•With insecurity, divisive forces and a weak economy, this is not a birthday to applaud
It is clear that Nigeria at 61 is not a moment of optimism. Usually, a birthday for this country is often one of pomp, and a look into the possibilities of our diversities.
But not so because, as we write today, a divisive air pervades not only in the ethnic babel of our people but also along religious lines. The founding fathers were not a holy writ. They bequeathed a cacophony of tribes and tongues in our politics. They blotched us with a civil war, yielded the polity to a generation of military adventurism and a sleazy slough of corruption.
Yet they would be aghast at the depth of today’s despair. Right now, the political elite grapples with a lack of consensus on whether a region should throw up the next president, with each region replacing dialogue with a brinkman’s rhetoric.
It is with fear that citizens travel by road or water in the country, even as air travel is a special province of a well-feathered class. In the north, where a place like Jos or Yola or Maiduguri used to be bastions of commerce and rainbow peace of different peoples, we have not heard news if we have not heard of a death by a gunman’s rage on the streets or by machete or by any other macabre means.
The same Jos that gave us one of the great dramas of agrarian peace, Cockcrow at Dawn, is where people go to today with trepidation. Recently a whole town lost over a hundred people, and no one has been held to account. In the aftermath, an innocent bus of travellers ran into the mourners who, in a fit of both revenge and hysteric paranoia, killed the travellers.
It is a testament to how a lack of trust has upturned our psyche: that the innocent is a victim and the predator could seek revenge with a righteous claim.
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Boko Haram has become a national metaphor of military failure but also of corruption, of top men and commanders in uniform who see their tours of duty not in the mould of a messianic soldiery but as opportunity leech and fleece a huge and juicy budget.
On the highways are high stakes of life and death. We no longer complain of potholes as we do of threats of kidnappers. High and low are victims. They take them to the bushes and nondescript hideouts while their families scramble to borrow to heed a ransom call, even if such payments do not always guarantee freedoms and reunions with their loved ones.
Even as the average citizen tries to come to terms with a poor economy with the value of the Naira spiralling out of control against the world’s major currencies, separatist grief is overtaking significant portions of the populations in the southeast and southwest. Even those who share a profound love for a united country catch themselves showing sympathy for Nnamdi Kanu of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Sunday Igboho of the Yoruba Nation.
Right now, the legitimate authorities in the southeast states have become impotent beside the IPOB renegades who were recently able to even show themselves a nightmarish parody of Boko Haram by disrupting students writing a critical examination.
The electoral body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is planning an election in Anambra State in a few months, and many fear that it presages a clear contest between legitimate and illegitimate authority.
Insecurity is the first condition of Nigeria today, and lack of trust a conjoined twin of this unfolding tragedy. We cannot, as people, steer ahead until we can put them behind us, and the prognosis seems bad. The Buhari administration has these on its shoulders as it ponders its legacy. Yet, it has only a short time to tackle them.
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