At what point do Nigeria`s classes on nationhood become clashes? At what point do the lessons on nationhood lurch into lethargic and even clashes on lethargy and even larcenous clashes on a national scale?
At what point for example does patriotism take its leave for provincialism to descend? At what point do Nigeria`s teachers become its tormentors and its helpers the hyenas who would who rip it into pieces. There is surely a point just before it goes all wrong.
It was in 1960 that Nigeria became a free country, breaking free of the colonialism that was hatched from the hubris of European hatchet men and imposed on a hurting country. It took less than a decade for Nigerians to become the grotesque ghosts that haunted their own country. A military coup there was in 1966 and from 1967 to 1970, a calamitous civil war.
Once the warehouse was looted the first time, there was no stopping the weasels as military coups followed in 1975,1976,1983,1985 and in 1990. Some of those weasels live on today like wisteria even as the wasteland they hastened Nigeria to become continues to cry out for some accountability for past infractions and indiscretions. That is if they are really past.
At what point in Nigeria do those who should protect national oil facilities in their communities as if they were their own become those who blow them up? At what point do people learn how to set up illegal refineries in the forests even as national refineries lie comatose? At what point do people learn that it is `okay’ to burn public buildings and kill security personnel just as terrorists do?
A country of people who would cut their nose to spite their face can now no longer look itself in the mirror because it is afraid of what it will see. Beyond the horrifying point where students in public secondary schools learn to tear down school furniture deliberately to spite the government and beat up the teachers who confront them, there appears to be little else left.
Sometime last week, in Yobe State, it broke into the news that upon discovery, a Nigerian soldier who inexplicably teamed up with terrorists to attack the same people he was supposed to be protecting turned the gun on himself. How many more saboteurs are within the ranks of Nigerian soldiers who put their lives on the line every day to keep the gnats away from the Giant of Africa?
At what point do public officers sworn to protect public interest begin to deliberately take steps that do nothing but imperil the same public interest? At what point does the dog begin to eat the bone hung around its neck? It is monumental folly to choose to die so as to punish others because having succumbed to death, the satisfaction that would come from seeing others punished evaporates.
Nigeria has become one vast swath of many people who because they believe the country cannot work actually do nothing to make it work. Citing past failed promises and false dawns, they have convinced themselves that things can never change . Every day they live out this incredulous creed, failing or outrightly refusing to lift a finger when they should. Alarmingly, they pass this mentality to their children who gleefully receive it like hot bean cakes.
In Nigeria`s southeast, the IPOB, long proscribed as a terrorist group, trains its hands for war with the government by turning the region into a killing field. Every other Monday, even those who live from hand to mouth and must go out daily lest their children go hungry are forced to remain at home. While the IPOB insists it no longer has a hand in grounding activities in the region every Monday, Nigerians know there is something a group known for its kamikaze approach is not saying. Is it by bringing the same people they supposedly want to emancipate to their knees that the yellow sun will rise? If the hen does not cluck, with what will she feed her chicks?
There is on the streets of Nigeria an eminent sense of frustration which those who lead the country do not appear to share. There is the inescapable feeling that the country has become a free-for-all fiesta where survival depends on the sheer ability to shear off a slice of the national cake however that may be.
The images conjured up each time the warehouse lootings during the Covid-19 pandemic and the widespread destruction of public property during the EndSARS protests come to mind evoke the scale of the malaise.
For a country so precariously perched on the edge of the precipice, the greatest danger is that it does not even recognize it. Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, the walk of snails bathe in blissful ignorance.
How much longer do we have before the fatal plunge becomes a fait accompli? How much longer?
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
