-inspired policies and programmes. Ours is a rentier state happy to dole out patronages and preferment via prebendal means. So, the sooner the masses know their place as scum of the earth, the proles the better. We have always said that Nigerians have not risen to the status of citizens yet. So let’s not kid ourselves.
But lucky is that man who throws a stone into the Nigeria market without blinding his kinsman in the process. Such is the Cretan Maze of interrelationships of the Nigerian society that fighting a supposed foe is akin to indulging in self-destruct. Given decades of cross-cultural alliances in marriage, business, religion, club and so forth, one ethnic group cannot afford to do battle with another without suffering immense and immeasurable collateral damage themselves. As they say, you do not cut your nose to spite your face. But the real tragedy is that, in Nigerian politics, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Thus, in spite of the unspeakably horrendous eight-year Apocalypse we are living through now, those who vote, the electorate, are no wiser! The voting pattern is still going to be along the following lines: (a) religious (Muslim-Muslim ticket versus Northern Christians; (b) tribal (Yoruba versus Igbo versus Fulani) and (c) generational (the EndSARS/ASUU-strike youth distemper versus the age-old ancien regime of “We-are-told-to-vote-our-kinsman”. Ethnicism, our politicians’ trump card, may yet carry the day. As someone once perceptively observed, Nigerians don’t mind their servitude and enslavement so long as the slave master is their kinsman. The child-voters as well as their longsuffering parents will vote their kinsman in the north, just as pauperised adults in the south will cast their ballots for their southern kin without any rational reason to do so apart from ethnic affiliations. Stomach infrastructure, as always, will have its say but will not carry the day. You shall hear things like: “Collect their money; take their bags of rice and indomie but vote your conscience”. How convenient! Have we factored into the equation the unsettling issue of thuggery? Ballot-box snatching? Intimidation? Threats? And violence resulting ineluctably in loss of life and property? Will the electoral umpire itself stand up and be counted? Will it be independent, in deed and in truth? How about the various security agencies? Will they be professional enough to be above board or will they bolster the arms of incumbency? And, finally, will the president do the right and proper thing: let the ballot speak without let or hindrance?
Let us end with the immortal words of Chief Obafemi Awolowo: “A day will come when Nigerian masses from the north and south, Christians, Moslems and Animists will merge as a force for progress and unity, and kick against rigging, corruption and tyranny”.
As the electioneering campaigns proceed apace, Nigerians must, for a change, put aside religion and ethnicity, and vote the person who has the physical energy, patriotic vision, abhorrence for corruption, a detribalised Nigerian who belongs more to the future than in the past, not a passenger in the departure lounge who is more comfortable with the way things are than to radically cleanse the Aegean’s stable. To the youth and the progressive-minded, east, west, north and south, I say to you: dare to wrest your country, your future, from the asphyxiating grip of geriatric power-mongers. 2023 beckons. Cometh hour, cometh the man!
Anyokwu, Associate Professor of English, writes from University of Lagos
