NIGERIA, PRODIGIOUSLY ENDOWED AND INCREDIBLY WAYWARD
OKEY ANUEYIAGU
The title to this short essay was borrowed from words of the great novelist and activist, Chinua Achebe, who constantly provides us with a consistent voice of wisdom loaded with conscientious and punctilious exposition to the problems with our country. Achebe, the magnifico, and the grandmaster of our literary world, in his lifetime, saw Nigeria as enormously gifted and talented, but desperately useless and endemically sick.
The history of our country’s waywardness, has proven to be a conscious debilitating process that has completely emptied out into time and memory. We must view and consider our history, and all its sordid turns, with very specific goals; with the definite ends that have inevitably, and with dialectic trends, distorted our growth, unity, cohesion and development. In many respects, one is little surprised that the long-lingering persistence of Nigeria’s waywardness has been so predominantly ignored. Its longevity and sustenance distort the mythology of most ignorant Nigerians who are quick to dismiss and explain our past as a normal evolutionary growth of a nation. No matter how we attempt to embroider our sins, we must all be shamed, and, must recoil from the paths that the country has towed from inception to date.
The problems of Nigeria did not start yesterday. It started way back and as far back as our soiled memories can recall. To begin to recall and write about the well over 100 years of the horrifying discontents that have characterized our country’s existence, will be an endless ordeal without providing us with sufficient answers to these seemingly absurd occurrences. I have always known that beneath the query about what has been happening to our country, lay a persistent haunting worry about how we have apparently been damned by this hedious fate and doomed by our unworthiness.
We must acknowledge and accept the many years of the heavy weight and burden of the cycle upon cycle of malevolent destruction, and the pains and agony of seeing the country rise above the cusp of extinction, only to be indignantly taken back to higher levels of violence, anarchy and obliterated opportunities of greatness. Even as the pain of plowing our past is so excruciating, the ephemera dumped on the country by our leaders that have been imbedded in our trifles from day one, are telling explanations for the waywardness, and the fissures that have beclouded our Country.
Today if we can be profoundly certain of one thing, it is the incontrovertible fact that our country, Nigeria, has been besieged by anarchism, and has become divisively dysfunctional, and a dangerous enclave to dwell in. That, despite all the human and natural endowments bestowed upon this country, we have little or nothing to positively show to ourselves and to the world.
The prodigious endowment of our country can be traced back to the period when we were considered to be one of the most prosperous countries in the world. We were number 3 in the entire world in the production, distribution and export of cocoa, rubber and palm oil. We were in the group of the world’s largest producers of textile, sugar cane, sorghum, cotton, magnesium, columbine and tin. We became one of the top 5 producers and exporters of crude oil. We refined our own crude, and exported many useful byproducts of crude. Our country had a viable, strong and an enviable potentially progressive economy that was the toast of the world. And boom, we became desperately poor, despondent and hopelessly, a miserable entity.
The most painful part of the story of our country’s decline, is to recall that we were at a time, the hub of first-rate infrastructural development – we built sustainable railways and road infrastructures, we built dams and hydropower systems, seaports and airports, manufacturing industries, and were on the path of massive forays into being a giant in the field of evolutionary industrial development. It appears evident that we have collectively failed our country, and that it is abundantly clear that we are all deeply vulnerable to the pathologies that started to plague us to our descent into infamy. With the primitive and the gratuitously disgraceful actions and behaviour of our political actors, and the incivility of its leadership, our country essentially, and in such an alarming and catastrophic speed, degenerated into the abyss.
The myriad of problems that have rendered Nigeria a wayward state and hindered its growth are many. They range from political, social to economic issues like; leadership deficiency, followership docility, weak democratic structures and institutions, deficient power (electricity) supply, dilapidated road network, air, rail and waterways transportation inefficiency, insufficient domestic food production and processing, fuel and multiple oil industry issues. These problems and others that include ethnic and religious strifes, corruption, nepotism, kidnapping, terrorism and the killings that follow them, have continued to fester unabatedly, holding our country down in a dangerously precarious stranglehold. It is pathetic that for several decades and still counting, our country has confronted and endured these deep-rooted problems, and has failed, or has been unable to solve or resolve them.
Going through the length and breadth of this country, it is difficult not to find a single Nigerian citizen of age and maturity that can claim ignorance of the calamities that have befallen our country. We all are aware of our problems, the causes and who the culprits are. We know how they planned and perfected their ruthful and rueful ruination of our country. These men and women are still with us, and are still parading the corridors of power, and still descending on us, with their wicked hammers of heterodox doom.
What can be considered to be the impediment on how to create prosperity and peaceful tranquility for our people, can be traced to the past 6 decades or more, that our country has been burdened with a retinue of bad, incompetent, contemptuous, corrupt and inexperienced leaders, who essentially did not, and do not understand the art and science of how to manage a country and its people. The cluelessness and insouciant behaviour of our leaders, coupled with their fecklessness, deprived us of the benefits of keeping abreast with the rest of the world, thereby keeping us all in poverty and misery. Paradoxically, the irresponsible, worthless, and inept leadership that our country has mostly inherited from birth, and their weaknesses, has been our bane, leaving us unable to deal and grasp with dexterity, the intricate predatory nuances of world politics and economics.
The critical issue pervading our political and economic evolution since independence, is the persistent problems of governance, and how these intractable problems have held and strangulated the country, stunting its growth and development. What has become very disturbing and painful about these analytical and prescriptive views about our country, is that the overall cognitive evaluation of our past and our present, paint a very pernicious, contemptuous and consequential dire situation for us, and for our future.
We must all be worried and frightened by the prevailing evidence that Nigeria has become injuriously more fractious than at any time in our history. Even in our psyche, it is abundantly clear that not even the apocalyptic civil war atrocities and the after effects of that rancid and evil war, match the vicious trend of the horrible orgys of killings and the other corybantic events that we are witnessing in our today’s Nigeria. The waywardness of our country can be found without looking very deeply in the waning and decline of trust and confidence in the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary branches of our government. The levels of distrust are so high and alarming, that it has become rather centrifugal, and raising the already high stakes of disunity, hostility and the multifaceted crisis that have engulfed the entire country.
As Achebe predicted, a robust country can be weakened and destroyed when actions ignored and not timely taken can inimically bode ill for the smooth functioning of that country. When we pertinaciously ignore to address the issues of bad governance, corruption, ethnic and tribal bigotry, nepotism, and electoral malpractices, we surreptitiously invite chaos. When we fail to address the issues of productivity, innovative initiatives, educational backwardness, poor management of our natural resources, the diversification of the economy, we leave the fate of the country’s existence and survival in a dangerous balance of endangerment. These pervasive institutional and structural disorders portend for domestic instability and destabilization.
Now, it is clear that the waywardness of our country inspite of the abundance of blessings at her disposal, has precipitated the instability, the hunger and the distortions of the lives of its people. The wanton killings, the lack of empathy and compassion for human life and dignity, and the general desecration of the various structures and institutions, are responsible for our tolling misfortunes.
There is a clear nexus between a legitimate, stable and safe government, its leaders, and the growth and advancement, and that of any society or any country. If the government lacks legitimacy and is unstable, and unable to form, formulate and implement an acceptable polity, foster and promote social and economic plans based on consistent and strong policies; both fiscal, monetary, and other terms, the political, economic and social growth of that country will dwindle and suffer. Unfortunately, these issues have negatively deepened the despair and disenchantment of the people of our country.
The verisimilitude of the Nigeria situation resembles the truthfulness of what our leaders have done to our country, and presenting the most vicious cycle of an open realism of a perfectly recalled account of a people’s bitter and wicked journey through darkness and gloom. To ponder Nigeria’s often bewildering history of the 1966 crisis, the senseless military and civilian killings, and the ultimate killings through starvation, bullets and bombs of well over 3 million innocent civilians in Biafra, is to understand the beginning and the deepening of the callousness that continues to consume us today.
The vertiginous steps of those who falsely claim to be vanguards of a strong and united nation, have today, become even more steep and slippery, thereby causing the country to remain stagnated and abysmally poor and despondent. I am doubtful if we have learned any lessons from our past mistakes; if our visible waywardness has shamed us enough to provide us with any intrinsic measures in our history or culture to immunize us against our new chaos and disorder. I doubt it. And the frightening reality is that today, Nigeria is by far not inoculated from the festering diseases of hate, tribal and religious bigotry, corruption and the many other atrocious calamities that have overtaken the entire country.
Presently, I believe that the exacerbation of many non-democratic practices of governance in our land, are the biggest threats facing our democracy and inevitably forcing down our already battered-down precedents that are leveling our established norms and ethos, and demolishing our constituted institutions, and our people.
I have struggled to come to terms with the level of pain and anguish inflicted by our leaders on the country. It is difficult and painful to see how and where this country has been driven to by those who fought for, and won the war; the war they claimed was necessary to spill the blood of millions of the innocent in order to unite the country and make it strong and virile. It appears that the victors have taken all the bounties of the hallowed victory, and driven the country to the brink of a total collapse. When I hear some Nigerians say things like: “It is a waste of lives to die for Nigeria, because Nigeria is a fraud”, I quiver. These people justify what they say, because they believe that Nigeria lacks accountability, fairness, justice, equity, equality, and not a respecter of the rule of law. Within this group of thinkers, I do not see any tint of unpatriotic spirit in them. Rather, I perceive a certain level of despair, despondency and frustration with the dire realities of living our lives as Nigerians, in a country that is so prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward.
Philosophically, I am a proponent of the dictum that people can never achieve peace and prosperity, if they do not look backward and reflect on their pasts. This is to say, that no good will come out of our violent and wicked past, even as we contemplate that the imposition of the so-called rational ideals and changes would result in a just and fair society. Being acutely aware of our libertine tendencies, and our contradictory ways of life, how are we handling the weakness by many unaided reasons to find out the truth in our waywardness, by truly embracing self-transformation?
An inconvenient truth is the reality that our country is infested with people who have forced their way into public affairs and politics by hook or by crook. This group of people, simply because they have no meaningful and useful private business or lives worthy of their attention outside government, venture into politics and stay in it perpetually without a clue of why they are there, and of when they will exit. These emergency politicians who have no useful impact and nothing worthwhile to offer, appear to do nothing but pollute our systems with their unreasonable and dishonourable actions and judgments. These people, are the problems of Nigeria.
Until we find credible, reliable and knowledgeable leaders and dedicated followers with a complete disquisition on the importance of visionary political and economic ideas, devoid of the known ills that have been bedeviling Nigeria, we will continue to remain incredibly wayward no matter how prodigious our endowment is.
OKEY ANUEYIAGU
A Professor of Political Economy
Is The Author of
Biafra, The Horrors of War
The Story of A Child Soldier
