Why Is Nigeria So Cursed?

 By DAN AMOR 

When the Union Jack (the British flag) was, at the glittering mews of the Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos on October 1, 1960, lowered for a free Nigeria’s green-white-green flag, gloriously fluttered in the sky by the breezy flurry of pride and ecstasy, it was a great moment pregnant with hope and expectation. The whole world had seen a newly independent Nigeria, a potential world power, only buried in the sands of time. Endowed with immense wealth, a dynamic population and an enviable talent for political compromise, Nigeria stood out in the 1960s as the potential leader in Africa, a continent in dire need of guidance. 

                        *President Buhari 

For, it was widely thought that the country was immune from the wasting diseases of tribalism, disunity and instability which remorselessly attacked so many other new African states. But when bursts of machine gun fire shattered the predawn calm of Lagos its erstwhile capital city in January 1966, it was now clear that Nigeria was no exception to Africa’s common post-independence experience.

During the following four years (1966-1970), the giant and ‘hope’ of Africa measured its full length in the dust. Two bloody military coups, a series of appalling massacres and a protracted and savage civil war which claimed over two million lives threatened to plunge the entire country into oblivion. 

It also deprived Black Africa, already weakened and disillusioned, of a crucial element of strength and leadership in the growing confrontation with White Africa along the Zambezi. As God would have it, at the end of the civil war in 1970 the nation experienced an oil boom and a staggering wealth never before recorded in the history of young nations; which made Gen. Yakubu Gowon its military ruler then to announce to the whole world that Nigeria's problem was not how to make money but how to spend it. 

This new status, coupled with the emergence of a dynamic leader in the person of the late General Murtala Mohammed, in the mid-1970s, launched Nigeria back to a position of relevance in Africa when it proffered a new meaning and identity for the continent. Today, instead of a consummation of that hope and expectation, what confronts Nigeria is the story of a nation that has turned full circle as a giant with feet of clay: a big national and international nuisance and embarrassment. Indeed, we are experiencing an unnerving weight of devastating and agonizing poverty in the sixth largest exporter of crude oil in the world. Each time the price of the crude oil goes up in the international market, our local tormentors here increase the prices of petroleum at home. This is because they import every product into the country. 

A sadistic cabal of recycling and recycled local imperialists in both khaki and agbada has since hemmed the supposedly “giant of Africa” in a colony where incompetence, misrule, ineptitude, crass opportunism and corruption have been elevated to a national culture. More than sixty years into this circuitous game in which the nation’s till has been pillaged and her vast wealth frittered away abroad, the rot is peaking; and the hapless people are paying the imponderably colossal price. At the moment, in spite of a record huge revenue from external borrowing amounting to over N31 trillion as of June 2020, and other domestic sources, the social services sector, which more directly impugn on the people’s lives, is almost at the height of a complete system collapse. 

The story of virtually every social responsibility of the state to the people; of every area where the state remain relevant to her subjects under the unwritten social contract code, has been rewritten on its head: hospitals have graduated from mere prescription clinics into mortuaries as even medical doctors and other health workers are constantly on strike while our institutions of higher learning are completely shut down for more than ten months. We heard that the strike was called off last week. 

Even before the outbreak of the global pandemic known as Coronavirus or COVID 19 which has held the entire world hostage since November 2019, the country's academic calendar has been violently altered. The public school system is in a shambles; roads, including hitherto smooth expressways are now death traps; and almost a century after electricity supply debuted in Nigeria, her citizens still live more in darkness than light. 

Here is a complete story of retrogression and decay. Above all, there is an alarming rate of insecurity in the land. Nigeria is in a ferocious state of anomie. This is made worse by a tired and disheartened bitterness among the citizenry. If Hilaire Belloc is right in his opinion that ‘readable history is melodrama’, the true story of the first two decades of the twenty-first century in Nigeria, which also doubles as the longest tragic period of civil misrule since the past 107 years of the forced union by Lugard, is mind-boggling. It has been two decades of turmoil, with the elemental passions predominant. 

Never have Nigerian public officials in responsible positions, directing the destiny of the nation, been so wicked, brutal, hypocritical and corrupt, leaving the country to swim in infrastructural decay, unemployment, hunger and desperation as in the past six years of quasi-democracy. In fact, the magnitude of killings in Nigeria, especially since the last six years of the current administration is monumental. The outcome is the pervading poll of insecurity and poverty which is threatening to drive the country into yet another bitter crisis. Like a demented society, Nigeria is soaked with irrational impulses, stress and tension as the people can no longer elect their leaders. 

Aside from armed robbery which has rendered the entire police force vulnerable, there is candidly speaking, an alarming rate of mockery killings in Nigeria. There are indeed gruesome stories of rapes, perversities, and child murders even as Fulani herdsmen go about invading communities and killing people and taking over their lands with reckless abandon. Hostage taking is now a booming business in the country. An extremely partisan and sympathetic public is willing to read and believe anything as even the crime pages of our national dallies appear tinged with sadism. Yet, where is that Nigerian who does not know that the real criminals in our midst today are our rulers? 

Who does not know that much of the savagery connected with our current state of hopelessness and bloodletting could be explained in the character of the buccaneers who have misruled us for all these miserable years? How did Ghana which was at the level we are today between the mid 1970's and early 1980's make it to now become an enviable haven where our foreign and local investors now relocate to? How come that Ghana is now where our wealthy families now send their children to for qualitative education? Why has Nigeria suddenly relapsed into a country where violence has become a national pastime? 

It is interesting at this point to draw a historical parallel between Nigeria and India, a former victim of colonialism which has now turned itself to a world power due to political doggedness and economic independence. For a country like Nigeria still paying lip-service to the ideals of a federated union, the Indian Federation is an enduring model. There is a high level of competition among the eighteen regions with every state or region controlling its economy, separate army and police. Hence the drive for massive, unprecedented investment in education and manpower development as India exports more than 800 scientists annually to the Silicon Valley of the United States who manufacture made-in-America goods. 

Again, despite the internal party wrangling which led to the unfortunate assassination of Mrs. Indira Ghandi, India's erstwhile Prime Minister and that of her son, Rajiv, who succeeded her, the military in that country did not intervene in their national politics but allowed their politicians to make their mistakes until they were able to hone their politics to a considerable art. 

The difference in age of independence between India and Nigeria is just 13 as India gained political independence from Britain in August 1947. But the question is: can Nigeria attain the height India has reached in the next 13 years? From a position of relative despair and frustration, India has bequeathed to her children hope and happiness while Nigeria is still dancing in circle. Nigeria, where is thy soul? Why is Nigeria so cursed?

*Amor, a public affairs analyst writes from Abuja