Nigeria: The Lost Hope!

 By Obi Nwakanma

In the last three weeks, I have suffered from a very devastating writer’s block. I could not move my mind. It felt stiff and unyielding – unwilling to grasp, or grapple with any kind of ideas, relating particularly to Nigeria. I have felt completely drained; as though there was no more gas left in my tank. I have felt like there is nothing left to be said about Nigeria.

We have imagined the impossible. We have become the impossible. I just felt cynical. In these last few months, I have also thought long and hard about fully and completely giving up my Nigerian citizenship. I mean, what is left of this country, really? What is Nigeria to me? I have asked these questions, rolled it in my mind; weighed it. And I very nearly made the move of officially renouncing any more affiliations with Nigeria, and thereafter, stay quiet, and stop worrying about this very tragic and demonic country.

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like a coward’s option. I had once more to go and re-read the poem, “I am Bound to this Land by Blood,” by the poet and artist, Olu Oguibe. It is a poem about tough and ineffable love. But truth be told, I’m not feeling much love for Nigeria these days. I feel betrayed and exhausted by her failures. It is a hopeless, genuinely damaged nation. There are many who have concluded that Nigeria is damaged beyond repair.

But what is a nation? A nation is the largest cooperative society ever invented by the human mind. To build and maintain a nation requires cooperative citizenship, and the existence of certain guarantees, like law, on which social order is built. Man is at best, a primitive and autonomous actor. Human beings need the existence of law to contain and regulate their primal instincts, otherwise, social order will collapse; an arbitrary state will ensue, and the state will disappear under the weight of normlessness. 

Dear reader, measure Nigeria fully, and it will be very clear that the nation has collapsed. It exists now, only on paper. There is murder on the streets, kidnappings, crimes of the kind that are indescribable, and at some now distant point in this country, unimaginable. In many instances, these crimes are perpetrated by those licensed to enforce the law and establish order. The law courts are a joke. Judges of the court are a joke. The Nigerian constitution is a huge joke.

There is no public official that commands the respect and adulation of the Nigerian citizen. Nigerians think of politicians as huge jokes. The national political leadership is now viewed, not as a national leadership, but as factions in a criminal gang, fighting to take over the state, and loot her. Nigerians, more than ever, have come to understand that the nation that the Nigerian nationalists fought for, and dreamed about, has turned into a criminal enterprise. 

Many of us had predicted that Buhari will kill Nigeria. Tinubu will bury it. The truth lies in between those facts. Truth is, there is nothing left. Nigeria is in debt. She is not producing anything. She is living on borrowed time. There is anger in the land. There is so much hunger. People are dying like flies, and the Board of Health Statistics is no longer keeping counts. Nigerians are tired and are in a daze. Nigerians have been poor before. But I have never seen or felt this level of despair before. Folks are shitting themselves.

The desperation is driving normally decent people to acts they’d once have considered shameful. That is how dangerous it is. The economic index is dire. The ,man, who has been foisted on Nigeria, by a concert of despicable forces, Mr. Tinubu, campaigned on some mythical capacity to apply magic economic solutions that would straighten Nigeria, and turn it into some El-dorado. “Look!” he said, “look at what I did in Lagos!” But from the moment he swore the oath to become president of Nigeria in May, Tinubu has floundered desperately, and has rolled from pillar to post, and there is no sign that he knows what  he is actually doing. 

There is no magic. No brilliance. No bold strategic action. The “city boy” has become the Budha of Asokoro. All he has done is give appointments, and create an over-bloated federal cabinet, filled with his flunkeys, many of whom are paperweight. Never mind the hype. He is borrowing money and spending it like the proverbial drunken sailor.

The last we heard, he raised a supplementary budget, in which he asked for money for all kinds for ridiculous things: billions for the repair and re-furnishing of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Lodges; money for the office of the First Lady; money for a Presidential Yacht: A luxury yacht for the president, in these desperate times?

That is the nature of Mr. Tinubu’s priorities. That is the real meaning of “Emilokan.” Well, Nigerians knew what he did in Lagos, and that was why majority of Nigerians rejected him at the polls. Yes, Nigerians did not vote for Tinubu. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Cuckoos have said about this, and I shall return to this point. 

What is clear to most Nigerians is that the APC government under Muhammadu Buhari connived with the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and under the orders of that erstwhile administration, stole the presidency of Nigeria for Mr. Tinubu. It was the culmination of a long and serial list of acts of disrespect and disdain for Nigerians and the constitution of Nigeria. It was also a very private, self-interested act. Why? To conceal. Yes, indeed, Buhari aided the stealing of the presidential election as part of the “scratch my back – I scratch your back” compromise that was at the foundation of the coalition that created the mafia organization called the APC in 2015. 

It is about a grand cover-up for all the atrocities committed under Muhammadu Buhari for which he, his Attorney General, his National Security Adviser, and many others, should be prosecuted and sent to jail. It is also the reason why Tinubu is following exactly the Buhari policy and template, right down to his skewered appointments of his ethnic fellows to commanding positions that are unconstitutional and tantamount to cronyism and nepotism. But who cares? What does it matter?

This is the point at which writing about Nigeria, or hoping that the tides will turn for Nigeria, feels hopeless and meaningless, writing about hope; about possibilities. We write because there is something to imagine; something bigger than us, which constitutes a raison d’etre; a reason for being. What is Nigeria’s reason for being? The anti-colonial nationalists who fought for the liberation of Nigeria from colonialism thought of Nigeria as the giant of Africa; the great Black hope. That feeling – that idea of a transcendent nation held true till the 1980s, until it slowly began to thaw. 

Nigeria turned into a giant lump of shit under Buhari. It was already in deep trouble, even before Buhari. But I can testify to this: between 2007 and 2014, there was a new spring of hope in Nigeria. I saw Nigerians moving back to Nigeria from across the world. Something was going on. It was a period of renewed hope. I knew many who had packed their bags and returned to Nigeria – including young Nigerians born in Diaspora. For a very brief interlude, in the era of Yar’ Adua/Jonathan, a sense of prosperity and purpose was in the air. But suddenly, from 2015, Nigeria went into a deadly spin. 

A coalition threatening to foment violence if it was not allowed to form government, blackmailed a very weak-minded Goodluck Jonathan into conceding power, and from 2015, Nigeria went into death throe. By the end of Buhari’s administration, the in-gathering of Nigerians from across the Diaspora had turned into an exodus. Nigerians were fleeing from Nigeria. They now call it Japa. The election of February 2023 was a chance for Nigerians to retrieve their country.

They went to vote. In many parts of the country voters were threatened with violence; forced against their will to vote candidates other than their wishes; threatened; brutalized; traumatized; in many places party thugs of the government party were aided in destroying voting records by state agents; yet Nigerians persisted under the rain and the sun. They cast their votes. 

The result, when it was announced was not what they expected. They knew who they voted. It was not Bola Tinubu. INEC said to them, “Go to Court!” The parties went to court. They had evidence. They had the recordings. They had the electoral laws that supported the claims about iREV. The brazen theft of the Rivers and Benue presidential election was proved with copious evidence.

The distortions of the Lagos numbers were put to evidence. After what turned out to be a charade, the Nigerian courts, almost as though it was not listening to these copious evidence, dismissed the petitions. The worst was the Supreme Court which, in its declarations, contradicted itself by dismantling key moral and legal precepts at the foundations of Nigeria’s legal precedents. The jurisprudential implications of those rulings will haunt us for many years to come.

*Nwakanma is a US-based poet and professor