Nigerians:Docile Or Resilient?

By Emma Jimo

Nigeria is possibly the country with the greatest appellations and accolades in the world. Nigeria is called the giant of Africa, the world’s most populous Black nation, the nation with the highest number of malaria victims , etc. What about Nigerians? Some people have their own way of describing certain other persons. One of the most recent ones I have heard is the expression that ‘Nigerians are docile’!

(pix: abusidiqu)

 I think this is highly debatable, not to say annoyingly nauseating. An expression of this magnitude of indictment has its root in the perception that Nigerians remain calm often in the face of clear case of misrule  or uncomfortable policy or some other unprintable happenings. Against this backdrop, it pays to peep into semantics and epistemology. Semantically, to be docile is to be ‘quiet, not aggressive and easily controlled’. This is certainly helpful to arrive at my own viewpoint that Nigerians are resilient father than docile.

A writer Thomas Carlyle defines  genius as the infinite capacity for taking pains; that is, limitless ability for perseverance and capacity for endurance. I think seriously that tolerance, seemingly limitless capacity of Nigerians to endure pains and yet remaining hopeful against all clear signs of lack of hope in sight, all things being (un)equal are marks of ingenuity rather than docility. Since it is the relationship between the governed and the government that generated the assertion about docility, a politics – based example should not be out of place or off-tune here.

Since Nigerian political independence in 1960, governance or rulership has oscillated between military and civil rules sharing almost equal number of years until 1999 when a 16–year-at-a-stretch civil rule began. In Nigeria’s political history, no government, whether loved or hated, military or civil, imposed or voted legitimately has spent more than nine  years,  being also the maximum spent by the General Yakubu Gowon-led administration, by far the most economically comfortable, though arguably.

At least, the civil servants who got Udoji award would think about economic buoyancy even if academics would consider the same event as an (un)economically misdirected prodigality. Anyone who has got his ears close to the political realm should have heard, seen or read how in spite of nationally-acclaimed dribbling skills of a military ruler was fought to a stands till by a combined civil forces ofthe then very virile Nigerian Labour Congress and the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) with patriotic collaboration of the press, including the defunct clandestine and nocturnal Kudirat Radio, among others.