“It is time for a change. One thing is sure; we cannot continue the way we are going.” – John Cardinal Onaiyekan
Year in, and year out, Nigeria had gone on as though corruption in high places was without consequence. But one sure thing is that if we do not rein in official corruption, the cankerworm same day eat up what is left of Nigeria.
Where Nigeria is now points to the fact that something must give because we can’t continue living in denial as a nation. This forced marriage of 1914 is not working. Nobody is servicing it. We are all servicing our ethnic and religious egos at the expense of the country.
Change in the real sense of the word is now inevitable in Nigeria because all indices of failure have been highlighted and they are confronting us frontally.
Many agree that Nigeria as a country has found itself at a crossroads where going forward is a problem and backwards is no solution. How did we get here? We know, and why couldn’t we stop it? The reason is not farfetched.
All reasonable people knew and forewarned us that the route we were headed to led to disaster, but we blocked our ears and listened only to the music of money. It is indeed true that the dog that is destined to die does not smell anything.
Our country produces shameless leaders who indulge in blame games. Tinubu blames Buhari, Buhari blames Jonathan, and Jonathan blames Obasanjo for bringing in then-ailing Yar’Adua. In all, no government in Nigeria since 1999 has tried to outdo its predecessor. Nigeria has been progressively running failed governments. From Obasanjo to Tinubu, Nigeria has been getting worse regime after regime. What is more tragic is that Nigerians are even saying that the Buhari regime is better than Tinubu and Jonathan regime was better than Buhari yet we do nothing as the country slides. Between 1999 and 2024, the only thing the distasteful bad governance has not given us is an officially declared civil war, but we have seen everything fit for a nation at war.
How did we get here? We breed injustice and corruption, thinking it has no consequences. We got here fanning the embers of ethnicity and religious bigotry to cover our weaknesses. Now the chicken has come to roost and everyone is lamenting. In Nigeria, the public goat is dying while individual-owned goats are robust and swimming in wealth.
If Nigerian democracy collapses under Bola Ahmad Tinubu, it would be significant because he has been a critical player in the corruption-ridden political class. And he climaxed it with the grab-and-run theory that installed him as the President at all costs.
To ensure that evil in practice endured in the land, all negative variables were resurrected and highlighted by the political class for selfish gains. Tribalism was elevated, and religious bigotry became a plus for political operatives. Nepotism got embraced like a new wife.
The only time these negative variables did not come up was during the looting or sharing of looted funds. Of all vices, only corruption has national character in our clime. There is no tribe, religion or geopolitical area that can be pinned as being more endemic in corruption than the other. If any tribe or religion is more it’s only due to having more in number that were exposed to power and political positions. The level of avarice of political leaders appears to be uniform among political leaders of all tongues and creeds.
Whenever you see two Nigerians working amicably in a public space, underneath them is looting going on, and binding them together is greed. For example, it was the corruption aspect of the deal that made an Igbo Godwin Emefiele work well as Central Bank Governor under a Fulani-run federal administration. Ditto, the current NNPC Group Managing Director Kyari is sleeping well on the same bed with a glaring Yoruba regime that kept all but one income window to themselves.
When you saw Sokoto Prince Sambo Dasuki serve an Ijaw President Goodluck Jonathan, it was made possible manured by the largesse of office determining the extent of the relationship.
If Tinubu is heading the Nigerian government and struggling with the legitimacy and goodwill of the people, it’s because of the embedded injustice and corruption in our system. What else could have made an academic of Mahmoud Yakubu’s height leading the nation’s electoral process and the judiciary prefer Tinubu to Peter Obi? It’s corruption in us that made Northern governors who are now in lamentation, prefer to support the likes of Tinubu with his unattractive past above all other aspirants. Now the region is licking its wounds and howling to nobody in particular.
It’s the corruption aspect of our lives that created various spokespersons defending what they know is wrong, switching positions to the opposite party and shamelessly contradicting themselves in their attack dog roles.
When discerning minds, and religious and political soothsayers declared unequivocally that the 2023 general election would be a make-or-mar one when Nigeria should get it right or face the repercussions, the greedy political elite laughed it off.
Our unpalatable situation now that we saw coming has become a dark cloud hovering over us and possibly throwing us into a loop if not paralysing us. We do not need anybody to tell us our indecision yesterday has become the decision we confront today and more often than not the wrong decision we took yesterday or the good decisions we refused to take are hurting us today.
When South Africa’s iconic leader Nelson Mandela advised that our choice should reflect our hopes, not our fear, he may have had in mind political leaders who backed Tinubu notwithstanding how he grabbed the presidency. They made their decisions not based on their hopes but more out of their fear of bringing in a Peter Obi whose mien, precedent, and utterances might block corruption that has kept this country down. Obi’s message of resetting the country was seen as a move to close the conduit pipe of corruption and remove oxygen from their greed.
But the truth remains and we all knew that if we refused to exterminate corruption, it was going to destroy us completely, but we chose to die rather than tackle corruption. We are therefore fully responsible for our failure to make that decision that we would no longer indulge in excuses and blame games.
Anthony Robbins, the American author of Unlimited Power and Awaken Giant Within, reminds us,
“Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.”
What is clear in every political decision is that you are free to make your decisions, to decide which path to follow but you cannot determine the consequences that come with it.
Right now in this country, we are lying in our rough beds and suffering the after-effects, bad dreams, and poor sleep.
Before our very eyes a war-torn nation, Ukraine is gifting us with survival food when 60 per cent of our arable land remains uncultivated or occupied by no state actors in our so-called peacetime. Just last week, nearly 300 pupils and students of primary and secondary schools were abducted in broad daylight and the nation is moving as if some cows had gone missing from the ranch. Why not, when we have moved on leaving some Chibok girls and Leah Sharibu in the hands of their captors in the forest?
A country with over 18 million out-of-school children cannot create an environment conducive to study. How committed have our various governments been in providing the basic requirements of any nation which is the protection of lives and property of citizens? Seventy-five per cent of kidnappers in this country get their weapons from state actors.
If a political leader can use money and a gun to get power, why should a uniformed man not use his gun to make money? Are they both, not crimes, one leads to the inconvenience of a few, and the political crime leads to the inconvenience of all.
The truth is that political crime is the parent of all other crimes. If nobody is in jail in this country today for electoral offences because the person they snatched ballot boxes for is in power, how does that discourage other crimes? Is it not the same youths you used as political thugs and you released from a police cell to help you perpetrate political crimes that are the bandits, the “unknown” gunmen and the kidnappers of today?
Surprisingly, we have remained in the same direction all this while, expecting to arrive at different destinations. Things don’t work like that naturally, hence the saying that as you make your bed….
The 2023 general election provided ample opportunity to choose between character and it was theatres the selfish minority in power, trading off competence, character and capacity. So, what do we expect?
We are surprised that the ₦aira is collapsing, and our children and teachers cannot freely study. Our security agents are helpless as the consequences of systemic corruption to which they are also accomplices have caught up with them. The untrained rag-tag gunmen and bandits get their weapons from them and use them to mess up their profession as they look incompetent, incapable, and forlorn at the nasty security situation.
We have over the years shaped our future through the choices we make. It may be hard to swallow where we have found ourselves but it remains a reality we created for ourselves.
Now, every indicator light is showing that we have met our Waterloo, and we are all seeing that the giant of Africa is lying prostrate, and at the crossroads, confused about which direction to go. It’s time for us to pick the timely advisory from the Archbishop Emeritus in the opening quote above.
This is the time to make a realistic change in our system that will discourage corruption which has become formalised, and introduce a system that will produce a responsive government that will be closer to the people.
Indisputably, this country has come to where it has to choose in the words of Josh James between turning the page and closing the book. God help us.