Olorunfemi works for Hoofbeatdotcom, a Nigerian communications consultancy and publisher of Africa Enterprise

INTO THE NEW YEAR 2025

JOHN SEGUN ODEYEMI  urges all to fight for a nation worthy of the name

In every conglomeration or configuration of shared spacial co-existence, to survive, we must mitigate and protect individuals’ rights within the polity.  In this instance, I am specific about the right to freedom of speech. 

As much as I love the civility of mutual respect, I cannot comprehend the puerile and almost non-rational attitude of most of Nigeria’s youth today.  No thanks to social media where everyone now is a content creator. 

Whatever garbage is put out is required to be liked and shared. I fail to recognize the positivity of the class of those who’s future are being stolen yet remain enarmoured by some perceived successes of governance in our nation. 

In these young people’s incurable optimism, fanned into life by various factors, they fail to recognise that every government fails when they are unable to protect the lives and property of their citizens. 

When the people are hungry, desolate and poverty stricken, yet told to endure some more – and those counseling patience and endurance keep on enriching themselves and their cronies…  I fail to see your optimism.  I ask for you to be intentional, honest and altruistic in your analysis of the state of our coexistence in a supposed nation-state.

What nation?  Someone suggested ‘there was a nation’, but I aver that there was never a nation. However, if for argument’s sake, one were to concede and agree that there was a nation, prosaic and quaint as it may sound, that nation was either in gestation, comatose at birth or a still birth.

As for the state of that nation; shambolic, disgraceful, the bastardization of a heritage of virtue, of ethics; here a good name is not preferred to silver and gold.  And because we left an oil lamp burning on our thatched roof, we incinerated what our forebears bequeathed to us.  We no longer honor those who serve, those who build so that the community may grow.  Rather, viscerally, we celebrate those who are morally rotten, compost of a dunghill.  

Every altar in the land has been desecrated and every memory of those gone before dragged through murk, and mud.  This seismic shift is akin to a communal schizophrenia – herein lies the most important question – how do we fix a communal collapse of rationality and the capacity or desire for common good?

We are now a fragmented people because we broke that which was the soul of the experiences of our families, relationships, religion, our economy and politics and our culture.  Therefore, without an established identity to stand on, the nation drifts based only on the hope that the “ship” will not hit the rocks to disintegrate until all that is loot-able has been looted from its hold. 

Here is a Banana Republic run by brigands, opportunists and mad men.  It is worse than an asylum because lunacy has become a shared experience between the committed and the supposed caregivers. 

The populace have been so mentally traumatized and denigraded that they can only moan and groan about their servitude. Ranka de de, they offer platitudes to their own oppressors as if begging for crumbs to fall from their tables to the millions of Lazaruses who grovel and groan, dusk to dawn, daily, all over the country in an attempt to salvage the fragmentation and make ends meet as best as possible is the only way to survival. 

Unfortunately, those sworn to honor believe that honor carries no currency.  To create a society where the two percent are the super wealthy, with an unrecognisable and unaccounted for middle class – and the rest of the population are forced into platitudes, prosaicisms, where citizens become scavengers in the sewage of poverty created by the two percent; that is the reality of a nation that has only existed in theory and in dreams.  

There was no nation, there is no nation, therefore, there is no state – there is an existence, ephemeral at best, scripted and directed by megalomaniacs and despots.  This is a new year, wake up, open your eyes and minds, fight for the establishment of a nation worth calling our own

• Odeyemi is an Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, IBCS, Xavier University of Lousisiana, New Orleans, United States