Events so far in the governance of Nigeria between 2015 and 2020 have shown that the much-advertised APC ‘CHANGE 2015’ with the ‘SAI BABA’ slogan have only succeeded to make Nigeria look like a country in suspended animation.
The above observation and remark may even be a generous one because not only has the country gone down dangerously and is almost at the titters in socio-political harmony amongst her diverse ethnic nationalities, all the major economic indices that may signify real growth in a developing economy have been flattened.
This is pellucid enough as Nigerians have noticed that the former arch protagonists of the government including some eminent northern traditional rulers are lost both in bewilderment and confusion.
In spite of the huge resources wasted so far in Nigeria during these years (tracked down budgetary resources, and not the unknown, unknowable, and unaccounted-for extra-budgetary resources that may have gone down the drains in a long and expansive conduit of corruption), the period between 2015 and 2020 in Nigeria may go down in the history of Nigeria as an aberration, a temporal period of diversion from the normal course of national history.
This assessment, again, may be on the generous side because at worst, the period between 2015 and 2020 (if the government sits up to its responsibilities between 2021 and 2023 – a possibility that is as certain as seeing through a pig’s eye) may end up as a period that never existed in the history of Nigeria.
With an unending appetite for external borrowing which has resulted in a sprawling external debt burden amounting to several trillions of naira in an economy battered by incoherent fiscal and monetary policies of a nepotic government known to be good at fixing square pegs in round holes, the government seem to have lost its bearing in the highly dynamic and sophisticated task of managing a huge, diversified and developing economy as Nigeria presents.
But the question is: did this government, from the onset, actually grapple with the tasks it received from its predecessor?
The answer is ‘No’. Recall that the political party which formed the present government seemed to have been an adept in opposition and would have been more comfortable in that position, spent more than 180 days in limbo before appointing its key officers after the inauguration of the government, obviously as a result of the shock it received when it dawned on it that the baton of power was about being handed over to it.
That first void created in national governance which had never happened in Nigeria before was a bad omen, and it signified that the present government was not prepared for the job it forcibly took.
It most probably did not believe that all the lies of ‘CHANGE 2015’ will be swallowed line, hook and sinker by the untutored, naïve and gullible Nigerian electorate.
Speaking recently at a webinar, an online conference hosted by ‘NZUKO UMUNNA’ (an Igbo brainstorming group) which was held in partnership with Ovation International and chaired by a prominent Nigerian economist, Prof. Pat Utomi, some participants raised the alarm of an impending civil was as a result of the failure in governance of Nigeria by the APC government.
Recognizing the present managers of Nigeria as unfit for the job of administering a huge developing economy such as Nigeria is, the Vice-Presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2019 general elections and a former governor of Anambra state, Mr. Peter Obi, during his address in that conference berated the ineptitude of the APC government and its lack of capacity to address the multiple socio-political and economic problems of Nigeria.
Comparing the traditional driving skills of a ‘molue’ (the phased-out rickety buses that plied Lagos city roads) driver with the skills of a digital driver in a modern and leading driving and motoring competition called ‘Formular I’, and equating then with the present government and Nigeria, respectively: Mr. Peter Obi said, and I quote, “You don’t go to a ‘Formular I’ competition with a ‘molue’ driver.”
In obvious admission of the void in national leadership which the APC government hoisted on Nigerians for six years, sixteen APC governors went to confer with the former President, Goodluck Jonathan, asking him to come and take back the leadership of Nigeria from where the APC truncated it.
I think the right thing those governors would have done was to apologize publicly on behalf of themselves and the APC, to both former President Jonathan and Nigerians for cutting short an administration that had started laying the foundation for a modern Nigeria where poverty and penury will not have a place to sit.
For example, I knew so many young men and women in Wuse and other markets in Abuja who were using soft loans from Fortis, Abbey, Lapo, etc, microfinance banks, turning their investments over enough to pay back the loans as the loans fell due, maintain life, and register marginal growth in their businesses.
To keep the increasing businesses of these grassroot investors through whom they mopped up the capital in the markets and along the streets, these banks employed many fresh graduates, trained them and sent them to the markets and streets to canvas for business.
Those small holder investors are nowhere to be found now. I know some of them who have gone to their villages. Others are still hanging around, obviously engaged in criminal activities because ‘man must wack’.
The microfinance banks have long laid off the young and fresh graduates employed by them for lack of business and these laid-off young graduates must have been thrown back to join the constantly-expanding and never-ending queue of the dormant Nigerian labor market.
In their campaign to take over the government of the country from the PDP, the APC administrators accused the officials of the government of President Goodluck Jonathan of corruption. Admitted, though, that there was massive corruption during that administration, the level of conceited, cult-like and unascertainable corruption going on in the present administration, joined with the impunity with which it is executed, has no part two. It is all inclusive.
Some people have asked me several times if I have not found any good thing about this government and my answer has always been an emphatic ‘No’.
Let me explain my reasons for the ‘No’ answer:
In the first place, government is about people. When whatever government believes it is doing does not have any positive effect on the people the government is tasked to cater for, then that government is deemed to have failed.
The Nobel Laurate, Prof, Wole Soyinka calls this condition ‘motion without movement’.
This government has been engaged for six solid years in ‘motion without movement’. If it ever moved, it moved in the reversed direction – backwards! This government moved backwards because more Nigerians experience poverty today more than ever before. The backwards movement of this government is why more Nigerians have lost their lives in an unsecured Nigeria more than the total lives lost during the combined tenors of all the previous governments in Nigeria since Independence, excepting during the internecine civil war of July 6th 1967 to January 15th 1970.
This is why the foreign dept burden of Nigeria has peaked to an all-time high amidst a dubious clean sweep of the external reserve. This is why the country is presently divided among tribal and religious lines. This is why nepotism and impunity have been elevated to a government official policy in Nigeria. This is why.… This is why…. ad infinitum! Indeed, for six years, Nigeria has existed in a condition that may be linked to a suspended animation.
I have gotten all the figures of the so-called economic growth dubiously churned out by government agencies and parastatals but it is needless to discuss them here because they do not put food on anybody’s table.
They are useless figures not worth the value of the pen with which they were written.
If those figures reeled out by government through its agencies and parastatals are useful in any way, they are useful only in confusing Nigerians the more and taking their attention away from a collapsing economy.
More than ever before, tribal and religious sentiments are being whipped up in Nigeria, destroying all the gains of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidency in knitting the country together.
Criticisms against bad governance today in Nigeria elicit condemnation by those who believe that either their tribe or religion has been disparaged. This reminds me of the Christmas homily of the Archbishop of the Sokoto Catholic Church Diocese, Bishop Mathew Hasan Kukah.
Talking about the Christmas homily of Bishop Hassan Kukah, I must not fail to mention the mischievous, misinterpreted, ill-interpreted version of that homily (the true version of Bishop Kukah’s homily went viral, hence available to most Nigerians who patronize the worldwide web) by the Secretary of the Jama’atul Nasril Islam (JNI), Dr. Khalid Aliyu that the patriotic message of Bishop Kukah is anti-Islam and anti-Muslim.
A Professor who oversees another Islamic group, Maishanu, was of the same view with Dr. Khalid.
Both Dr. Khalid and Prof. Maishanu made statements that could be preliminary to hoisting the Islamic Fatwa – a summary order calling for the execution of those deemed to have desecrated Islam or its Holy Prophet (S.A.W) on Bishop Kukah. They also threatened Nigeria with a religious war.
Well, my comment is that their outbursts and vituperations were undeserving of ‘egg heads’ as them because they are supposed to show the light to the people they lead, who do not have the opportunity and benefit of their academic knowledge and exposure.
As for a religious war, I have always said that violent people should stop threatening peaceful Nigerians with a religious war because a war is a two-sided coin which when tossed, can come down on either of the two sides, including a 50/50 possibility where the aggressor may turn out to be the vanquished. People should be careful the way they talk in an already tensed-up Nigeria.
Mr. Reno Omokri, a former Presidential aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan wrote in his Instagram account and I concur with him that “Bishop Kukah said Buhari was taking the peaceful nature of Christians for granted and the highest Islamic body in Nigeria attacked him, with others threatening him….”
Mr. Omokri concluded, “….it did not occur to them that their violent threats actually vindicated Kukah’s words.”
Mr. Omokri’s opinion directly hits the bull’s eye. “There is nothing more to add”, says a former advertisement jingle of a Nigerian brewer of an alcoholic beverage. Mr. Omokri’s assessment of the response (s) to Bishop Kukah’s homily from the Muslim organizations is also food for thought for those of them who want to crucify Bishop Kukah for saying that Christians are more peaceful than those who attack them, a condition which, posteriori, has sustained the peace in Nigeria, preventing the country to be torn into shreds by a religious war.
In any case, why can’t Bishop Kukah or any other Nigerian, for that matter, criticize the President who is a public officer accountable to all Nigerians.
The truth, and not sycophancy in any form, is that there is nothing special about Mr. President as an individual like all of us, if not the office he holds in trust for all Nigerians, including Bishop Kukah.
If the President was in his house as a private person as any other Nigerian like myself are in our houses, nobody, including Bishop Kukah, and even myself who derive authority to write about him here because he is a public servant, will dare bother to ask after him, criticize or applaud him. We will have better personal issues to attend to.
Nigerians are interested in him simply because of the office he holds in trust for them, and for this reason too, in so far as such criticisms do not encumber the process of human socialization as well as approach the legal boundary of libel, Nigerians deserve the right to ask questions about what he does with the trust reposed on him, by either applauding him if he does well or criticize him when he fails to do well.
I still agree, a fortiori, with Bishop Kukah, that were the current president not to be a northern Muslim, he would have long been swept away from the office by a military coup if he fails to resign, both for lack of capacity, ineptitude, and incompetence.
But for space, I would have gone down the history lane to give proof as to when, and how what Bishop Kukah said happened in Nigeria. Because facts are available and enormous, I can make a voluminous book out of the details of such incidents in Nigeria where government more efficient than the present government were swept away from office for inefficiency.
The question is: why is the northern elites, including the elitist Muslim groups shielding the President from his obvious failure? Those of us who have lived with the Nigerian masses all our lives from birth to now and made friends over several decades with the masses of northern Nigeria know that the northern elites and these elitist Muslim groups do not have the support of their people in the opinions such elitist groups represent. What these elitist groups do is to whip up religious and tribal sentiments and wrongly move the illiterate ones to fight.
This development is really bad for Nigeria and Nigerians must wake up to face the reality that, according to Aliyu Gwarzo, another northern irredentist, Nigerians are slaves in their own country!
Shortly before Bishop Kukah’s homily the Chief of Army Staff raised a coup alarm saying that the government and the military hierarchy were aware that some military officers were being approached to stage a coup. It will be strange for anybody to stage a coup now in Nigeria, because Nigeria has gone beyond that primitive stage.
Be that as it may, Nigerians understood the Chief of Army Staff alarm as a game of wits and decoded same as a case of a person crying wolve where none existed, because a thief who continues to cherish operating in unanimity, under cover, does not openly steal to reveal his identity as a thief when something the safety of which is considered both precarious and uncertain is kept in the custody of the thief.
What is mean to say is that even if anybody wanted to stage a coup in Nigeria today, that coup will fail because it has not come from the ‘right’ quarter.
The second message of that alarm of a military coup in Nigeria is that the fear of a military coup in Nigeria and the need to check it will guarantee the continued stay in office of Service Chiefs whose tenors had long expired.
The National President of Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (A.Y.C.F), Yerima Shettima who had decreed that the Eastern Security Network (ESN) be disbanded, given a seven day ultimatum to unleash the combined terror of all the insurgency groups in the north to destroy Igbo and Yoruba lands if his ultimatum was not heeded, (without remembering that his herdsman brothers have surrounded Nigeria waiting to receive the order to strike), was quoted to have asked the Federal Government to arrest Bishop Hasan Kukah because of the Bishop’s Christmas homily.
My opinion in that call by the young man and the effrontery exhibited by him is that if Nigeria is not a jungle where people like him can stampede and trample on the less privileged and less financially-endowed citizens without being held responsible for their actions, that young man should have been cooling down in the inner rooms of the intelligence and security agencies for publicly declaring that he has the networks of all the terrorist groups operating in Nigeria at his disposal.
If the government of the day knows its onions and can actually prove that it is indeed in control of the security situation in Nigeria, arresting and questioning that young man would have been a veritable means of breaking the backbone of terror in Nigeria. But that can not happen in the present Nigeria because he is a sacred cow and the nepotic inclination of this government shields him from arrest and interrogation.
I expected younger generation Nigerians – his age mates – to respond and challenge the audacity of this young man publicly, but heard nothing. I was surprised.
The younger generation Nigerians should spare us, the elderly ones, the humiliation of addressing some of these lads who were taught by their arrogant fathers that other Nigerians are slaves to them.
The older generations have lived their lives in an envied Nigeria when we were treated as Princes and Princesses outside Nigeria with our ‘green’ international passport; when I once exchanged N2,000 (Two thousand naira); for $3040 (Three thousand and forty dollars); travelled from Enugu in Nigeria to Frankfurt Main in Germany, Brussels in Belgium, Kowloon in Hongkong, and Taipei in Taiwan, on Lufthansa German Airline with a return-ticket of N1,760 (One thousand seven hundred and sixty naira); bought a volkswagen beetle car for N2,600; etc.
We have actually lived our lives and enjoyed it. Younger generation Nigerians should liberate themselves from usurpers, or their future will be wasted. I always say that nobody allows a restoration of your stolen freedom on a platter of gold. You must fight to restore it.
A Bini man and a brother to my wife who doubles as both a friend and a brother because we got very close having done many things together, William Omeregie, would say, and I quote, “mothing dey for eye, na only water’.
One thing I assure Shettima is that he and his friends who are engaged in the business of crime – those who he intends to mobilize and unleash on the Igbos and the Yorubas will be making a grand mistake to believe that these two highly-civilized, highly traveled and versatile Nigerian ethnic nationalities will be a walk-over for him and his friends. It will be suicidal for him and his friends to take such a risky venture.
Secondly, he should not underrate what eventually may come up to be the strength of the Igbos in any new aggression against them because that ethnic nationality has leant her lessons from the defeat of the civil war.
I do not know how old Mr. Shettima was during the civil war (if he was indeed born before the civil war) to understand the strong and massive resistance to their conquest which the Igbos singlehandedly presented in spite of the great odds against them.
Furthermore, Igbos of 1967 are not Igbos of 2021. That ethnic nationality is highly dynamic. It he wants to understand what I am saying let him visit all the Igbo cities destroyed during the war and compare the development in those cities with those of the cities domiciled in the region from where he comes, which saw no war.
A lot has changed and Igbos are ready to explore and maximize all the new advantages they have learned and strengthen them with their civil war experience to rescue their ethnic nationality from possible extinction which is the traditional threat they have always faced in Nigeria as a result of hatred from some of her neighbors – people like Yerima Shettima – because of the natural spirit of enterprise endowed on the Igbos.
Drum beat of war has just started with the recent incident in Igangan, Oyo state, where some Fulani herdsmen suspected to be the masterminds of the increasing wave of kidnapping in Oyo state and the adjoining states were sacked from their forest hideouts by an irate mob of disenchanted youths.
The do-nothing, sleeping government of Federal Republic of Nigeria should be warned that a situation which may eventually degenerate into intra-ethnic skirmishes across Nigerian cities has just began.
Before this incident, Nigerians of other ethnic nationalities has been crying and complaining of the menace of the Fulani herdsmen across the country, and the President, a Fulani by tribe, who is the Grand Patron of Miyetti Allah, a Fulani cultural group under whose auspices and control the herdsmen operate, has given deaf ears to the complaints.
Younger generation Nigerians should take all legal options available to them to recover their freedom from usurpers.
Unless some members of our generation lack the wisdom to show gratitude to God, I would say that in the light of what is happening today, there is actually nothing to lose and nothing more to enjoy in a country where the dearth of love, trust, sincerity honesty and all the pristine, altruistic virtues which hitherto defined human relationships have taken away the joy of living in the country.
Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican-born reggae maestro whose musical hits were popular in the seventies, in his music album titled, ‘The harder they come, the harder they fall’, sang, “I would rather be a freeman in my grave than live as a puppet or a slave”.
Glorified slaves, like most Nigerians are, are worse than honored and dead men who died seeking their freedom, because, one, everybody can not die at the same time, and two, the dead will forever be remembered by the living for dying seeking their freedom. But most importantly, people don’t always die when they seek their freedom the legal ways, which, by the way, remain my minimum recommendation for freedom for Nigerians.
ABUCHI OBIORA
abuchiobiora@gmail.com
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