The forty-year groping in the wilderness of the Jews, whether as a parable, a metaphor, article of faith or historical reality comes to mind as we adumbrate on sixty years of political independence of the Nigerian State. Without doubt, at 60 Nigeria is already an old man (woman?), both from the spiritual and chronological perspectives. However, in terms of commensurate maturity to its chronological age, we can only say that it is a different kettle of fish. At sixty years of age, certain fundamentals of growth and stability ought to have been established. A sixty-year old man is set, ought to be set in his ways, settled in world view, preparing for life on the other side! Yet, it takes a man who had made some plans for the rainy day to confidently assert that his focus is now on heavenly subjects! How did our notion and practice of building Nigeria fall into the pattern of groping, stumbling and perambulating through dark and bright channels, always on the precipice, standing on one foot, blustering, boasting and standing where we did not really build a solid platform for ourselves? Nigeria as currently portrayed could only have been created by Franz Kafka like in The Trial, essentially in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s absurd theatre as captured in Waiting for Godot and Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead!
For, building a nation was not adopted as a serious project ab initio especially because there were doubts about the need for and the nature of the union. Strange bedfellows came together and hoped that with time a brotherhood would be forged through hard work and conscientiousness. ‘Though tribe and tongue may differ’, we sang in our first national anthem, ‘in brotherhood we stand! Yet, we did not pull up our sleeves to work on the brotherhood. Barely six years after independence, we fought a civil war that cost us three million lives! Fifty years after that war, there is a resurgence of the Biafran spirit in the form of the now proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)!
There was thus something tentative about the relationships of disparate and far flung ethnic nationalities which were yoked together in a political experiment created by British economic predators in 1914. It was poignant that one of the earliest nationalist leaders aptly referred to Nigeria as ‘a mere geographical expression! The portents of that statement still haunt us a people some four odd decades after.
The biblical narratives of the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land laid the blame of the forty-year rigmarole squarely on false reports of spies and the failure of leadership coupled with the faithlessness and foolishness of the followers. A journey of forty days was now prolonged into a forty-year odyssey, producing in its wake, a profound view of God-man relationship and how fickle man could be even if all resources were at his disposal. Golda Meir one-time Israeli PM had mused that if Moses had turned the other way, the Jews would have had the oil and the Arabs the desert! I am not sure how this fitted into God’s plan of sending the enslaved Jews into a land that flowed with milk and honey!
Well, followership, leadership and agents of the State have become a recurring decimal when interrogating the rise and fall of empires and nations. Chinua Achebe did not mince words when he blamed the Nigerian tragedy on leadership in his seminal work The Trouble with Nigeria. He had also interrogated Nigeria and produced There was a Country to portray what life was before our descent in a freefall into serendipity and madness. In a very cynical manner Ghanaian novelist had summed up the situation in his country by asserting that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a picture frame that could sit very well on the Nigerian architecture! The final clincher is from the good book, the greatest book of all time, through the prophet Isaiah in the Holy Bible, which asserts in very clear terms that ‘the leaders of these people cause them to err and those that are led of them are destroyed!
The twin issues of religion and ethnicity have become an albatross, manipulated by politicians to serve their nefarious purposes. Religion in isolation, devoid of political machinations, is not a problem. Ethnicity devoid of mischievous politics is not a problem. These become problems when we use them to manipulate gullible people. To be sure, when the political gladiators sit at table to loot the nation’s patrimony, there is no exclusion or inclusion on account of religion. Followers, rather proclaimers of the two main religions have not become good or bad because of their professed faiths. Rather, they are what they are despite their faiths. Until the rapacious entry of bloodthirsty elements from the Sahel into the Nigerian geographical space recently, lowly, and middleclass citizens lived peacefully, sharing, trading, and cohabiting.
In moments of philosophical clarity, I ask myself, inquire of friends and associates what area of national aspiration we can claim a sixty percent score of success. It is like searching for a pin in a haystack. All institutions, sacred and profane, have been patently soiled. As an incurable optimist and a believer in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, a believer in the predominance of good over evil even in this evil world, the only positive has been the human spirit as exemplified by individual acts of redemption, often carried outside public glare, not noticed by the high and mighty, often for altruistic purposes. What baffles us is our inability to translate that private good into the coffers of the common good. There seems to be a barrier created by whoever and whatever that makes the common good a thing of other climes. Is it because we do not accept the terms of the union, that the union is unnecessary, irrelevant, and unjust, that it does not deserve recognition through acts of collective positive affirmation? Is that a pointer to the spectre of a dissolution of the contraption from 1914?
If we have spent sixty years in the wilderness, it is time we got to the promised land. The Jewish odyssey did not have all the gadgets and technology that we currently possess yet they made it in forty years, albeit with divine guidance. Certainly, we cannot declaim the presence of the divine in our collective affairs. The only challenge is how well and deeply have we listened to the voice of divinity. It is not because of a lack of prophets or visionaries that we have beat around the bush. It is because we have shut our ears and eyes to the admonitions of the wise ones.
Of great concern is how relegated to the background the young people of this country are from the centre scheme of things, from the reins of power. Our demographics are in favour of the youth by 70% according to some statistics yet there is no programme of action designed to prepare them for leadership of a country whose future is theirs. Too many of them have resorted to dubious means to attain wealth and influence. The models before them are not exemplars of moral rectitude. This is a sure way of killing the future of the country.
Education, health infrastructure, road network (transportation) and power generation and supply have become national nightmares, casualties of failure of leadership. We need a new approach to leadership based on accountability. The executive system of government which we borrowed from America has failed us because leaders can hide behind aides. We need to return to parliamentary democracy in a truly federal system that compels elected officials to give account of their activities during question time in parliament and which makes each region develop its infrastructure with some degree of seriousness. The current system hardly encourages competition because all stakeholders wait for handouts at the end of the month. Besides, the perceived concern that one small ethnic group has egregious plans to impose a hegemonic control over the rest of the polity is fatally dangerous. It promotes the spirit of going for broke, having been ushed to the wall. Nelson Mandela once wrote: ‘we must therefore act together as a united people, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let there be work, bread, water, and salt for all. Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another’. There is hegemonic oppression being installed in Nigeria today! It must be resisted.
Nigeria can be one, Nigeria can bring itself out of the wilderness only if and after there is justice and fairness in allocation of the federal resources. The current agitation for self determination should be given deep attention. Our elders say that ‘a river that overflows its banks before our eyes does not, should not drown us! Happy Independence!