By Abuchi Obiora
Recently, a friend of mine who is a brilliant companion on intellectual matters found fault in my heightened interest in global matters and international politics especially in the war presently going on in Gaza Strip. He felt that I should get busier in discussing the many problems in Nigeria with a view to proffering solutions, especially as it pertains to mass hunger in the country.
Addressing my fear that the war in Gaza Strip may end probably as a ‘Catastrophe’, my friend said,…. “we should apply our minds and freewill to the ‘Catastrophe’ that is already Nigerian, the poverty chopping every homestead, multinationals fleeing, political rascals everywhere aiding and abetting corruption, bandits having free reign, kidnapping for ransom, resources being plundered, millions of out of school children….”
Alas I reckon that the list of the woes of Nigeria and Nigerians is endless and surprisingly the country still manages to be, even with One US Dollar having peaked at more than N1,500.
Let me admit that I understand the concern of my friend but I also understand that there is nothing more to write about Nigeria that has not been written before. Since 1991, that is, a clear 33years of my active writing career, I have found myself writing exactly the same thing on Nigeria yet nothing changed. Politicians in Nigeria have decided to keep deaf ears to everybody’s opinion, including the opinions of Public Affairs Analysts, Commentators and Public Opinion Molders.
There is nothing that is happening in Nigeria now that I didn’t foresee and comment on during the electioneering campaigns of 2023 and I suggested and pointed out the way Nigeria was supposed to go. If anybody is in doubt, they should read my works published in The Kaleidoscope Archives Opinion Column of The Global Upfront Newspaper during that period.
For this reason, I insist that for Nigeria, there is nothing more to say or write more so as the country called Nigeria expired on December 31st 2013, after 100 years of her existence as articulated in the terms and conditions of Union in the 1914 Lord Fredrick Lugard’s Amalgamation document. For the above reason, for Nigeria or the successors to her existence to survive, the following two conditions must be met:
- Ruthlessly deal with corruption and corrupt politicians in the country.
- Restructure the country along six autonomous geopolitical zones to ensure healthy competition within the framework of true fiscal federalism.
This work discusses more of the first above condition than the second condition which I have discussed several times in The Kaleidoscope Archives.
Having said this, my decision to comment less on the internal affairs of the country is, first, bone out of apathy, and second, the understanding that since we may have lost out on a possible peaceful (and not violent!) change of the Nigerian polity, I must shift attention to assist in securing the world we all live in by not allowing events in Ukraine and Gaza Strip to lead to the legendary but still mythical apocalypse or Armageddon, both of which represent a Catastrophe for the world and all humanity. The understanding here is that if the world survives and we all still stay alive, we shall solve the problem of Nigeria someday.
When a former Nigerian Military President who ruled the country during Nigeria’s only experience at diarchy, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida went on the goose chase of what he called ‘political and economic engineering’ through his diarchy and the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) experiments, respectively, I wrote my pen dry analyzing the imminent dangers in those weird political and economic experiments, comparing that decision with a student who, though not yet proficient in what he is being taught, had wrongly decided to apply himself to doing the job that he is not yet done with the training. I concluded that IBB was inept and as such not qualified to introduce SAP. Some thirty years down the line, all the issues I raised during those years came to pass with Nigeria now competing with the poorest countries around the world to become the poorest country in the world.
Fast forward to the year 2023, and to add salt to Nigeria’s almost cancerous injury, a new set of some economic ignoramuses and political miscreants succeeded in hijacking the country with a vague and dubious agenda of ‘RENEWED HOPE’ after the controversial general elections that held in that year.
In one of his weekly works published in The Newswatch Magazine which he part-owned, Dele Giwa, one of the greatest wordsmiths that Nigerian journalism has ever produced and a pen master with great passion to infuse satire drawn from everyday life experiences, said that Nigerians had been ‘shocked beyond shockability’. Were Dele Giwa to be alive today, he would have known that the level of shock he lacked words to express, even with his almost limitless command of English Language words and expressions, was ‘moi moi’ (to use a Nigerian slang!) compared with what is on-going in the country. What is presently happening in Nigeria as regards every aspect of life in the country has no ‘part two’ (using another Nigerian local parlance).
Events in present day Nigeria is a dead-ended real-life drama cast in absurd totality, incomprehensible to any sane human being either in real life events anywhere wherever in the world or in stage acts, not even in Disneyland. But it is real here and we are all experiencing it right now. Nigeria is creating history in all areas of human endeavors, albeit on the negative side. The country is competing with itself, trying to undo and surpass itself in everything negative.
Readers may recollect examples of some of these trail-blazing negative records of Nigeria within and around their communities. At the inevitable risk of mass insanity, Nigerians have developed limitless capacities to absorb all manner of shocks to the detriment of their individual and collective psyches and in revelation of the malfunction of the national group social order, a consequence of collective amnesia. How long will Nigerians endure? Nobody knows.
Let me quickly recall a recent occurrence in Nigeria, one of those unheard-of stories which can only emanate from the shores of Nigeria. Some social miscreants and outlaws called bandits waylaid a truck transporting a newly wedded bride and her women entourage along a road in Katsina State and kidnapped the bride and sixty two women.
Few days later, they reached out to the helpless Nigerian armed forces through the state Governor. They derided, mocked and challenged the armed forces to rescue their captives, if the armed forces have the guts to do that. They didn’t stop there. They announced that if they are not paid their N200 Million ransom money, they will marry off the bride to themselves and, wait for it!, SELL OFF THE REMAINING SIXTY TWO WOMEN to who knows who! This is the Nigeria we live in today.
Against the background of a collapsing country, I agree partially with my friend, Tive, and many Nigerians that Nigeria’s intellectuals, out of patriotism, should step down a little bit from researching and writing on what will help the world to how to deal with a handful of Nigerian politicians who have long held the country on her jugular. This new line of thought will inform the subject matters of some of my future works on The Kaleidoscope Archives.
What will it take to deal with these individuals and their families who have destroyed the country and through their actions cause thousands of death of Nigerian citizen everyday? There are presently pockets of protests springing up every day across the major cities of Nigeria as a result of the unprecedented economic hardship and total breakdown of security in the country. But with these spaced-off and isolated protests, it only rains. It needs to pour spontaneously and continuously at a containable stretch so that those politicians and their cronies in the corridors of power who are busy playing games with the lives of Nigerians will be completely drenched and be stripped of their dirty linings along the cities of Nigeria.
In the manner of a heavy downpour, it needs to rain in torrents in Nigeria. Nigeria needs a torrential rain to wet her cities and cleanse the Augean Stable. Maybe Nigerians will be free of their oppressors after the downpour as every solution that has ever been proffered to solve the problems of the country will begin to work.
Let me put up another question: with all the brigandage by non-state arms-bearing actors all over Nigeria, is Nigeria truly sovereign? My other question, a crucial one for general consideration, would be: between the politicians who are on oath to protect the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and keep her sovereignty for the four years the politician is in office, and the members of the arm forces who are on oath through their service years which may turn out to become their entire life times, to protect the constitution and keep the sovereignty of Nigeria, who is more challenged to show the way to the other party and salvage the country, if that other party derelicts in his duty? Let this question become the topic for a national discourse henceforth so that someday somebody somewhere will take actions that will save the country. This national discourse is necessary now unless both parties (the politicians and members of the armed forces) are in the same business together.
Before I conclude this work, I must observe that it amuses me that the new ‘normal’ in the administration of Nigeria both at the Federal Government level and across the states, which seem to be gaining a surprising and weird public acceptance, is what I call ‘politics of palliatives’. Is it any wonder therefore that such money-guzzling Federal Ministries and conduits for siphoning public funds and looting government treasury as the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation have been created to serve as official government portfolios and vestiges for the maintenance of political cleavages and distributing largesse to political errand boys/girls and their partners in corruption and crime?
Are palliatives really necessary in a functioning and functional government? The answer is no, unless one has a dubious reason to say yes. The truth is that the Federal and State Governments in Nigeria have abandoned their administrative responsibilities to their constituents as clearly demarcated in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. These constitutional obligations have been replaced with an insulting and conquest-based type of apron string gift called ‘palliatives’ whose beneficiaries have been turned into hungry beggars in the manner demonstrated to his Cabinet by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18th December 1878 – 5th March 1953), President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, (U.S.S.R) (between 3rd April 1922 to 16th October 1952) when he plucked a chic of all its feathers and enticed the morbidly shaking chic to follow him with pieces of corn seeds which he dropped that worked as inducements to force the desperate hungry and captive chic to be loyal and follow its wicked oppressor and captor.
Before now, Nigerian politicians use to apply what they call ‘dividends of democracy’ which I see as eating from the crumbs that fell of the masters’ tables. But that was better than ‘palliatives’. So, my question is: shouldn’t palliatives be emergency measures to temporarily cushion the problems that may appear along the way of execution of government projects? Why should ‘palliatives’ be made a permanent system of governance that a permanent Federal Ministry is created to undertake such a temporary government assignment? If permanent government structures are created to oversee temporary government assignments, when are good governance structures and functions of the government going to run their proper course?
We are getting it all wrong in Nigeria and nobody, not even people who are supposed to know, are saying anything. This is because everybody is waiting to grab one palliative, one tax rebate, one tax exemption or one exclusive right, or the other in Nigeria. ‘Nawa for Nigeria and Nigerians’.
While the distribution of the so-called ‘dividends of democracy’ symbolizes eating the crumbs that fell from the master’s tables, I see the sharing of ‘palliatives’ by Nigerian politicians as making Nigerians to beg to scavenge from dust bins. Think about it. Are Nigerians not scavenging from the dust bins in the present era of APC’s ‘Renewed Shattered (!) Hope?
Scavenging from the dust bin could mean anything between dropping from your normal standard of living to having nothing to eat at all. So, you need to properly look at yourself to find out if you are presently scavenging from the dust bins, or look within the community you live in other to observe that more Nigerians are scavenging from the dust bins than those eating from the master’s table and others eating from the crumbs that fell off the master’s tables.
You may be one of the few ‘lucky’ Nigerians still eating comfortably and being dished out food from the master’s tables, but at what cost to other Nigerians?
In summary, I want to end this work with a warning by a Ugandan in his address during a Conference, thus, “The poor do not sleep because they are hungry and the rich do not sleep because the poor is awake”. This should be an important and timely advice for Nigerian politicians before the bubble bursts.
Abuchi Obiora
Global Upfront Newspaper
Read Other Posts by Abuchi Obiora in:
The Kaleidoscope Archives