Preamble
Let me start today with a Qur’anic admonition which I have frequently quoted in this column but which has consistently meant nothing to the rulers of Nigeria. It goes thus: “…Beware of a calamity that may descend not only on the perpetrators of injustice amongst you; and be warned that Allah’s retribution can be very severe on the unjust…”
Q. 8:25.
History is an invisible teacher. It teaches the experience of the past to the inexperienced people of the present with a view to guarding them towards a safe future. Some people perceive history as the best teacher because it warns against the vanity of human wishes as much as it encourages the emulation of impeccable exemplariness of the past.
Others call it a bad teacher because it does not practically prevent people from falling into the quagmire of life.
From whatever angle it is observed, however, history remains the undisputable teacher of all teachers which can be described in any way by anybody depending on the side of the divide to which each observer belongs. Thus, for as long as human beings remain in existence, passing through the coast of history will never cease to serve a meal of lesson.
In the past couple of years, Libya stood out as a bastion from where the smoke of history was oozing out into the firmament of Africa and the Middle East for some misguided African rulers to inhale some scents of experience from. Of all the Middle East countries so engulfed in political turmoil, perhaps the least expected to join the fray was Libya. And that assertion would have become an axiom if (Gaddafi) the then 69 year old despot of that country had heeded the warning of history by reacting sensibly to the premonition coming from the neighbouring Tunisia.
Misconception
There had been a general but erroneous belief about the trend of the foraging revolts in the Middle East which started in 1979 with the fall of the imperial monarch of Iran, Muhammad Pahlavi, who styled himself the Shah-n-Shah (King of King). But the truth is that the revolts actually began two years earlier (1977) in Egypt. It was called ‘Egyptian Bread Riots’.
The two-day riots of January 18 and 19, 1977 were a spontaneous reaction by hundreds of thousands of peasants to the World Bank and IMF mandated removal of state subsidies on foodstuffs. The then President, Anwar Sadat, had, in response to IMF’s recommendation, increased the price of a loaf of bread by just one Piaster (an equivalence of one Nigerian Kobo). The policy was the height of insensitivity, on the part the government, to the murderous plight of the masses at that time.
By the time the dust settled, about 79 people had been shrouded for burial while over 800 others became patients in the casualty sections of many hospitals in the country. The riots ended only after the reversal of that obnoxious policy and the restoration of the removed subsidies. That singular incident, added to the general discontent in the land hitherto caused by the evident class dichotomy, eventually led to the assassination of President Sadat three years later (1980).
From thence, Egyptians became conscious that the only language understandable to their government was violent revolt. Thus, in 1986, barely six years after the death of Sadat and the assumption of office as President by Hosni Mubarak, another major riot broke out in Egypt.
On February 25, 1986, about 17,000 Egyptian conscripts of the Central Security Forces (CSF), otherwise known as Egyptian Para-military Force staged a violent protest in and around Cairo city destroying two major hotels and targeting the properties of the upper and the middle classes. The riots caused by a rumour that the government had decided to increase the then two-year compulsory national service to three years without any commensurate remuneration lasted three days with official casualty figure put at 107 while over 2,000 people were said to be terribly injured.
Unlike Sadat who quickly reversed his foodstuff subsidy policy, the only lesson that Hosni Mubarak could learn from that experience was the use of force against the protesters. Ever since, Egypt had become a delicate gun powder waiting to explode anytime. If there was any surprise about the recent Egyptian revolution that ended Mubarak’s 32-year regime ignominiously therefore, it was the delay of the time of that explosion.
With the Iranian and the Egyptian experience, one would have expected other rulers in the region to learn a lesson but as a Yoruba adage goes,” a dog that would die in perdition will never respond to the whistle of the hunter”.
Tunisian experience
In Tunisia, the protests leading to the flight of the tyrannical President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia were instigated by the gruesomely symbolic suicide of one Mohammed Bouazizi on December 17, 2011. The 25-year-old College graduate had used his University certificate as a collateral to obtain a bank loan to venture into retailing some farm products having realised the futility of looking for job in a country where about 14 per cent of the populace was unemployed.
But when his consignment of farm products were confiscated by government officials for not obtaining permit to sell farm products, the young man concluded that his country didn’t need him anymore and decided to commit suicide by setting himself ablaze. He died in a hospital a few days thereafter.
The public reaction to his death was unimaginably spontaneous.
Violence erupted across cities and towns as already aggrieved youths trooped to the streets burning whatever could be burnt and maiming whoever could be captured among government agents. The demand was no longer for reforms but for the removal of the President. By that time, the President tried to address some of the issues against which complaints were made. But then, it had become too late for such efforts to yield any sensible result. When the coming signals were no longer positive he knew that the die had been cast and decided to flee the country thereby ending his 24-year-old regime with historic ignominy.
The case of Bouazizi who set himself ablaze and was nationally pronounced a martyr as well as the father of the revolution was just an atom in the complex story of longstanding discontent in Tunisia.
There were many other cases of the like but three main factors can be said to be the immediate precipitates of the Tunisian revolution.
These were corruption, unemployment and insensitive affluence publicly displayed by government officials.
Gaddafi’s reaction
While those revolts were going on in Tunisia and Egypt, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s impression was that the Presidents of both countries were mere jellies who could hardly manage their matrimonial homes. It was far from his imaginary dream that the surging political tsunami in the Arab world could come near Libya let alone consuming him. After 42 years of unbridled despotism, Gaddafi reopened the film of Pharaoh’s history for the world to behold. Like Saddam before him, he lost all that he lived for, including most of his children.
The story of the Tunisian, the Egyptian and the Libyan revolutions, cannot be relayed in isolation. There seems to be more of the like to tell in the very near future. That story is not in any way dissimilar from that of Syria or Yemen. And if the hanged President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had not met his doom in the hands of his imperial friends turned enemies, he would have probably met a Waterloo in the hands of his own people.
In virtually all the Arab countries, education is free from the primary school to the university. There is no problem of electricity, water, roads, rail system, food and housing. The only two areas in which the people of those countries have problem with their governments are unemployment and lack of freedom to partake in governance. And for those two reasons, a political tsunami swept the length and breadth of what is called the Middle East like a hurricane.
Morocco and Algeria
The Moroccan monarch and Algerian President were only lucky to have heeded the warning tune of that tsunami in time thereby escaping its consequences. The lesson they learned from the experiences of their colleagues quickly served them in good stead. Otherwise, they would have ended up like Gaddafi or Mubarak.
Here in Nigeria, where none of the above mentioned infrastructures is available despite the enormous material resources with which the country is naturally endowed the rulers’ stock in trade is to ferry the scarce resources of the country illegally to some other African countries under the guise of arms purchase. Rather than utilising those resources to boost the general standard of living and thereby uplift the status of the country, the priority of our government is to squeeze the citizenry dry through the removal of a non-existing subsidy on oil and callous imposition of frivolous increase on the tariff of electricity in even when it is evident that Nigeria has no stable electricity despite the so-called privatisation of the public power sector.
While the Tunisians became restive over 14 per cent unemployment figure, Nigeria is proudly grappling with about 72per cent of unemployment rate even as the government keeps drumming the tune of becoming one of the 20 most economically viable countries in the world. What a grand self-deception?
The warning here is for the doubting ‘Thomases’ who are still in the dream land in Nigeria and the rest of Africa to open their eyes and clearly see the vanity of human wishes in the cited Arab nations. Such tendentious talks as: “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE IN NIGERIA” only belongs to parochial people who still live in the primordial time. To avoid becoming like flies dying in the bottle of wine, men of reason had better learn from the experiences of others before some others begin to learn from their own experiences.
The role of justice
Justice is fundamentally sacrosanct in the reckoning of Allah. It is the scale with which good governance and pious leaders are measured.
An unjust nation ruled by an unjust leader is Hell in which just peasants are roasted. But where you have people who are educated enough to know their right; where you have people who are conscious of their common affinity; where you have people who believe in God and His capability to bring justice to an unjust nation, let no one think that such people can be exploited indefinitely. Those in power in Nigeria today who think they can live perpetually on injustice should remember that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak never thought that nemesis could afflict them one day. Their episodes are now part of history. Prophet Nuhu (Noah) never prayed for the destruction of his nation and people even after many centuries of preaching to the deaf. His prayer only came when, one day, a small child carried on the shoulder of his father asked for a stone to be thrown at him (Nuhu) just as most people in the nation had been doing to him for several centuries.
He then concluded that with the example of that little child it became evident that even the great grand children of that generation would continue atrocities in the land and remain hostile to God just like their parents. Thus, when he prayed to God for the change of the generation, it was divinely accepted with ‘automatic alacrity’. The rest is history.
In history, we also learn how the people of Prophet Lut (Lot) were destroyed by divine order for indulging in homosexuality and the people of Prophet Shu’ayb were subjected to ruins for commercial cheating. We are also told in the Qur’an about the plight of the people of ‘Ad and Thamud who transgressed in the land. Each of these people was punished for a particular crime following their refusal to repent and show remorse. Thus, they came to serve as a lesson for others after them. Unfortunately, all the crimes that led them into ruins are committed in Nigeria today and the so-called leaders are the champions of those crimes.
Nigeria for instance
The current situation in Nigeria is by far worse. Here is a country where corruption has graduated from a crime to a pride, and both conscience and shame have taken a permanent flight thereby decimating the future for the generations yet unborn. Here is a country where vices are tied to the aprons and ethnicity and religion while ministers and some criminal merchants (masquerading in the cloak of religion) are audaciously stealing public funds and ferrying them to other countries for keep with no regards for any consequences. Here is a country where well known unremorseful criminals are granted state pardon and rewarded with national honours at the expense of conscience and shame. Here is a country where the so-called privatisation policy is being formulated not for the growth of national economy but for the benefit of the formulators who see themselves as the inheritors of the nation’s wealth. Here is a country where pseudo-clerics serve as suppliers of arms and ammunition of crooks even brigands enjoy patronage of the government in the perpetration of atrocities. Here is a country where official insurgency against the citizenry is a political instrument for silencing the voices of dissent and for self-perpetration in public office.
When such vices as mentioned above are perpetrated in a society, religion is often seen as the last bastion to which the populace look for solution. But when religion itself becomes the haven of crimes as in the case of Boko Haram and various forms of fraud in religious sanctuaries in the country what else remains as hope for the innocent few in that society?
To think that such crime can be committed without nemesis is to live in a fool’s paradise. Therefore, let those in Nigeria who refuse to learn from ancient history try to learn from the recent one. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. A word is enough for the wise.
