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Independent? Are you? Really?
Today should be a day of deep national and individual reflection by those who call themselves Nigerians. Today we cross into the other side of midnight, half a century plus one of what I call flag independence and three more years before we clock a century as one cobbled-together nation. I'm not a great fan of flag Independence, especially the type we celebrate in Africa. I mean, it's all great using the opportunity to spread goodwill and wish our nation well; but how long are we going to sit there and look away from the rot, hoping that the country will just be whole again, all by magic?
Are we celebrating the open butchery of the nation by the gruesomely predatory elite, the armed robbers shooting citizens at will and carting off their property with no police in sight or the kidnappers who brazenly make a business of selling people back to their families and loved ones, where not killing them for fun? Are we celebrating the fact that our universities are now glorified secondary schools with no place in the list of real learning institutions, even in Africa? Are we celebrating the death of primary health care, not to talk of anything a little more – to the extent that victims of the United Nations offices' bombing in Abuja had to be taken to South Africa for basic treatment and poor Bill Gates had to show his face in our neck of the woods recently in his frustrating fight against polio of all diseases in Nigeria?
Are we celebrating the suborning of traditional rulers and traditional institutions as they fall over themselves to indiscriminately support whoever is in power at whatever level, just so they can eat and run big palaces? Oh, maybe we are celebrating the fact that our manufacturing sector is suffering the lowest capacity utilization in Africa or that we are running an economy where money is chasing money into the vast pockets of the manipulators to the extent that over seventy percent of Nigerians still live below the poverty line in the 21st century!
Yes, we are celebrating the importation of fuel when we are an oil producing nation! We are celebrating the spoliation that our greed has brought to one of the best ecosystems in the world and the gassing of the owners of the land, while we spirit oil away for hard dollars to be stolen by those who claim to be serving us and protecting our interest in Abuja and the State Houses all over the federation. We are celebrating our inability to diversify our economy, with the vast non-oil resources we have all over, half a century after flag independence. We are celebrating being unable to provide electricity to run our nation in a land where gas is flared indiscriminately, the sun scorches from morning till night, the wind blowing, the rivers flowing. We are celebrating our leaders' mastery of giving hare-brained excuses for why we are still prostrate when we should be sprinting!
You may want to know why all this is allowed to continue in Nigeria, why the so-called international community isn't putting enough pressure on our leadership to deliver the much-touted dividends of democracy to the people. You may wonder why their representatives all troop into Abuja, smiling on TV and in photographs with the President and our leaders and speaking so highly of some unseen progress we are making as a nation. Are they doing this because there are no riots everywhere, no civil war going on and no sense that great instability is afoot to the extent that their oil hunger won't be fed, even if three-quarters of the people get gobbled up by poverty and disease? Well, they know. They know of the Civil War, they have seen the insurgency in the Niger-Delta and they have sat with their clients to design an amnesty programme that does everything, but take care of the people that matter. Development can be thrown to the dogs while a bit of flesh is tossed to the boys! Yeah, Boko Haram is no more than a teeny-weeny strand of the prevalent problem of worldwide terrorism, isn't it? And as for those hungry faces starring them (as they whizz to airports to return to their cushioned life outside), didn't they read the glowing reports of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Ministry of Finance? Oh, maybe the problem is one of lack of communication, rather than one of achievement, they conclude….
Of course, there is a school of thought that says we are this bad at self-governance, because we did not fight for independence with blood and tears. The Azikiwes, Awolowos and Ahmadu Bellos and the other nationalists all just jaw-jawed with the White man who was anyway tired of his imperial pretentions after the Second World War and the loss of the crown jewel in India. Independence was granted us on a platter of gold, they claim. Well, true followers of history know it wasn't. From the moment the White man stepped foot on our soil for slaves, through the time of the supposed legitimate trade, and colonialism, we Nigerians had consistently paid with our blood and birth right. There can be no worse violence visited on a people than to be considered uncivilized, carted away as slaves, dictated to on the price of your natural produce and then get ruled over by force of the Maxim gun, all over 400 years!
But, we shouldn't be crying eternally over that or be pointing at these as the causes of our present sorrows. Yeah, they are remotely responsible, but our real problem today is that we have refused to take charge of ourselves in the true sense of independent people. After all, we weren't the only people to suffer slavery or colonialism. Some of the most vibrant nations today with good governance and development, like China, Japan, Brazil and India and so on suffered same. So, why are we making a song and dance about it half a century after? Even Britain was once colonised by Romans!
I am not a fan of Wikileaks for reasons I have explained elsewhere at the time it first started, but I will not discountenance its social and political relevance as it concerns revelations relating to Nigeria. Anyone looking at the entirety of the leaks would not miss the fact that it is only in Nigeria you get the elite falling over themselves to tell foreigners our national secrets and how bad we are. Reading through the raw release, you would think everyone that works at the top or have the ear of anyone at the top is a CIA agent of the lowest cadre! The significance of that is that our country is in bondage. Our country is run by outsiders whose support ensures that we are lumbered by lumps of humans who are as effective as stones in action and as vicious as poisonous snakes in protecting their political positions. Democracy has no meaning in Nigeria, because the process of leadership succession and appointment is thoroughly compromised to ensure that the right type of people do not get there. The successors to the colonialists are happy to deal with these greedy dingbats as leaders, because they are easy to manipulate and more prone to letting them get whatever they can from our country for the good of their own people. International relations isn't a morality game at its core, so anyone hanging around to blame the White man or the Chinese for taking care of their interests at our expense isn't being realistic. That is how the world works. They call it survival of the fittest! If you allow dumb people to lead you, nobody in the international community will raise an eyebrow as far as they are well taken care of. But, of course, if you get your act together and redraw the relationship map, they will respect it. They don't go out creating loopholes; they only take advantage of them.
So, without mincing words, the age-old problem of neo-colonialism is still our bane. The terrain has changed, the language of definition has changed and capitalism has won the economic war, even if not the argument. Yeah, it's failing today with the recession we are facing; but the objective of its pivots has never changed.
Of course, I refuse to be saddened by it all, because I know my country has the human, humane and intellectual resources to turn things around. I also know that unlike a lot of people who keep looking at the long winding and narrow road, despairing that it may not happen in our life time, my belief is that it can happen in a jiffy! Yeah, history is dynamic and humans are equally dynamic and time is only what you make of it! So, if Nigerians begin to think and act like a blessed people, like a proud people, like a people God has specially empowered with population, brains, great naturally endowed land and weather and a great responsibility to their children and generation yet unborn, we will ditch our corrupt 'nature', ditch our political complacency and social inertia and seize the day!
In the meantime, we can all go back to our beds and wait for the professional activists to bell the cat of national failure.
Kennedy Emetulu,
London
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