In spite of fears expressed in Malthusian doctrines on the proportionality of economic and population growths, the poor is eventually going to get distressed. Demography, the type in which attention is paid to collective development of human faculties, is by all parameters an asset. Quality population cannot be a liability to economic growth and social development.
Our current circumstances apart, the argument of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) seems to be quite compelling. Those who argue that the possibilities of human suffering are inescapably due to the scarcity of natural resources such as fresh water, food, land and energy, the unveiling of which are ascribed to our unsustainable consumption habits, also have a strong case.
In our context, the possibility of exhausting natural resources is indeed grim. It is therefore not something to be ignored by those whose responsibility it is to shepherd society towards a desirable end. There is thus no doubt in my mind, nations and societies that planned their way of life pretty well cannot be compared with those that exist on ad hoc basis.
People that live a measured life, such that is informed by a rational criterion or a sense of reflection, are always better off in comparison to those that do not pay attention to the idea of planning their lives for the good of today and tomorrow. After all, despite our confused state, there appears to be a great deal of purpose to human existence. Looking at it cumulatively, not on case-by-case basis, planning should have been a core value of all human systems, practices and endeavors. And if that is to be the case, planning for the attainment of purpose can inescapably become a very vital means of human survival, a necessity that is mostly ignored by people, our people in particular, who live from hand to mouth in their day-to-day existence. This state of anomie, which shouldn’t have been the case in the first place, only afflicts any group that has lost the sense of its being in its location, in the confines of its identity markers, and in humanity’s kaleidoscope of differentiation. How do we plan for a realistic existential trajectory for ourselves, for our progeny, and in short, for a desirable future? First, we must identify who we are, how we are, where we are, and what we want to be in the midst of self-induced predicament.
Conscious human beings are those specie specifics of our own kind who carefully decide what they want for themselves through rational choices. What we are as individuals or as groups is ultimately the function of the choices we make. But we should avoid becoming mere eunuchs or passive spectators in the harem of history. The lever that drives our own mode of history making must be controlled entirely by us, if we really want to escape with our human dignity intact, with our untainted self-worth from the incongruity of our corporeality and soullessness. Otherwise, we will continue to serve as inconsequential footnotes in someone else’s historical pathways. As hermits of a contradictory civilizational gridlock that is perpetuating our collective suffering, we cannot by all means escape common association with meaningless diatribe against our miserable beings and existences. The most worrying dimension of our uninformed re-writing of foundational narratives is in our insistence that Nigeria is an accident of history. We go about this undigested perception as if all other modern nations are not products of the same processes of historical accidents.
No matter how we choose to rationalize its being and becoming, whether we see it as a mistake of history or as mere geographical expression that perchance happened to be created independent of our will by the British colonizers, Nigeria, once a very promising postcolonial African entity, is a country that is currently caught up in a vicious web of unabated lunacy. In the ensuing madness that afflicts our collective sensibility, ignorance, narrow-mindedness and irrationality of all shades and colors seem to be gripping a significant number of us in the country. Reason, rationality and critical thinking seem to have taken French leave from our shores. Rational and patriotic voices in public discourse have almost completely become drowned by the cacophony of idiocy, maliciousness and stupidity in the mainstream media, and social media most especially. And in all our atrociousness, the nation continues to take the heat, to remain the major casualty of our perfidy.
We can see this manifest problem through the pretense of some of us that all is well as our nation wobbles precariously under the weight of unending threats to our mutual co-existence. Yes, large doses of ignorance of history and reality have taken over our sense of propriety. If not ignorance, what makes us think that our nation is a conglomeration of quisling entities, existing under the influence of irreconcilable loyalties and dominions? Again, what makes us think that our situation is so unique to the extent of thinking that other nations have not passed through similar historical trajectories? We are deliberately refusing to take cue from the experience of the evolutionary motion of modern European nations that have been cobbled out of diverse ethnicities, groups and principalities. What else is the use of history if not appropriating its lessons to our own advantage? Whatever is the case, modernity, which is the driver of the type of development we aspire, has its own rules of engagement. We either agree with our own rules of engagement or we call it quits altogether. But no nation will endure through an endless process of disruptions, sabotage and chicanery. Political instability will never allow for a meaningful social progress or development in all its ramifications.
Anyway, we cannot aspire for modernity or its developmental bliss and, at the same time, insist on recoiling into our primordial cocoons. No, no, no! We cannot have it both ways. It does not happen the way we think it does. However, we must make conscious decisions over how we really want to see our nation. Society can only make progress based on our collective will and unalloyed resolve to positively move things forward. A nation cannot prosper through wanton antagonism, mutual recrimination and unfounded suspicion between communities, groups and sections of the country. Ideally, our diversity should have been an asset, a source of strength to our desire to attain modern nationhood. In Nigeria however, our diversity is becoming the source of our headache. We must all agree based on our own rules of engagement, procedures, regulations and laws, especially those we have collectively enshrined in our institutions, Constitution and codes of ethic, to forge a strong and virile nation based on social justice, equity and fairness.
As Donald Trump puts it in his response to the ideological crisis at Charlottesville, “hate, bigotry and violence” should not be allowed to dominate our communicative spaces. Hate will never help any nation to achieve its goals. In Nigeria, some people think the triple vices of hatred, bigotry and violence could help their cause. Never! The North thinks the South hates it because it has produced a chain of leaders, military and civilian, for the nation during the greater part of our postcolonial history. The South itself thinks that it is politically marginalized and the development of Nigeria is retarded due to the incompetence of northern rulers. The Southwest thinks the North is not willing to accept any power sharing formula as it dominates the political order in Nigeria. The Southeast also thinks the North is its mortal enemy since the Nigerian civil war. For that reason, the region wants to opt out of the union for the perceived injustice against it. The South-south similarly thinks the entire country is dependent on its oil resources; it too wants total control of its resources as the region contemplates going its own way if its formula of resource control is not accepted. The North that is thought to be politically cohesive under the General Yakubu Gowon, a Christian Head of State from Jos, is now fractured along ethno-religious fault-lines, and as a result of communal violence. So is the Southeast beginning to realize now that it cannot coopt South-south to its Biafra agenda. The Southwest is also realizing the futility of drumming balkanization of Nigeria in the name of restructuring or true federalism. Simply put, there is confusion everywhere.
Amidst all this, everything is viewed from the prism of ethnic jingoism and religious bigotry. By way of elaboration, the dominant ethnic groups have for sometimes now been slugging it out through their contestations for control of power and resources. The Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba most especially have been doing everything possible to set the country on fire due to their irredentist miscalculations, and vice versa. In the religious realm, Muslims, especially with the upsurge of puritanical Islamic sect, are increasingly seeing Christians are their problem in the political equations of the country. In the same manner, Christian denominations are assertively politicizing their participation in Nigerian affairs, as they perceive the threats of Muslims. Consequently, we are now faced with the prospect of a deepening misunderstanding between our two main faith communities, with both sides perceiving its security and wellbeing only if one of its own is occupying the number one political office in the land. We have seen this tendency manifesting during the tenure of President Goodluck Jonathan and President Muhammadu Buhari, respectively.
Yes, the problems afflicting Nigeria are structural, but not in the sense we politically and culturally perceive them as irreconcilable, but obviously in economic/social terms of systemic inequities, injustices and misplacement of priorities by the dominant elite. That’s what needs restructuring for a better Nigeria. One thing that must be made clear to all centrifugal forces threatening to full down Nigeria is that when the chips are down, when blood is split in the name of whatever sentimental or irrational cause anybody is championing, no group, I repeat, nobody is going to have it their way, the way we imagine it in our dreams of balkanizing, restructuring or “true federalizing” Nigeria, as the case may be. If you doubt my claim, lets give it a shot and see how it is going to turn out.
Mr Liman is professor of Comparative Literature and Popular Culture at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria
