TO say that the predominant mood in Nigeria at the moment is pretty discordant and depressingly traumatic will obviously be a gross understatement. Life has become so increasingly meaningless with all manners of ruthlessness occasioned by escalating criminality everywhere. The media is filled with all sorts of negative vibes; of assassinations and murders, of attacks on communities, killings by unknown gunmen, banditry here and there, kidnappings for ransom or for harvest of human parts for rituals, abductions of school children, cult clashes, etc.
At the moment, the near total breakdown of law and order, the perpetual dysfunction in our political economy and the broad disconnect between the people and their leaders at all levels of governance, leading to heightened survival and existential challenges, all bond together to perfectly recreate the scenario imagined in the first stanza of W. B. Yeats poem; “The Second Coming,” from which Achebe extracted the title of his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart.
Yeats writes: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre /The falcon cannot hear the falconer; /Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, /The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere /The ceremony of innocence is drowned; /The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity.”
In Nigeria, things have continued to fall apart; more so now than ever; it’s been tragedy upon tragedies all over the place. Nowhere is safe; neither our homes nor our roads; our rural communities and our towns and cities. Everywhere there is palpable fear! You can feel it, you can smell it; you can even touch it in the flowing blood of the many being dispatched to their ‘untimely’ graves.
How is it that we are in such absolute state of siege with the amalgam of security agencies, and on which billions of naira are being spent in terms of personnel emoluments and equipment; notwithstanding the unknown billions of public funds set aside in the name of security vote by all tiers of government?
Nobody is sure of the next hour; you will be alive now and the next minute you are dead. It is probably the worst time to be a parent in Nigeria, as we literally leave every moment with our hearts in our mouths, whether your kids live with you or they are in boarding schools, whether they work or are ‘applicants’, the pseudonym for unemployed graduates, or those waiting for admission into the many centres of tertiary miseducation. It is pure torture to leave in Nigeria at the moment! We are not in war but the prevailing mood is of war.
For years, we yearn that our President, Oga Buhari, should talk to us about all the promises he had made, promises that gave him that glorious victory, so as to assuage our feelings of despair and hopelessness. Majority of us are disappointed that he is gifting us scorpions and vipers rather bread, milk and honey, to which we eagerly looked forward to getting for our confidence in him.
In trying to show us that he heard our murmurs for the past six years, all we got were reprimands, threats and lies when he managed to speak to us last week. Rather than trending on the realities of frayed nerves, hunger, deprivation, unrestrained criminality and anomie, whereby those meant to ensure our freedom and safety are essentially the very people instigating our pains; we were told that things are better, that millions have been lifted out of poverty and hunger. Buhari told Nigerians that they are incorrigible hypocrites
On Buhari’s interviews and broadcast last week, hundreds of articles have been written and published. Numerous radio and television programmes broadcast. So also are immeasurable chats ongoing on the social media, irrespective of the proscription of Twitter from operating in Nigeria. More perspectives will still be shared, especially by historians of power. I do not therefore intend to engage in doing what many have excellently achieved. Here, I only intend to ask questions.
The Nigerian situation doesn’t make sense when common-sense questions are asked because there seems to be no common-sense answers to them. There are many of such questions! Take for instance the challenge of insecurity and the daily bloodbaths everywhere; from north to south, east to west.
How is it that we are in such absolute state of siege with the amalgam of security agencies, and on which billions of naira are being spent in terms of personnel emoluments and equipment; notwithstanding the unknown billions of public funds set aside in the name of security vote by all tiers of government?
How is it that in spite of these fiscal and structural organs, insurgents, bandits, kidnappers, unknown gunmen, armed robbers (most of whom seemed to have now switched to kidnapping), and other merchants of violence, keep growing day by day and have technically become more powerful than the state to have carved the Nigerian State into enclaves of terror, a nation where the most lucrative job is now the hunting and capturing of human beings for sale?
As an English proverb says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; one can categorically say that since the governors in the current dispensation have absolutely conquered the other arms of government to the extent that many state legislators in the course of the last constitutional amendment voted against their own fiscal autonomy to be slaves of their governors; it can only be that with devolution of more powers to the states beyond what we have now, governors will become absolute potentates, more powerful than King Nebuchadnezzar and Emperor Nero put together.
What is happening seems to have been taken out of our history books. We were told that in the era of slave trade, Africans hunted fellow Africans, captured and sell themselves like chickens and goats to the white man. We were also told this led to the collapse of many powerful African empires. Here we are; stateless insurgents and bandits have become more powerful than Nigeria that its rulers, past and present, thump their chests and boast as the biggest economy in Africa and the most populous black nation on earth.
It is not as if these bandits are spirits, or that we do not know the locations they operate. But it is over a decade that this current chapter was opened, but it appears that he or she who is to set the country free is not yet born!
How come that these monsters are so audacious as to continuously operate successfully along particular axis for years without the police, the intelligent services and a combination of the entire Armed Forces strategizing to eliminate them? Sambisa Forest is a location, so also are Borno and Yobe states, the heart of the Boko Haram insurgency. Why are our forces incapable of upstaging the insurgents from Sambisa, even if it means taking over its entire geography? Does this not stir an eerie feeling with regard to the operational integrity of all or a section of the security agencies, particularly the top echelon?
Let’s take a closer look at another theatre of the banditry that is closer to the seat of power. The Abuja-Kaduna federal highway has been under siege. It is such that ministers, national legislators and other senior government officials, even including senior security personnel – military, police, SSS, etc., with full complements of armed escorts – usually avoid travelling on the dual carriageway to and from Abuja and Kaduna for fear of being attacked or kidnapped. So they prefer doing the about two hours’ road trip either by train or by air.
These felons, for over two years, have freely operated on this stretch of an otherwise beautiful thoroughfare designed for pleasurable road trip and turned it literally into a Bermuda Triangle of daylight robbery, kidnapping, maiming, killing and torture. Yet, the state, with all its awesome power of coercion, seems powerless compared with the bandits operating on the road. What happens? Our overprotected government officials, including senior security personnel, have instead opted to travel by train and often taking up entire coaches thereby denying many poor Nigerians who lack security to commute through the trains to and from Kaduna. This is one area; security or insecurity.
There are numerous other aspects of our national life that baffles and stretches imagination to its elastic limits if common-sense questions are asked. Take the matter of restructuring, for instance!
When political parties, politicians, groups and state functionaries agitate for restructuring and devolution of powers in Nigeria; there is always this simple question that always usually come to my mind: if it is so difficult for governors to faithfully abide by the principles of checks and balances that is already enshrined in our constitution whereby the executive, legislature and judiciary are statutorily independent but act as checks on one another, how are we sure that the same governors will behave differently in the event that more powers are devolved to them?
As the English proverb says, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; one can categorically say that since the governors in the current dispensation have absolutely conquered or emasculated the other arms of government to the extent that many state legislators in the course of the last constitutional amendment voted against their own fiscal autonomy to be slaves of their governors; it can only be that with devolution of more powers to the states beyond what we have now, governors will become absolute potentates, more powerful than King Nebuchadnezzar and Emperor Nero put together.
I want to believe that yes, we have a lot of crises and challenges, but it is clear from even a cursory assessment of the general dysfunction that our problems are rooted in the trenchant incompetence, maladministration, unconscionable greed and duplicity of our ruling class across all echelons of power, most pertinently the executive arm symbolised in our presidents and governors.
It is established logic that if, and when, a head is decayed, nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done to salvage the body. That is why I believe that from the antecedents of our leaders, if they are deployed to any stable, dynamic and modern state; say Singapore, Emirate of Dubai, or even any of the developed economies; it will not take them two tenures to send any of the countries into recession or depression.
Like I said earlier, there are many questions to be asked in view of the innumerable paradoxes of Nigeria. Why would a country sell its multi-billion dollar assets to private individuals and still continue to fund it? Is that not what has happened in the case of NEPA, sorry, PHCN? After its unbundling into several entities, Nigeria continues to fritter billions, if not trillions even in the face of darkness! How come that we endlessly engage in the turn-around maintenance of our refineries with billions, if not trillions, of naira, for the past 30 years when a brand new refinery can be built in a matter of years? Where is the common-sense in looking for a loan facility of $2.5 billion dollars for a stake in Dangote Refinery when we have been dashing the company trillions in tax waivers, import waivers, etc., and when the product that the refinery would depend on to function is ours? And on, and on…
