Buhari, Call Off Customs’ Siege On Igbo Traders

By Okey Ndibe

A few days ago, a friend sent me a video of a choir made up of members of Nigeria’s security agencies singing “Feliz Navidad,” a popular Christmas song. The rendition was entirely inspiring, a thrilling combination of rousing singing, dancing and festive atmosphere. I was moved by the sheer cheeriness of the service singers, infected by their sunniness of spirit. The high professional quality of the performers was complemented by the outstanding videography.

*Buhari

In between the Christmas lyrics, members of Nigeria’s respective service arms took turns pitching messages. A female officer informed us that the police were our friends, that its officers serve and protect with integrity, and that they make Nigeria secure. Another officer, also female, touted the Nigerian Prisons Service as reformers, keeping society crime-free. A member of the Civil Defense Corps spoke about defending the defenseless.

It was, quite simply, a soaring performance, a tour de force, indeed the best rendition of “Feliz Navidad” I have ever seen or heard—and I have listened to quite a few. I couldn’t help replaying the video several times. Each time, I found myself riveted, beguiled, awe-struck, a dupe for the wholly upbeat service messages organically interjected into one of Christmas’s most captivating anthems.

Again and again, I surrendered myself to be transported by the winsome performance. Yet, I emerged from each session with an afterglow of sadness, brought rudely down to earth by the shattering awareness that there was little concordance between the reality of life in Nigeria and the mesmerizing vista projected by the video. The video vended a beatific vision to me; yet I knew that the reality of life in Nigeria was, for the most part and for the majority of Nigerians, awful, if not hellish. The video was selling me a dummy, attempting to mask the sordidness of everyday life in my country, its enchanting performance no more than an effort to narcotize its audience, to rig reality.

That dominant sense of a discrepancy between performance and reality was reinforced for me in two recent conversations. In one, a writer friend who is an academic in Canada recounted his near-brush with death. Some assailants had cornered this guy and shot him on the leg. Terribly wounded, bleeding, he had limped away from his car to seek help. In some ways, his nightmare worsened once he found the police.

First, the police had no ambulance to drive him to a hospital. They brought him back to his car, which the armed gangsters had abandoned because it was demobilized, and got him to reactivate it. Then, instead of rushing him to the hospital, they took him to their station because Nigeria has this weird practice that hospitals should not treat anybody with a gunshot wound in the absence of a police report. Meanwhile, as the police busied themselves with observing the bizarre bureaucratic protocols of generating a report, the bleeding victim slipped in and out of consciousness, gripped by a sense of his imminent death.

No, he didn’t die in the end, in part because one of the police officers finally recognized him as a senior editor at a major newspaper. Once his quasi-privileged status was established, he was able to muster just enough strength to convince the officers – against what they said was policy – to take him to a private hospital where a relative of his was a medical chief. The drive there was harrowing, marked by a traffic gridlock that slowed the car, leaving the hapless editor bleeding profusely, racked by hideous pain.