To a people addicted to the tragic luxury of
self-delusion, truth hurts so badly. But then, truth always refuses to go away.
It lingers around to perpetually taunt and haunt those that loathe and despise
its face.
And the truth we can no longer afford to deny today is
that anybody, in fact, any animal can rule Nigeria. I mean, even a bird or baboon
can become Nigeria’s president or governor. It is that simple! All it will
take, after all, is for the person to get a Prof Mahmood Yakubu and his band of
magicians at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to announce
his “victory,” and that would be all. But if, for whatever reason, they fail,
the Supreme Court can be relied upon any day to perfectly deliver the mandate!
The ruler does not even need to do anything to gain legitimacy. All he needs to do is just to stay there, occupy the space, use state resources to take good care of himself, his family and cronies, and that would be all. A few people whose consciences are still alive will make some noise but that won’t change anything, and won’t upset anybody.
Nigeria remains the best example of how a country could be
without any form of government or governance, or even a leader!
With time, the pretender to the throne could learn the
simple art of assembling some callous, unpatriotic, clever, cold-hearted and
light fingered characters around him and Nigeria would be theirs to pillage and
desecrate as they like, any day! And if he is lucky enough to be blessed with
the kind of morally challenged and spineless National Assembly headed today by Ahmed
Laman and his cousin, Femi Gbajabiamila, he can as well wrap the entire country
up, confidently put it away in one of the folds of his wife’s wrapper, and
retire to an oxygen bed for a long, refreshing sleep. And the heavens will not
fall!
Such a ruler will always and easily attract a flock of
vultures around him whose daily brief will be to unceasingly inundate us with a
list of the imaginary accomplishments the ruler has recorded in a country that
is already gasping for breath; he will also continue to unleash, in season and
out of season, very revolting, convoluted and toxic arguments about how Nigeria
would have ceased to exist if his principal did not do us the favour of accepting
to be our ruler and, by implication, our country’s remorseless degrader. In
fact, if we by our ungrateful attitude suddenly make him to pick offense and
retrieve Nigeria from where she is rotting away due to abysmal mismanagement and
hand her back to us and retire to his village, then Nigeria will just disappear
from he world map! Aren’t we so lucky? What a disaster!
It is not a new malaise, mind you. Late Mr. Alao
Aka-Bashrun, the esteemed former president of the Nigerian Bar Association
(NBA) stated it more elegantly many years ago when he said that even if some
armed robbers ganged up and seized power in Nigeria that he knew some of his
colleagues who would immediately rush in and fall over themselves to hand in
their CVs to seek to “serve” in that regime of bandits. A country whose
political elite is driven mainly by self-serving considerations rather than
ennobling altruism is a country that that will go nowhere. And that is why
Nigeria is yet to demonstrate any signs that it is going anywhere.
There is something called self-esteem, and it is very saddening
that it remains grossly in short supply in Nigeria, especially in the pool from
which Nigeria is, most unfortunately, drawing its irredeemably greedy rulers.
Time was when all a leader wanted was to leave a glorious name and sterling
legacy behind. But the set we have been stuck with for quite sometime now does
not appear to care about such things. Call them thieves to their faces, and
they will not even blush. All that excite them are the fat accounts and choice
properties they have criminally accumulated across the world.
And when they advance any opinion, one searches in vain
for the slightest hint of conviction and principles. Sadly, such terms, it
would seem, are totally alien to their entire worldview. They appear driven by
only the expected immediate gain to be carted away, and clearly lack the
capacity to even appreciate that Nigeria needs to remain there till tomorrow
for them to even find something more to steal. How a society became so unlucky
as to leave its destiny in the hands of mostly the dregs and scum in its midst
is one dilemma that might engage the most learned sociologists and experts on
behavioural studies for ages? Sadly, in President Muhammadu Buhari, a dying country
has already lost hope of ever commencing the most yearned-for reclamation.
Nigeria always fills any sane and decent person with
unqualified sadness. At no time in our history has a country been so badly
diminished by raw greed. As one watches in utter disgust the series of poorly
scripted and unsightly drama being periodically unleashed on the polity by a
bunch of ultra selfish and unpatriotic entities to discourage any attempt by
Nigeria to get on its feet again after being horribly crippled by the utter
visionlessness and gross inertia of a
misfocused band of leaders, as they undertake several desperate and devious moves
to destabilize the country by emphasizing the country’s fault-lines and
exacerbating ethnic and religious tensions just to maintain their stranglehold
on the country’s resources, it is just unbelievable that men and women
empowered by law and paid from the public purse to put a halt to the whole
nauseating nuisance are sitting passively and watching helplessly as the
country is badly diminished before the rest of the world.
Now, are there no institutions empowered by law in Nigeria
to investigate the mind-boggling reports of crude acts of corruption at the
various points of leadership? Suspicions abound that the slush funds flowing
around like polluted rivers have ensured the silence and passivity of those who
ought to do something about the insufferable leakages. For goodness sake, how
long can we continue to hide under the debasing excuse that this is a badly run
country where anything is permissible, whose rot is irreversible? When shall we
lay claim to a better testimonial? How long shall a country greatly endowed
like Nigeria remain grossly diminished before others she ought to be better than?
No doubt, the consequences have been enormous. Because of
the kind fellows we allow to take charge of our affairs in this country, there
is decay everywhere, because they lack the capacity to appreciate the need to
build enduring features for posterity. The only language they understand is
grab-and-plunder, which has caused the country to bleed profusely and die
gradually. Consequently, Nigerians are fleeing their country in droves daily as
if it is involved in a very devastating war.
In all manner of countries they are being subjected to all
manner of unimaginable humiliations and debasing deportations. Did you read the
reports some years ago that some Nigerians were also deported from Sudan, of
all places? Now, Ghana here is treating Nigerians like trash and the same man
who as military ruler had deported poor Ghanaians in 1984 has lost his voice? What
an irony! How low can a country sink before it decides to seek
self-rediscovery? Public officers and rich Nigerians now send their children to
schools in Benin Republic to get quality education. Imagine that? Our rulers
have deemed it fit to watch the schools here to rot away, while they cart away
the funds that could have turned those institutions into international centres
of excellence to educate their children in better managed countries.
I felt deflated a few years ago while attending a
conference at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana, when I found out that Americans, Britishers,
Chinese and people from diverse nations of the world are proudly studying
there.
While a
friend and I took a walk around midnight on a Saturday at the Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology, Ghana, we felt so safe, despite the several trees in
the well landscaped and beautified compounded that lend the school its
serenity, but which could also provide cover for cultists (if we were in
Nigeria) to strike. As we stood on a walkway, about eight American youths
hopped across, chattering, laughing and feeling so much at home. Children of
countless Nigerian government officials are enrolled in the school, generating
huge funds for Ghana with which she now offers divers scholarships to her own
citizens.
In 1993, I
met an American Professor of Economics who proudly announced to me that while
he studied for his Masters Degree at the University College, Ibadan, (UCI) in
1958, he stayed at Kuti Hall. I wonder if he can advise any American child
today to get near that same Kuti Hall he spoke so glowingly about, or encourage
the child of his worst enemy to attend a Nigerian University.
Prodigal
Nigerian rulers would prefer paying all the money to Ghana than improving and
making our own schools qualitative and safe so that youths from several parts
of the world can also come here (as used to be the case) to study. Nigeria has enough resources to
buy up the entire Ghana. No doubt, Ghanaians do not have the
drive and innovativeness of Nigerians. Under sincere and honest leaders whose
eyes and hearts are not focused only on the treasury, nothing can stop Nigeria
from becoming one of the greatest countries in the world?
It offends
me each time anyone attempts comparing Nigeria with Europe or America. From
Swaziland, Botswana to Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia to Uganda, Benin, Ghana,
Ivory Coast to the Gambia, Nigeria is, perhaps, the only country in the whole
of Africa that is yet to achieve reasonable stability in electric power supply.
What a pity.
Sometimes,
one wonders whether Nigerian masses are even worth fighting for. The same
people who are exploited and oppressed daily by heartless and godless public
officers are the same people who would eagerly agree to be rented as brainless
crowds to demonstrate and whip up support for sinking corrupt and/or
incompetent officers.
When will
Nigerians see their oppressors for whom they are and learn to distance
themselves from them, no matter the peanuts they offer them or the ethnic or
religious affinity they share with them? Those who agree to be part of rented
crowds to fight the cause of corrupt leaders are using their own hands to
perpetuate their own slavery. Will they ever learn? So pathetic.
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