In the Eyes of  History

PAT Utomi

I begin with a confession. Approaching 70 leaves me almost in a continuous state of examination of conscience. What did I make of this gift of life. Is salvage of my wrongs possible? How will history judge the choices I made? Will my great grand children feel proud to call me a forebear? These questions weigh heavily on my conscience.

It can therefore be understood that I feel strange before those who are without remorse for what we are handing our children as country and legacy.

Of course it is not all that find the wisdom offered in  Chinese literary price winner, Zhou Daxin’s novel, The Sky Gets Dark Slowly, about aging, adequate warning to step with honor towards Biology’s victory over ego, greed and failed character.

As aging creeps up on the lucky, those of faith and know the Psalms, who let Ps 90:12, teach us to number our days, guide them to recognize the brevity and uncertainty of the course of man, so they can live purpose driven lives,  must feel deep pain at where Nigeria is. Poverty capital of the world, lowest place for life expectancy on the planet, terrorism hotbed, etc. etc.

As I still manage to travel to countries that were our peers or were considered worse off when I was a swaggering teenager, now much better places to be called human, I quiver in remorse and bowed in shame.

A few weeks ago it was South East Asia. This last week it has been Morocco. The palpable progress and discipline of the human spirit that stare you in the face, so different from when you first visited 40 years ago, tells a story.

To read from here of new plans in Nigeria, widely published, to abuse the electoral process and negate the will of the people yet again is to really wonder where sense, common or uncommon, has emigrated to. This from a dying brood that has had a lifetime of unfettered parasitic dwelling on the blood of the commonwealth. Has Nigeria not suffered enough from the desperation to lord it over a people that desire differently. Is it that those who have captured the Nigerian state do not feel the detriments of the crisis of legitimacy their ways have caused which set back the hands of progress? Have they not ‘enjoyed’ enough the fruits of their abuse at such high cost for nation building and people living  peacefully with their neighbours.

It is true that many of the aging dinosaurs who have brought Nigeria to its current prostrate place in the college of its peers may not have the discipline of reading to have found redemption in Daxin’s novel or the Psalms but does the slowing down of the motion of their body parts as Biology comes forward with the truth of the brevity of life not remind them of the final words of Pope John Paul 11 before the bombs began to drop on Iraq: the judgment of Conscience, the Judgment of history and the Judgment of God.

As a student of Institutions in Human progress I wonder often how those who have played in them in a country of failing and declining institutions think of how they will be remembered. How does a highly educated person like Mahmoud Yakubu think of how he and his INEC glitches will be treated by history. In Singapore where Institutions grew strong men who thought they compromised often committed suicide. That they still walk with a swag in a country like Nigeria tell much of the collapse of culture. Our times have betrayed our race, yet again.

I deeply feel the sense of the failure of my generation. Out of relative obscurity, as Franz Fanon suggested, we found the mission of our generation. It is to redeem an Ubuntu people who had big houses with no doors before Europe happened to it because no one was left behind or had need to steal, but compromised and sold their neighbors into slavery.

It was our mission to redeem this error and save the black man from a looming thousand years of servitude.

But the emerging elite was overrun by politicians who compromised it all for houses in Europe and Private Jets  the way their forefathers sold their brothers for a mirror and Brandy bottle, a few generations back.

May be there is room for aging wrongdoers to do a mea culpa. My trust in the judgement of judges and lawyers in Nigeria is waning; my fear for the courage of youth to see past immature material cravings to impress people they do not like, is increasing; and my pain for those who ignore George Santayana’s warning about ignoring history being a sentence to reliving its errors, is rising.

I can  only hope now and pray. My limbs are not like they used to be. The Paul Kagame option has been taken from me by time. But it is a time of hope. So I hope and pray. For the judgments that lie ahead of us all, complicit or of  failed effort, and for dignity of those we failed.

•Prof. Utomi, political economist and professor at LBS, is  the founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership.