Nigeria: From Freedom To Anarchy

By Dan Amor

Once upon a time, there was a young country struggling in the comity of nations to find her place in the sun. For, in this young country of brave people, it was discovered that free­dom was a God-given right. So impressed were the citizens with this belief that they lit a candle to symbolise their freedom. But, in their wisdom, they knew that the flame could not burn alone. So, they lit a second candle to symbolize man’s right to govern himself. The third candle was lighted to sig­nify that the rights of the individual were more important than the rights of the State. And finally, they lit a fourth candle to show that government should not do for the peo­ple those things which the people should do and have been doing for themselves.

*Buhari 

As the four candles of freedom burned brightly, the young country prospered. And as they prospered, they grew fat. And as they grew fat, they got lazy. When they got lazy, they asked the government to do things for them which they had been doing for them­selves, and one of the candles went out.

As government became bigger, the people be­came smaller, and the government became all important. And the rights of the individual were sacrificed to the all important rights of the State. Then the second candle went out. In their apathy and indifference, they asked those who bear armour to govern them, and the marshals of the commandist clan did, and the third candle went off. In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted se­curity, a comfortable life, and they lost all – comfort and security and freedom.

For, you see! When the freedom they want­ed most was freedom from responsibility, then Nigerians ceased to be free. The last candle has been extinguished. One could assume, then, that we have it made. Never have any people at any time, anywhere, had it so good. But in our present abundance and luxury in the galaxy of power, something is wrong. Peo­ple aren’t happy. They no longer walk down the streets of our cities smiling or whistling a happy tune. There is discontent, and one can sense the fear of the unknown. Everywhere, the people are grumbling, cursing, jeering and hooting. The people have mistaken ba­boons for monkeys.

Nigerians are jittery. There seems to be a tarnish on our golden Mecca. We’ve created a new breed of men and women who can’t work but loot, just like we’ve created a new breed of men and women who crave for power for the sake of it. You had an opportunity to turn the nation to an Eldorado, but you supervised the mindless looting of our national patrimony into private pockets. You wailed and roared and were given the power, but you’re seeing it as an opportunity to favour your tribesmen at the expense of others and you’re still en­meshed in blame game while the country is bleeding. You even lack the capacity to govern a complex country of this magnitude. You are also supervising the grand looting of our national patrimony before our very eyes. Our debt overhang which was N6 trillion when you came to power is now N50trillion in just six years, with nothing to show for it. And, instead of the slogan, “God bless Nigeria”, all we now hear is, “Let us go our separate ways”. The signs aren’t too hard to read. They are the signs of internal decay – the dry rot of apathy and indifference.

The symptoms of our national disease be­gan just six years after gaining political in­dependence from our colonial masters, when we began to penalize our collective will by banal expediency. We had come to think of our early history and the men who created it as a kind of fairytale instead of the greatest success story of all time. So we decided to ban the teaching of history in our schools. Boko Haram, bandits and armed herdsmen have forced us to shut down more than 1,000 schools in the North and more than 10 mil­lion children are compelled to drop out of school in the North because “Western educa­tion is evil”. And our leaders seem to agree with them as the schools remain shut and the children at home. Since the past fifty-five years, we have been flirting with a dangerous­ly clever and seductive master called military rule. They misruled us in uniform and they are misruling us in ‘agbada’. And for the same length of time, we have been toying with ideas which have proven a failure in most of those countries where they have been tried.

It seems to me that we are in this terrible mess for several reasons. The first is the nat­ural evolution of human civilization. Lord Byron, in tracing the rise and fall of great nations, says that, “people go from freedom to glory, from glory to wealth, from wealth to vice, from vice to corruption, and from cor­ruption to barbarism”. The second reason is temptation. We are being tempted as we have never been tempted before- tempted to trust even those who bear arms. Indeed, it is not an easy thing being a free Nigerian when all around us, the misguided and the misin­formed tell us the government owes us all these things which up until now we have been providing for ourselves. There is yet a third reason why we are losing our freedom. Most of us accepted our present lopsided union, not because of our weaknesses, but rather because of one of our finest virtues – human compassion.

Through our misguided love for unity, we believe that the cramming together of more than 250 ethnic nationalities despite obvious and staggering differences in language, reli­gion and culture, would solve our problems as a people. By passing the buck and surren­dering our personal responsibilities into the hands of murderers and looters, we absolve our guilty consciences as a nation and as in­dividuals. And, finally, we have begun our journey to perdition for yet another reason. It is the scarcity of the courage to take chal­lenges. For too long, too many of us have been too willing to let someone else call the shots. We have been too busy with things which, in the end, don’t count for much, and in our mad­ness for materialism, we have forgotten how to govern. We have been letting “Ibrahim” to do it, and “Ibrahim” has been messing it up.

For one shining, glorious moment of histo­ry, we had the key and the open door, and the way was there before us. Men threw off the yoke of centuries and thrust forward along that way with such hope and such brilliance that for a little while we were the light and the inspiration of black Africa. Now, the key has been thrown carelessly away – the door is clos­ing – we are losing the way. Nigerians have in­herited the greatest nation in the black world, but we are finding out it’s not easy being a free Nigerian. In spite of our enormous human and natural resources, Nigeria is, ironically, not only the most fantastically corrupt but also the most barbaric country on the face of the earth. And we have suddenly taken over from India as the poverty headquarters of the world just as Buhari came to power.

Every passing day, Nigerians kill them­selves with alarming impunity. Abdulsallami Abubakar, a retired General of the Nigerian Army and former head of state has said that more than 6 million illegal arms are circu­lating all over Nigeria. And instead of dis­arming the armed herdsmen, bandits and Boko Haram, our government is set to disarm the poor of their machetes, kitchen knives and hoes with which they go to farm so that the herdsmen and bandits would kill all of them. Now, there is famine in the country as farmers can no longer go to farm. Ours is the only country on the face of the earth where its leaders call terrorists “bandits” and have refused to expose sponsors of terrorism in the land. While terrorists are being pro­tected, innocent and defenseless Nigerians are dying like ants. Yet, our rulers would tell us that they cannot declare kidnappers and killers of innocent Nigerians terrorists be­cause they are following due process. What a stupid excuse!

Nigeria remains the only country in the world in which refined ideas are jettisoned but crude prebendal manipulations are pre­ferred. There is nowhere in the world that open grazing is preferred to ranching in an­imal husbandry but in Nigeria. As we gnash our teeth in hunger and desperation, we must constantly remind ourselves, and one anoth­er, that our freedom is threatened by those who promised us security instead of opportu­nities; and that no country has survived civil war twice. But we can pass on the heritage of personal freedom to our children with the three golden keys of leadership: personal involvement in public affairs, humility and honesty to self and the national ideal, and a recrudescence of the home and the house of God. We must reject tribalism, bigotry, fanat­icism and I-know-it-all bravura. This we can do if only a lot of us will care enough to do enough. The choice is ours.

*Amor, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja