One thing that most of us are not factoring in our distorted view of issues is honesty and sincerity when looking at our history as a nation. We are oblivious of the fact that we have come a long way in our journey towards nationhood. As our socio-historical patterns suggest, even without the rupture caused by colonialism, communities, groups and identities would have evolved into a larger behemoth through what Abdullahi Smith called the processes of state formation. And since colonial enterprise had since arrested those earlier patterns of development, Nigeria was forced to come to terms with a new reality that was triggered outside the shores of the African continent. As the brutal subjugation of our will unfolds itself, the most realistic option open to us is to summon our God-given mental resources to chart an enduring course. We must forge ahead to a desirable future of our own making, a future that is not externally induced by any vested interest. In the name of decolonization, we cannot afford to regress back into our primordial essences nor immerse ourselves in an uncritical postcolonial conflation.
Beyond the argument that sees Nigeria as temporal and spatial abode of irreconcilable differences, in the social sphere our pre-colonial communities have related fairly harmoniously well for centuries despite the blatant cleavages of our pristine cultures, which are currently being accentuated by postmodern dissonance. Indeed, we started on the promissory note of healthy competition between regional governments under leaders that demonstrated remarkable foresight and understanding of nation building, target setting and development agenda. That was before the setbacks unleashed on us by the strings of political crises and miscalculations of military putschist, which culminated into the Nigerian civil war and the subsequent implantation of a unitary system that had no basis in our political lexicon even under colonial administration.
With the benefit of hindsight, it could be argued that our successive military regimes were solely responsible for our social atrophy, mal-development and institutionalization of corruption that pervaded the various segments of the Nigerian society. We can also recall, based on its wealth of natural resources and human capital, Nigeria had no business abandoning its all round approach to national development in the face of deceptive allurements of the oil economy. The rise of oil prices between 1970s and 1980s has plunged Nigeria into the morass of reckless spending, fiscal profligacy, underdevelopment, mismanagement and corruption. Since then, the country has been cascading downhill with nobody doing anything to avert its heavy crash into an abyss. However, the measures we are deploying to lift us out of the abyss, including externally engineered ones, are purely non-starters. They are not working at all. As the quantum of misery multiplies with our failures to pull Nigeria out of its self-induced quagmire, we have become hysterical.
Nobody is willing to own up to our glaring failures. Collectively and individually, we are refusing to share the blame. In the process of self-exoneration everybody is to be blamed but us. The blame game is beginning to take all sorts of bizarre twists and turns. The elite who are the main architects of our downfall are now looking for ways and means of passing the buck to ordinary folks. First, the elite traded blame amongst themselves. They then shifted gear by extending their blame to other elite from other sections of the country. In the process, the ordinary folks have been caught up in the middle, and consequently the intrigues of the elite have confused them. The elite are also doing everything possible to ensure that ordinary folks do not understand the nature of Nigeria’s problems. All available identity markers and fissures are therefore called upon to ensure that Nigerians remained divided along ethnic, religious, linguistic and sectional lines to the advantage of the elite.
Today, no issue is objectively canvassed outside our primordial lenses. The notion of Nigeria or national interest or anything necessitating acts of patriotism has since been consigned to the background. The nation is always put on the back burner. We think of ourselves or our families or our tribes or our religions and our communities first before seeing things from the angle of our common Nigerian identity. The object of our savage attacks is always Nigeria itself. Meanwhile, we want have a nation we can all be proud to have at the same time. As the oxymoron it implies here, we can be seen nagging endlessly if things are not working for us as expected. You cannot however consciously and willfully destroy the only nation you have and desire to see it prosper as well. You either have Nigeria or you don’t have it. The choice to make of either/or is entirely ours. But no Nigerian should expect other Nigerians to accept views that are cooked up in a primeval soup of any particular pristine enclave.
In the political sphere, we have now reached a point in which we do not see the value or worth of anybody that does not belong to either our tribe or religion. Nigeria has never have it so bad as during the tenures of President Goodluck Jonathan and President Muhammadu Buhari, a Christian and a Muslim adherents, respectively. As we have witnessed it, the creeping tendentiousness under the two leaders was for members of their different faith communities to see them not as national leaders but as exclusively leaders of either Christian or Muslim faithful. Increasingly, some Nigerian Christians feel comfortable only if a Christian faithful is the President in the same manner that some Muslims would rather have a Muslim faithful as a leader. Having faith and trust in only members of our faith community as our leaders are only fanning the embers of mutual suspicion, accentuating our differences rather than understanding in a complex polity like ours. How will this emergent phenomenon help the cause of national unity, I don’t really know? But one thing is very certain that Nigeria is not going to progress under such circumstances.
In the economic domain, we have since abandoned our pretense to making Nigeria great and prosperous through the development of our human capital, economic potentials and natural resources. As stated earlier, every other form of economic activity outside oil industry is no longer being attended to with the seriousness it deserves. In situations where the government is expected to facilitate growth of a certain sector, it would rather be seen constituting itself as an impediment through bad policies and bureaucratic bottlenecks. Since our discovery of oil, agriculture is neglected. If genuine efforts were made to modernize agricultural practices, we would not have been caught in the net of farmers/herders conflicts threatening the corporate existence of Nigeria. Agriculture alone would have accelerated our industrialization processes. It is only modernized agriculture and agro-allied industry that would enable employers of labor to absorb the massive pool of unemployed youth roaming the streets of our towns and cities without hopes and dreams. Government does not seem to have the ability to come up with innovative measures of addressing the youth time bomb through the potentials of our agricultural industry.
In the same breath, the current economic regime is only toying with the idea of leveraging resources from unproductive social sectors for investment in infrastructure. This idea is turning out to be a total ruse. Government divestment in some economic ventures is only leveraging massive corruption perpetrated by very few powerful Nigerians. This can be seen from the rapid deterioration of our infrastructure, and the starving of health sector. Thus, as the social sector is dwindling, as the indices of poverty are shooting through the roof, and as suffering and misery are multiplying all over the place, the neoliberal economic model is proving to be unsustainable.
Education is yet another sector that needs critical intervention. For sometimes now our system of education has become dysfunctional mainly due to corruption and neglect. Government at all levels and stakeholders are merely paying lip service to education reforms. Through its tinkering with neoliberal economic policies, Nigerian government seems to be buying the argument that investment in education is a burden that must be shifted to private entrepreneurs. This is exemplified through the promotion of private investment in the sector. However, the mushrooming of private schools and universities does not seem to be paying off. Standards and performance indices are everywhere falling sharply. Right now, nobody is sure about the purpose of the type of education imparted to Nigerian children in both our public and private school systems. This deplorable situation is more acute in some sections of northern Nigeria where the value of education is totally lost upon the people.
Again, culture is also suffering. As things are in the country right now, postmodern religious revivalism has been threatening to suffocate our means of cultural expression. As the newfangled puritanical religious movements gained more grounds, attack on cultural modes of expression become frequent. We don’t seem to understand that culture is obviously the fertile ground in which society, ethics and values that cohere the people are nurtured. Nigeria is not going to jell through its mantra of unity in diversity without giving currency to our rich cultural heritage. National culture or values can only germinate and flourish through a strong sense of attachment to the wealth of traditional cultures we are endowed with. Although some Nigerian youth are beginning to realize the potentials of our culture industry, more needs to be done in terms of our collective intervention towards the creation of an enabling environment for cultural entrepreneurship, modernization, creativity and innovation.
That is the way to develop the habit of looking at the bigger picture in Nigeria, is it not?
