by Samson Olawale
“Ol’ boy, why waste your time writing articles and talking to oppose men who can only be stopped by God? You don’t have enough power to stop the President or the powers that be”
“Ol’ boy, why waste your time writing articles and talking to oppose men who can only be stopped by God? You don’t have enough power to stop the President or the powers that be”
This is a common remark one gets anytime one discusses the subject ‘Nigeria’. Such Pliant, (Capable of being influenced or formed) and submissive attitude of Nigerians point to two profound deformities. One is in the idea of Nigeria itself, a polity polluted by toxic values and run by or for contemptible interests. Nigeria’s problem does not lie merely in the fact that most elections are massively rigged even in the Attahiru Jega era. Nor is the crisis primarily about the pervasive culture of corruption. The space called Nigeria is not animated by any lofty values; it is not driven by any clearly defined, widely embraced set of noble aspirations. As a cultural phenomenon, Nigeria is very much a vacuous space – with the vacuum invaded by such virulent maladies as corruption, power abuse, electoral fraud, an undiscriminating worship of wealth, and a cult of banditry.
The second deformity is the absence of any articulate idea of what it means to be a citizen. The so-called Nigerian citizen is, in reality, a fiction. All the instruments of the state are arrayed against her/him. The police can arrest and detain any Nigerian at will, especially when the said citizen has committed no crime. The courts are, at best, indifferent to the plight of the savaged “citizen.” The Nigerian military would be willing to storm a community with tanks, gunboats and fighter jets and massacre innocents at the president’s say-so. Officials of the State Security Service (SSS) would not question the legality of a president’s order before executing it. A university lecturer might decide to fail a female student who refused him sexual favors, and the student would have no recourse – save God. When a state governor steals public funds, the residents and taxpayers of his state – in other words, his dispossessed victims – know that the Nigerian constitution protects the thief with an odious clause that offers “immunity from prosecution.” They know that the state commissioner of police, who dines with the governor and receives a healthy monthly handout, would never, ever entertain the “crazy” idea of questioning the thieving governor. They know that the justices who receive illicit gifts of cars and cash from the governor would not lift their gavel to order a refund of stolen funds.
That explains why, after making the bizarre choice of accepting rigged elections, we begin to whine as soon as it becomes evident that the bandits we permitted – or even encouraged – to hijack electoral offices have settled down to the business of fattening themselves at the expense of the rest of us. We forget that our monsters grow from the soil we fertilize; that we conceive and nurture them; that they represent our deepest, most misshapen values.
Unable or unwilling to take on these monsters we help create, we telegraph prayers to heaven to, a, change the hearts of these monsters that have hijacked power or, b, remove them for us. The collective wisdom of Nigerian anti-corruption agents, prosecutors and judges could not establish that former Governor James Ibori of Delta State pinched one naira from the public treasury. Yet, British law enforcement and prosecutors worked so assiduously and gathered such overwhelming evidence of Mr. Ibori’s money laundering that their quarry opted to plead guilty rather than risk being unmasked in court.
How did many Nigerians react? Instead of wondering why their system would let the likes of Mr. Ibori walk free, they began to entreat the UK to please, please arrest and prosecute other corrupt Nigerians. It’s again that syndrome of outsourcing work we should learn to do for ourselves – a job that is far from rocket science, but we fail at it because we have accepted a space animated by awful values.
The best antidote to corruption and other crises bedeviling Nigeria is one that’s home-grown and home-nurtured. It’s ultimately counterproductive to farm out the fighting of our battles to the US, the UK, or God. If Nigeria is not to remain a hollow idea, then its enlightened people better commence the task of founding it, defining its values, and negotiating the terms of its existence.
My Name is Ernest Uadiale. I am a passionate writer from the southern part of Nigeria. I am the author of the book, CONFRATERNITY. It is a novel that reveals the other side of confraternities in Nigerian universities. Though fictional, it is suspense filled and will surely captivate you.
Buy your own today on Amazon sites. Follow any of these links:
PRINT VERSION: http://tinyurl.com/confraternity-novel
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