The wheel of the nation is grinding to a halt; there is no respite anywhere; it is total and comprehensive siege, mental and physical. The more things appear to change, the more it remains the same; even worse. We go to bed with fear; we go to our work and business places in fear. Tears, blood and death are commonplace while basic necessities of life have gone out of the reach of ordinary citizens. The insecurity in the northeast has paled into insignificance as the entire country has become a huge inferno. Bandits, robbers, ritual killers and cultists are running amok. The Nigeria Police Force is in the news for the wrong reasons and unable to burst the crimes. The Police Force is so undisciplined that it cannot rein in a rogue officer and super-cop with bloated ego.
The president has not hidden the helplessness of the government by telling the people to go and pray to God for safety and security of citizens. Yes, he has given up on any hope of solution to the problems. The security forces have become overwhelmed with little appetite to fight insecurity that has become a behemoth. We are confronted with griping existential challenges as farmers can no longer go to farm and to get the next meal is not just a walk in the park. The economy of the country is not built on any known consistent economic model or theory. We are driven on loans and grants with scathing interest from Paris Club, Chinese loans and the International Monetary Fund that is fixated on removal of the phantom fuel subsidy.
Even at that, the loans are not known to be utilized on any visible or concrete project that has impacted on the wellbeing of the citizens. They are mostly used for luxury and exotic goods for the pleasure of political office holders and their minions who appropriate everything as perks of office.
The government prefers to engage our existential problems with propaganda and chasing shadows. Security is politicized and casualties and victims are either covered up or muted in self-censorship. The chaotic scene at gas stations across the country today is like Armageddon. People struggle to buy fuel at filling stations but are told that there is no product while in front of the filling stations the product is freely hawked in kegs and jerry cans by street urchins and hoodlums. Ours has become a lawless country without government as nobody takes responsibility. The current scarcity has been linked to importation of bad fuel that is harmful to machines but nobody has been held responsible. The junior minister of petroleum and his NNPC counterpart are still sitting on their schedules.
Our streets, roads and market places are like lunatic asylum with no order as our mental health has been tasked beyond the capacity of sanity. We are unable to manage even simple traffic on the road as everyone has gone bonkers from those in authority to the little child in the kindergarten. Nobody wants to take his turn in doing anything or be orderly. Nigeria is an oil-producing nation and yet is unable to satisfy domestic need of its citizens. The ripple effect is already on every consumable goods. This is just one aspect of it.
The situation in the country is enough to be taken as a state of emergency but the president prefers to jet away to Brussels attending Euro/African conference soliciting for more loans and debt forgiveness and requesting Europe to come and develop Africa to stem migration from Africa. We have become a mendicant nation and unable to harness our huge resources for the well-being of our people. One is unable to understand the Blackman’s psyche that has all the resources in the underbelly of its own soil and yet is going cap-in-hand to beg for food and security from someone less endowed.
The entire continent has become a huge refugee camp and we buy weapons and turn on one another in strife.
The most traumatic and devastating is the siege on the judiciary which has since lost its pristine nobility and courage to speak to power, and dispense justice without fear or favour. Justice delivery in Nigeria has become a mockery and a huge joke. The process of filing simple documents speaks to the rot and corruption that the judiciary has become. If you don’t yield to the demands of the clerks and their minders that use them as proxies, your process is delayed and your client bears the brunt.
There is physical, mental and psychological siege on the judiciary as the third arm of government. I used to know the judiciary as a place of liberty where you go unfettered. But today, the judiciary itself is chains and fetters and highly militarized. Unbridled security operatives of the Department of State Services and their police counterpart now barricade lawyers and litigants away and stop other businesses in court because they have a common felon and suspect that they have decided to give a larger than life image. Not even the Nuremberg trial of the of the masterminds of the Second World Wart attracted the kind of security being given to Nnamdi Kanu of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). We have not deployed such resources to rescue kidnapped victims who are in their thousands on daily basis. We are simply wasteful with misplacement of priority.
What threat does Nnamdi Kanu pose more than those who are sponsoring the insurgency in the northeast and the banditry that has enveloped the entire country? If he poses such a grave danger and risk to the republic being tried in the federal capital territory, why can’t the state take him to a remote place and conduct the trial? If we must go on as a united indivisible country, we must stop selective justice and treat every citizen equally irrespective of tribe and religion. The government should stop media trial and sensationalizing simple misdemeanour and malfeasance of common felons.
It is now time for us to borrow sense as Nigerians and fight to liberate our country from these buccaneers and merchants masquerading as political leaders. Have you heard how much money individuals, civil or public servants are alleged to have stolen from the state? It is mind boggling. Only an insane person would engage in such level of heist, stealing what he does not need. Now money and material acquisition have been elevated to objects of worship in Nigeria. Little wonder then you see a minor and 17 years old boy that should be in school or learning trade going to kill a poor innocent girl for money ritual. Not to talk of the Yahoo Boys that now feast on faeces and excreta in public glare to acquire power to make money. We have become a country without value system, what a lost people!
While the political leaders are looting the treasury, our spiritual leaders are using their exalted altars to steal from man and God. Like a people under spell, we are not seeing our leaders as the problems of the country. On the contrary, these rogue leaders make us to be chasing and hounding our brothers and sisters because they are of different ethnicity and religion who are victims of the same elite conspiracy and graft.
Now we are waiting for these same leaders again come 2023 to offer us a change. Change to what? We want power shift to the south and I hear some clergy argue that the next president should be a Christian. Not that the person must have integrity and be above board in transparency and seeing the entire country as his constituency. Our qualification for job and public office is our ethnicity and religion; Christian or Muslim, period. It is our misfortune and an anathema that qualification for public office is based on tribe, region and religion. We are in a country where public discourse centres on conflict of wearing Hijab or veil in schools promoted by governors and ministers of the republic.
Nigeria needs competent leaders, not ethnic irredentists and bigots. We have competent people in the demographic spread of this country, north, south, east or west. We don’t need Christian and Muslim leaders; that should be left for their places of worship. The choice before us is to first fight the mental and physical siege that has held us down.
- Kebonkwu Esq is an Abuja-based attorney.