OPINION: NIGERIANS, IT'S NEARING DUSK

By Modiu Olaguro:

Each time the cloud of hate opens up with accompanying heaviness and ferociousness, with thundering religious fanaticism on one side and ethnic lightening on the other–all present in this Lugardian contraption,–even the inhabitant of the mountain does not lose sight of its fatality.

With colonial Nigeria, the strictures were there, albeit, in a state of animated abeyance; rearing its head on few occasions but tamed solely to fight the common foe.

With the amalgamation in the early days of the previous millennium, the dropping of the imperial flag some decades later, and series of events that followed leading to the coup and counter-coup of 1966, all reaching an apogee with the Biafran war, it was only a matter of time before the children of the new republic knew what the white witch had done. Talk of learning the hard way!

It was more or less like a magical spell. The birth of the new republic, with all the euphoria and fanfare woke to see it was home to peoples so near, yet so far! A union of strange bed fellows of sort.

Far north, you mistake them for the descendants of the holy Prophet of Islam (SAW), with features of resemblance from toe upwards–extending to the strand of hair on the people of the cattle. You come down south and wonder if you were in the same country!

Had these differences been managed in the spirit of nationalism and Pan-Africanism, the cracks which the colonialists trapped us in would not have grown into a ditch of restiveness and disharmony the nation currently occupies.

The colonialists left the amalgam in the coffin of agitated conundrum and invigorating confusion. Unfortunately, when they left this shore, the country has not been so lucky with either civilian or despotic leadership.

It is this inability, nay, lack of will of the elite at channeling the heterogeneousness of the nationalities into a homogenous voice of national cohesion that reduced this nation into one wherein naturally imposed differences grow to become monsters of contour and confusion.
With the men of the barracks crushing the nation with both the boot and barrel, hence placing them in their rightful places as the final nail on the colonist’s coffin, their civilian counterparts have only been an extension of the dictators.

This is why the nation moves without moving. The hegemonic forces that rule over the Lugardian contraption appear to be from the lowest of the low amongst us.

As the charismatic Kwame Ture noted in Pan Africanism and the new world order: “Africans seem to have a monopoly of corrupt leadership. I mean the scum of our race dominates us. I mean these pigs seek individual luxury in the midst of mass suffering of the suffering of the masses. So there’s no question here. We have the most corrupt leadership in the world.”

It is however not surprising that post-military Nigeria birthed a process of a faulty leadership recruitment process so enamoured with the past as to be entangled in a web of democratic aberrations and mesmeric distortions. If the nation was ailing under the clutches of dictatorship, it appears to be on life support at the moment.

In a week or so, about 2000 workers have been laid off by the custodians of the coin. It was only a matter of time. No nation, wired and programmed by the colonialists as an imperium hub escapes such machination. Ask Zimbabwe, she’ll tell you.

Our situation, as i pointed out, became pitiful, appalling, and pathetic when the usurper left only to hand us over to indolent parasites with bulimic tendencies. 90% of deposits belong to a tiny 2% of the population. The number of Nigerians with up to N500,000 in their bank accounts would fit on our fingers.

Nigerian Banks literally survive on governments’ fund. With the implementation of the Treasury Single Account, the parasite appears to be suffocating having lost its host. Soon, their heads will move plate-in-hand to go get some bailout. The royal one acquiesced during his reign. His shadow still hovers across the national vault.

The masses have always been the grass on which the tussle is had, bearing the brunt for elite sleaze and malfeasance. With the lucid lack of direction of the occupant of the throne, authority graft in the 36 enclaves, and pillaging of our common patrimony by the 774 local champs, it’s surely not dusk in this abode of suffering.

For, the effect of cosmetic ordinariness, ably communicated by none other than the kind of leaders thrown up by this sick space has never been this penetrating in both said and unsaid terms.

Had it not been so, we would by now not wake up to the rabid agitation of the feeding bottle children. A bunch of spoilt brats who hold the country by the jugular having lost out of the power equation.

Had their “son” been a worthy president, their madness would have deserved a modicum of pity. But with the nation regaled with tales of state perfidy in gargantuan proportions while he held sway, the colorless ex-president–and whatever legacy his mentees throw at him–already has his place in the dustbin of history.

It’s an act of national betrayal. With the economic castration of the nation, defilement of the environment and the passing of a death fatwa on the number one citizen in amazingly pompous fashion, the country is once again besieged by men who blur the line between activism and criminality–besmirching the former in the process. With unity gone, one is tempted to ask what is left of the nation.

It is this begging national question that has brought out the Igbo in the Avengers. With the Daura demon on the rocky chair, Biafra has suddenly found her long lost brother. The nation must pay for it even if it means spilling crude on shrimps and earthworms. The wretched of the earth now poses for the camera on a wretched earth!

It is this characteristic ordinariness which manifests in magnified proportions country after country, state after state, person after person that gave a green light to the pragmatic black existentialist philosopher to voice out in exposing the enemy within post-colonial African states.

“National consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty fragile shell.” Wrote Frantz Fanon. “The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe–a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of the nation and national unity.”

This is why discerning minds will live and transit to the great beyond holding proportional grudges against post-colonial Nigerian leadership with probably an exception for the statesman adorned on the twenty naira note. The Daura demon would have made the list had his posture and utterances been a rallying point in mending the cracks in the nation.

It appears the country is only living up to its billing. With everyone defecation everywhere, a country carved for imperialistic convenience has been modified by nationals into a space of criminal convenience, with the leaders doing theirs authoritatively while the led replicate theirs in their modest ways. It’s a race against sanity. A marathon show designed to cling the cup of criminality.

The nation reeks of a population lost in its shadow. With unprecedented hardship in the land, giving fillip by the near cluelessness of the president and his coterie of cronies, the thick skin hitherto developed by Nigerians to withstand the gulag their leaders have made of the country is wearing thin.

It’s nearing dusk for Nigeria.

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Article first appeared Here



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