Our country, like many other countries around the world, stands at an interesting point in time and space. We are actually on the brink of something. But unlike most other countries, Nigeria is a special case and there is only on direction to go, and that is to step up, towards light and truth.
The consequences of doing otherwise are too dire to contemplate.
Nigeria is a different country, and a spectacular country. Many of us do not know it. Donald Trump hinted at this when he hosted our president. But of course many of us, especially the indifferent press, drowned the Trump comments in a flood of negative tales on everything that concerns the current occupier of our State House.
And that is another funny thing. Once the person occupying the State House is not of our own liking, we regard him as an enemy and we do not have enough maturity of spirit to realise that the person in the State House has been put there by the Laws that never err, and it is our duty to help him achieve positive things on behalf of all, for our country, whether we initially supported him or not.
More so than not, with out elite leading the way, a virulent campaign of pull him down is embarked upon, the leader is declared an enemy worse than a foreign invader, and being a violently vocal set, the opponents make sure the hapless leader is tormented with a combination of lies, half truths, insults, negative wishes; including death, destructive criticism that sees nothing good in the leader, even clearly good ones, imputing negative twist and motives to every single policy of the leader, all these sustained and done with a hypocritical air of pretending to fight some imaginary human rights battle.
All and every kind of evil tactics is deployed in this war. No trick is too vile to be off the table. Tribalism, religious bigotry, racism and appeals to stereotypes and negative profiling are all employed liberally.
The cumulative effect is to create an artificially polarized environment that is toxic for development. And everyone is drawn backwards. The country stagnates, because a country, or a house, divided against itself can make no progress.
This proclivity to divisive conduct, now manifesting at its worst, has become a braking mechanism for our country.
But it has not always been like this. We used to have a healthy respect for our leaders and our society. We used to have a minimum understanding of what our national goals are. But not anymore. We are now polarised into mutually antagonistic camps based on such ephemeral things as religion, ethnicity, language, state, geopolitical zone, and even political parties. This lack of national consensus on what our country ought to look like and what goals we ought to deploy our considerable National energy on, is at once sad and disastrous. It has kept us at a standstill, and in some vital aspects, retrogression.
Nor can we honestly ascribe this phenomenon to the rise of the Internet and Social Media, though we must acknowledge the contributions of social media to the psychological mess we have found ourselves in.
“Moving the country forward”
Consensus or not, all who are willing to see can clearly perceive that we need to move this country forward, to use the phrase that Nigerians are used to. Everyone says this as a means of cover, or mask, to divert attention from the private and selfish agenda they are projecting. Thus when we engage in the most biased criticism, we end up by inserting somewhere in the narrative that what we have done is motivated by the desire to move the nation forward
This phrase, which is a lie, gained ascendancy at around the time of the unnecessary crisis created by the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. People who ignore the obvious solution of de-annulling the election while mouthing strange contraptions are the ones that introduced it and mainstreamed it.
Moving the country forward is not apriori a good thing. At least I know of two situations where moving forward is NOT THE way to go.
If you are on a journey and you took a wrong turn, moving forward is the WRONG thing. You must stop any further forward movement, and actually retrace you steps…
If you are on a journey, and you find yourself on that same road at the edge of a precipice, wisdom dictates, demands, that you first STOP, and go back. Moving forward is the last thing you do.
Move forward by moving Back
Analysing all the variables, we can state categorically that Nigeria has now arrived at the two points described above. We have made a wrong turn in our journey to Nationhood, sometime back, and we are now at the edge of a precipice.
Our wrong turn was around 1985, which error came into full bloom in 1993 with the unnecessary voiding of the presidential vote of that year. From 1985, we had a kind of savaging of our national psyche, as policies from the government seem to support corruption and the debilitating spirit of ‘anything goes’. Corruption was mainstreamed and enhanced. That was the era that impunity in public stealing was instituted because those convicted of stealing public property were released and their confiscated illegal properties returned to them. From there, it was a downhill journey forpublic ublic morality. The young ones who were nurtured with that mindset (1985 onwards) have now grown and they are in charge of our public services and businesses. In charge of our universities. In charge of the press. In charge of the commanding heights of our economy.
And so we have arrived at this critical junction. Actually, we are at the brink.
Today our press with few exceptions support corruption. They are not interested in the evil of corruption but on the technicalities. Our politicians are mostly on the side of looting. Lawmakers can not point to any great legislation to advance the cause of our nation. Civil servants steal billions and we dare not try them for these crimes. If it is attempted, the press will start yelling about ethnic or religious victimisation.
Our banks, many of them are engaged in voodoo banking… business elites are owing banks and refusing to pay back. AMCON recently said that there is 5.3 trillion bad debts by Nigerian businesses, with only 350 individual owing 3.8 trillion of that amount. And in politics, young politicians are outdoing the elder ones in hate speech, stealing of public funds, refusal to pay salaries of workers and general impunity and recklessness.
Youths not in government engage in yahoo, and yahoo plus, because they want to be rich at all costs. Others took to kidnapping innocents for ransom. Some joined the terrorist bands to terrorise other countrymen. Some are even agitating for breakup of the country.
That is the junction we have arrived at as a nation. That is the brink of disaster to which our country has now found itself as a BALEFUL LEGACY of the errors of 1985, the point where we made a wrong turn in our national life.
Way forward to Light and Truth
The way forward is to come back to our senses, make a u-turn back to our pre-1985 morality, re institute moral rectitude, and return to an aversion for corruption and impunity. We should begin to feel outraged at corruption. We should all insist that infractions be punished.
We must stop celebrating the corrupt people among us, whoever they are, no matter their relationship with us. Religious, ethnic, professional or party affiliation should count for nothing when a crime is being investigated or prosecuted.
We should reawaken the teachings of the WAR AGAINST INDISCIPLINE (WAI) and imbibe its tenets, and internalise them. Our press men should stop commercialising news and begin to do developmental Journalism. Journalism that stands on the part of truth and what is in the best interest of the Nation. Sensationalizing security challenges, or promoting false and misleading narratives must be stopped.
Fake news must be censored out. And journalists should begin to serve as watchdogs of the society once again. Our religious leaders should actually preach what their religions teach, and not prosperity gospel, or making political commentaries from the pulpit.
In summary, all of us must take a respective look backwards, and move away from the brink where we are all standing now. Any attempt to continue with our present path for leaders or followers, especially followers, would be disastrous for our country.
So, for our nation to move forward, we must look backwards…back to where the rain started to beat us.
If we can do that, and learn its lessons, our positive possibilities would be realised. As we move into elections in few days, we must know what is at stake. It is a choice between carrying on the present return to probity and path of moral rectitude; or to make a retreat to where we were in 2015 which was a result of the baleful legacies of the previous 14 years dating back to 1985.
We are at the brink of great possibilities. But we must take the right decision.
It is our call as a people.
Our future is bright. If at the end of these elections coming up, Nigerians are able to make an unequivocal choice for change, a break from the baleful past, Nigeria may at last begin her long announced and long delayed progress to greatness that is our manifest destiny.
