Edifying Elucidations BY Okey ikechukwu okey.ikechukwu@thisdaylive.com
I have my doubts, even as the allegedly new year is 24 hours away. “Allegedly”, because it is not likely to be much different from the year before it. We can, perhaps, only call it new because it will bring new, and higher, doses of what the year before it meted out. So, more of the same is new, sort of. What one sees hovering in the horizon fall under (1) more economic hardship, (2) more borrowing by the federal government, (3) more expenditure on alms giving rather than wealth creation, (4) greater proof of directionless leadership, (5) more confusion in the two major political parties, (6) greater insecurity across the country, and (7) further devastation of the North by terrorists.
That, then, will be the new year offering. It will still be preceded by Crossover services, of course. Many church goers will attend these services and still walk into the new year with their outstanding rents, joblessness and many other of their headaches. Yes, the troubles always find a way of crossing over with many of the people, instead of staying behind in the old year. So the cycles keep rolling over themselves. The entanglements and self-delusions thrive. Anon, the religious and other scammers keep smiling to the bank. Good fortune gets attributed to “the man of miracles.” Not so good results receive the consoling words of the “infallible” pastor: “Your miracle is on the way.” In which case it may well be coming by public transport.
The new year resolutions, which are often the very same resolutions made the year before, will also be there. The hollow chatter of idle governors who swallow huge monthly security votes in the face of increasing insecurity will not be missing. So, let’s face it: The new year will only be a marker on a calendar. It holds little or no promise of any positive transformation of the Nigerian State.
Before anyone prances forward to say that Buhari, Jonathan APC, or PDP are solely to blame for the misfortune enveloping the nation today, let me repeat what was said on this page on October 28, 2016. Under the title: Nigeria: Beyond Buhari and Jonathan: “As actors in a crisis-ridden political environment, Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari are not solely responsible for our present national problems. The PDP, the APC, or the two together, also do not bear exclusive blame for everything wrong with Nigeria today. They have their real and imagined shortcomings, of course, but they are also victims of generations of leaders and followers brought up on impunity, consumption and arbitrary use of state power.”
The extrapolation we can make from the sentence quoted above is that we should adopt a long-term view of our national crises, if we are to come anywhere near the remote possibility of conceptualising a solution. From this perspective, the next sentence from the above-refrenced article makes sense: “The many powerful people whose interests differ from the national interest are partly responsible for the trajectory of the two presidents and of most past regimes and presidents. So let us first calmly admit that our crises have had long gestation. To fail to do so is to ignore history, particularly the essential elements of our own history, and replace it with hysteria.”
This column had argued, then, that “We have been building a mansion on quicksand and with pillars of straw. The soil, quicksand as it is, is further infested with two species of ants, called presumption and nepotism. These ants, which feed exclusively on straw, have been nibbling away for decades. They have left us with a hollow and painted frame that conceals a lie. This lie has been on parade for decades. It is described as an architectural masterpiece by casual observers. An architectural masterpiece that is not designed to withstand the wind? Now that the whirlwind has come, and the elements are in their element, radical modifications (in design and material) have become necessary.” Notwithstanding the above observations, we are not thinking of any needed modifications at all. The reflexes of our leaders at the three tiers today give so little hope.
The aforementioned article had also said: “It is not right that a nation should be undergirded by untruth. It is also not right that a nation should be under a political economy of decay and corruption, warehoused and propagated by a business and political elite that lives in denial…..Now that we have brought up children who have seen shielded criminality as leadership, we have a nation wherein hiding under the instruments of state to violate natural justice, equity and good conscience makes you not guilty of any crime. Look at Nigeria 56 years after independence. The dominant motifs are (1) skewed values, (2) a flawed national psyche and (3) an aberrant leadership recruitment process. These motifs have given us several national ‘leadership pseudopodia’, or “false feet”.
As we walk, or perhaps crawl, into 2022, we are still facing the after-effects of leadership pseudopodia (or new regimes with insular notions about nation building). They “spring new agenda, new national ideals and new aspirations on everyone without warning and without consultation. They have since replaced National Development Plans with limited regime goals, and often without plans or strategy. And it all vanishes without trace with the demise of each regime.” This has been the trajectory of our national political leadership since the days of General Yakubu Gowon. It explains why the same political party and government can move from SEEDS and Seven Points Agenda to Transformation Agenda without consolidating anything.
I have always held the view, as further canvassed here on October 16 2016, that “A major misdirection of the Nigerian State and people occurred on January 15, 1966, when Major Kaduna Nzeogwu announced his military coup d’etat. That coup saw a junior officer issuing instructions to his superiors. It saw murder as an instrument for leadership recruitment and transformation. It saw an officer peremptorily informing the nation (by mere announcement about ‘Extraordinary Orders’) that all local administration in the country was now under the ‘local military commander’, who would mete out any punishment he ‘deemed appropriate’ to anyone who disobeyed him.” Utter bunkum! Can an officer of the rank of Major be more unprofessional?
That unfortunate military intervention “left right and wrong in the hands of individuals of, sometimes, questionable antecedents. It violated Service Discipline and set new paradigms for the collapse of esprit de corps in the armed forces. It sidetracked the existing crop of leaders and their ‘replacement generation’, who stagnated for 12 years, until 1979. The trio of Zik, Awo and Aminu Kano, would since given way to the likes of Tafawa Balewa, Michael Okpara, Bola Ige and others before 1979. But they turned up as presidential candidates, because of the 1966 coup. This created the backlog of two generations of leaders that we are still unable to deal with today.”
Those who still celebrate the Nzeogwu coup must wake up to the fact that, having ushered in murder as leadership replacement tool, “it laid the foundations for subsequent murders and abominations. It set the tone for the eventual replacement of professional military service and responsible national leadership with personal and ethnocentric desires, misuse of office and titles, political illiteracy and petulant idealism and exuberance. Everything forbidden by our traditional values the popular religions eventually became normal. Many “Excellencies” emerged from this murk, filling our post-1966 nationhood with sporadic and spasmodic declarations of new national goals, new federating units and much more.”
We are still living with, and celebrating, the worst conceivable after-effects of these aberrations. We celebrate the Armed Forces Remembrance Day every 15th January, even though that date, as observed in the aforementioned article, “… bespeaks impropriety and is inappropriate for accolades. Nzeogwu’s action, disguised for decades under the mistaken notion that “patriotism” excuses immaturity and unmitigated arbitrary exercise of discretion, birthed many institutional and axiological horrors that we are living with today. It was on January 15 that some highly respected senior citizens, and some of our best senior military officers, were murdered in cold blood.” Another batch was similarly dispatched some six months later, unfortunately as retaliation and with fanfare.
How many “new” years have we had since 1966? And we are regretting many of the negative new things that have become part of our chequered Nationhood. Following the events of 1966, “One major further aftermath, over decades, is the epidemic of prematurely retired military officers, many of whom have passed on, or are living today as frustrated and unfulfilled professionals. Others were last seen, or heard, as failed politicians, owners of failed banks and failed airlines, failed philanthropists, failed traditional rulers and much more. Yet they initially joined the armed forces to become military professionals, unlike some of their later colleagues who joined during the triumph of military regimes as a short cut to wealth.”
If we want to start many things anew, we should perhaps begin by asking many questions and re-examining many things. Is there equity in the land? “Should we be celebrating Armed Forces Remembrance Day on the day families of some of Nigeria’s greatest leaders are in mourning? We have several military exploits, including the final triumph of ECOMOG, or the day Buhari rallied the Nigerian military to route Chadian incursion during the Shagari Presidency, to make our Armed Forces Remembrance Day. That will save us from holding up a day that blights our collective dignity as decent people to salute the gallantry of our armed forces.” The above thoughts, expressed a few years ago, stand as metaphor for the type of mental outlook that should lead into the new year.
But we are still busy trying to develop by sweeping our high quality human capital and professionals, military or not, out of service and out of relevance at the slightest opportunity. And that is after so much had been invested in training them. So, the indices do not suggest some hidden good news out there tgat would miraculously descend on the Federal Republic of Nigeria on January 1st 2022. There is discontent and disquiet everywhere. The nation itself is looking more and more like a living fraud.
And, still going back to January 15, we should stop advertising a date that brings up memories of a civil war that led to “the complete economic disenfranchisement of a section of the country.” To speak of a genuine new Nigeria, let us remember that South Eastern Nigeria remains convinced that it is still an unrehabilitated, unreintegrated, unreconstructed and/or unreconciled fragment that the civil war treats as a sore in Nigeria. As we walk into 2022, let us calmly admit, as observed here in the aforementioned piece, that “The nation’s ill-fated leadership trajectory has been a consistent violation of the cardinal principle of sustainable leadership and national development.”
Our nascent democracy has thrown up leaders with sudden, stupendous wealth of questionable origins. That wealth has impacted only their immediate and extended families, of less than 15 persons, and a few friends. Their local communities, members of their religious congregations, most of their friends and even members of their extended families know how poor or rich they were a few years earlier. Some envy them even. The priests, traditional rulers and other supposed custodians of public conscience ask no questions. They honour them, instead. Meanwhile, almost everyone, including their kith and kin, silently regard them as thieves who got away with their loot!”
Less than 24 hours into a new year, let us think back to many things that can change our nation and our lives. The Nigerian State of today is a product of its own history. Many of the people noisily criticising Buhari today once told us “anything but Jonathan.” So, let us get real. The PDP, the APC and other variants of political assemblies are at the end of their wits. As this column pointed out: “It all boils down to the absence of truth, deep knowledge, nobility of soul, propriety in public office, dignity in self-presentation, graceful ambience, competence and decency in leadership.”
These are precisely the qualities we need to enter the new year with, if it is to really be a new one for us all. Otherwise, and even in spite of that, the compelling reasons for pessimism will not be any less compelling.
