By Sunny Awhefeada
These are mad and dangerous times for Nigeria and I must concede that we never saw this coming. Not even the famed prophets envisioned the calamities now buffeting us as a people. Nobody foresaw or warned us. Those among us who lay claims to clairvoyance are largely charlatans who think about causes and effects of actions and offer surmises which they call predictions.
That is why they always turn around to tell us they were misquoted, quoted out of context or point at what they claimed they told us, but they never did. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times tells of a time of acute social insecurity and how the people were impoverished and pulverized. Like other narratives by Dickens, the novel mirrors the grim, dark and dreary side of life in a manner considered to be exaggerated.
Yet, what Nigerians are going through at the moment far exceeds
the intensity of human suffering evoked in Dickens’ novels. Just when one
thinks that our experience of oddities and inanities has peaked and that
nothing more bizarre could confront us, something more odd, scary and searing
pops up to say “oh, you guys haven’t seen anything”.
Our ordeal is the product of choice, a choice that arose from
poor judgment. Blinded by ignorance, beguiled by deceit, lured by promises, we
allowed ourselves to be railroaded into a rollercoaster that led to nowhere.
Our ship of state turned and turned and got marooned. We made that ruinous
choice seven and a half seasons ago.
It was not that the alternative to what we chose was a better
deal, but when two things are presented one is often better at the end of the
day. Looking back, it has dawned on us that what we considered the better
alternative was the worse of bad. So, we went for a choice that has turned us
into the living-dead. Our country has become an existential setting, where life
and communication are devalued, where hopelessness, disorder, uncertainty and
fret have become recurring indices.
Nigeria has become like T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” because of the choice we made a little over seven
seasons ago. The frightening reality of our situation is that it is not
fiction, but it appears stranger than fiction and the geniuses of Dickens and
Eliot couldn’t have conjured it in prose or verse. Nigeria has become an
ultra-absurd work in the hands of an ultra-absurdist author!
All over Nigeria are chaos and bedlam, anarchy and confusion,
gloom and doom. Nobody is truly happy because we are all trapped in a macabre
existential crisis and the answer to the question “for whom all is well?” is a
loud NONE! Some days ago a news item, in sequence, trended in print, video and
picture. It was the story of a soldier that was beaten up by students of the
University of Benin.
The video which was the first in the series showed him being
kicked and knocked down. He struggled to extricate himself and fled the scene.
What followed was a picture of the soldier lying face down with a student
putting his foot on the soldier’s back. That was a national sacrilege in view
of the roles played by soldiers and the sacrifices they make in securing the
territorial integrity of the country.
Having said that the act correlates sacrilege, the question that
should be asked is how and why did it happen? The ongoing fuel and naira crises
have precipitated a high level of anger and disillusionment which in turn
yielded a monstrous hybrid of defiance. The story went that a soldier in
uniform came to an ATM located within the University to withdraw money and
instead of joining the queue decided to shunt and he was challenged by the
students. Instead of pleading, he played macho and pounced on a female student.
The act angered the students and they also pounced on him and beat him black
and blue.
Nightfall came and some “unknown soldiers” came on a revenge
mission wearing hood even under the cover of darkness. They inflicted injuries
on everybody in sight and destroyed properties and scaled the campus fence and
returned from whence they came. The soldiers’ act amounted to a gross
professional misconduct national embarrassment and it has been a recurring
act.
Uniformed men feel a sense of being “untouchable” simply because
they carry weapons of violence and the system does not inflict the full weight
of the law on them in Nigeria. Olusegun Obasanjo in My Command did narrate how
unruly soldiers were in the 1960s and how they dealt brashly with civilians. He
had to enact tough measures to make sure the civilian-military relationship was
cordial. Military highhandedness persists till this day. Our uniformed
personnel enjoy self-conferred immunity and they get away with too many wrongs.
However, they must take into cognizance that society will not
always remain the same and that a new generation that is anything but pliant is
emerging and that a soldier’s ass can be kicked if he misbehaves. The emerging
generation is not yet definitive in character, but in full bloom, it will
holler and fight back. So, soldiers must look inwards, put mechanism in place
especially the training and discipline of their officers and men. They must
desist from provoking the people.
The incident in UNIBEN rekindled memories of the 1990s and how
students of that institution battled the ogre of military dictatorship in
admirable and courageous manner. The 1990s were the years of brutal military
dictatorship and Nigerian students, unlike now, rose in defence of nation. At
the University of Benin, the students were motivated and inspired by a sense of
history and a compelling call to duty for fatherland.
They joined forces with the suffering masses and embarked on
civil disobedience to force the hands of unyielding military dictators. There
were multiple protests annually and it always involved clashes with soldiers
and the mobile police. Some of the protests ended up being bloody and tragic,
but UNIBEN students were egged on by such thoughts like “no army in the world
can stop an idea whose time has come”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”
and a student union leader once thrilled his audience saying “Nigerian soldiers
were ambushing and gallant UNIBEN students were advancing”.
That was a generation of Nigerian students that epitomized
derring-do. When the University was to confer an honorary doctorate on Augustus
Aikhomu who was then Nigeria’s number two citizen, the students opposed it and
when it was the time fixed formally for the ceremony they seized the venue, got
a goat on whom they wore an academic gown, conferred the honorary doctorate on
it and named it Aikhomumu. The University quietly delayed the ceremony till
afternoon and repeated the rite for Aikhomu.
A lot is going on in Nigeria that we have become numb and we no
longer care. A policeman shot and killed a woman in Lagos on Christmas day of
all days. Another policeman opened fire on a medical doctor in Delta State
barely a month after the Lagos tragedy. Gunmen shot and killed a sitting judge
in Imo State. Despite the ENDSARS crisis of 2020, our policemen have gone back
to their old murderous ways. They are all over town extorting the youngsters at
gun point. It is happening daily and nobody seems to be showing concern.
University teachers went on strike and our universities were
closed for ten months and government did nothing. The people are angry and they
shouldn’t be pushed beyond what they can bear. The anger in the land is
playing out in a number of bizarre ways. The men and women who stripped
themselves naked in banking halls did so to show their anger and
disillusionment.
Nothing could be more shameful than what they did, but who
cares? They are ready to take anything, even death. And there are many
Nigerians like that. People are fighting and breaking their heads in banking
halls and in petrol stations.
The sad thing is that government appears powerless in all of
these. Government would always come out to deny the situation, then grudgingly
accept that something was wrong and then promise to fix it. That would be the
end of it. Right now, there is no cash, there is also no fuel. The nation is
experiencing excruciating hurt.
People now use naira to buy naira. The citizens are daily
alienated and their place in the scheme of things has been badly eroded. As we
live under this grueling condition, we are still smiling and laughing with the
hope that “e go better”. We will
survive because we survived perilous times in the past. These mad and dangerous
times too shall pass away.
*Awhefeada, a professor of English, is a
commentator on public issues
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