Professor Iyayi died in the hands of Nigeria
I have always believed that what makes an individual poor is not so much his/her lack of material resources as his/her lack of the requisite imagination to deal with that lack of resources in an integrative way. At any point in time, poverty cannot lead to the destruction of any man or woman. What destroys is this frightening vacuity of mind. When a man reaches that stage of flailing his arms around the air wildly hitting out at anyone rationally or irrationally, you know he is as good as gone. I know this because I see it a lot in my dog. Whenever I see him uselessly flailing his paws and looking wistfully at passing birds flying high up, I know he has lost it, at least for that day. For, I never can tell whether he is thinking of dinner or of flying.
By the same token, a country is not poor because it lacks enough resources to cater for its citizens or even develop itself. A country is not poor because it cannot pass muster in international or cross-border competitions. No matter how rich or ennobled at starting point, a country is soon rendered poor and stricken when it has leaders who are not leading it or enriching it. When the major preoccupations of a country’s leaders are the deadly combination of self-gratification and self-justification, then you have a problem. Indeed, that country is poor because of the vacuity of mind of its leading statesmen. This vacuity will sooner or later destroy the country and its citizens. Any interested researcher or even disinterested observer can come quickly to the conclusion that Nigeria as a country is already destroyed, thanks to, yep, its vacuous leaders. Now, that leadership has started to destroy its own citizens.
There is no sane individual who plies Nigerian roads that is not shoved aside DAILY by one governmental convoy (ferrying frolickers!) or police convoy or bank convoy! This column, along with many others, has repeatedly stressed that no sane society should allow any group of people tear furiously through traffic the way Nigerian governmental functionaries, police and bank vans do. Now, look what this country has gone and done to Prof. Festus Iyayi, one of the most distinguished and respected academics in this country through the convoy of Gov. Wada of Kogi State.
When I heard the news that the Kogi governor’s convoy had killed the professor, I was sad for many reasons. First, that death represented for me a sealing of the fate of Nigeria. Prof. Iyayi was one of those who believed in the Nigeria project because his faith in the ability of ASUU to make Nigerians and its leaders understand the reason for applying reason in national affairs was unshaken. I never met him yet I met his commitment to being unwavering in his belief. He believed where many of us had lost faith. If he did not, he would not, at his age, have committed himself to travelling the length and breadth of this country to attend meetings. The tendency is there to believe that ASUU fights battles for its own ends and thus Iyayi died in an ASUU struggle. That view was expressed by someone who reacted to the online version of the news but it was heartening to note that practically every other respondent dressed the fellow down for failing to see beyond his nose. Clearly, anyone can see that when ASUU goes on strike to press for something, the nation is often the better for it as universities are raised to higher platforms of performance, and the staff and students are the ultimate beneficiaries. Iyayi did not die in an ASUU struggle; Professor Iyayi died in the hands of Nigeria.
That is my second reason for being sad. Nigerian leaders created and are maintaining the present social disorder for personal aggrandisements. Listen as I tell you. Now, every single government official uses not just sirens but convoys – the executive, legislative, army, state functionaries; police, local government, palm-wine tapper functionaries… And where are they all tearing through the traffic to get to? Just name them: in Nigeria, we use convoys to convey oga-on-top to the offices or hospitals or girlfriends’ apartments, the wives to the markets, the girlfriends to their friends’ apartments, etc. Now, traffic in any Nigerian city is chaos on the throne as people need to become wild behind the wheels in order to get home. There is no law, there is no order. Everyone flails uselessly and wildly at the others’ throats, along with the commensurate verbal insults and deprecating abuses, just to get that advantageous edge to get home first as if trying to breast a tape.
Sadder still is that the drivers of these vehicles are all drawn from the society. They do not come from Mars. They are therefore, our neighbours, friends, husbands, relatives, sons; we who walk or drive along these roads. When governmental vehicles drive in a tearing hurry against every sense of traffic reason and safety, they therefore have to shove us their own neighbours, friends, wives, relatives, sons, daughters out of the way, sometimes damaging their neighbour’s, friend’s, wife’s, relative’s, mother’s or father’s vehicle or legs in the process. Yes, the very many people who have died in these unruly road behaviours simply increased by one last week. They have been relatives of these drivers and commuters. Imagine a driver getting home and being told that the accident he caused had claimed his nearest and dearest. Just imagine that deep, deep irony. That is what literature, and the courts, feed on.
Wait, there’s more to be sad about. We all know what power is like: it assiduously takes over an individual. S/He finds that s/he can do anything and get away with it until s/he begins to act like a monkey. Power in the hands of an educated man or woman is safer because the voice of his/her education would tell him/her again and again that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Not so the not so educated. Power in such hands is at best a very risky business and at worst a destructive gale. To them, ‘Just drive’ means ‘you own the entire road’; ‘let no one come near the vehicle’ means ‘gun down all ants, cockroaches and rats pretending to be people that cross this vehicle’; and ‘escort this money’ means ‘suspect and kill everyone you meet along the road whether or not they come near the vehicle’. Thus it was that once, while travelling along a Nigerian highway, the vehicle I was in was unfortunate enough to accost the convoy of then Vice-president Atiku. Only the savvy driving of my companion saved us that day as the convoy took the entire two-lane road and it had everyone else jumping into the bush over culverts. The alternative was to wait and be hit head-on by these semi-illiterate relatives of ours holding in their hands the illusion of power and understanding very little or nothing of it.
For goodness’ sakes, no life in this country is less or more important than any other. It cannot be said indeed that any government functionary becomes indispensable once he/she gets there and has to be protected at all costs. That’s a capital NO for that, unless of course you want to count their parasitic existences. So, why should they be so interested in protecting themselves at the expense of the people they are supposed to watch over?
Worse yet, and this is the last, every government official caught out has always found ways of displaying inhumaneness by blaming the victims. This is exactly what Kogi State press officials did by peddling falsehood over the Iyayi matter. That is just classless. Such utterances show more than anything else that the country is as good as gone. Only serious social engineering can bring us back from the brink now.
