It is just as well that the euphoria that swept the nation following the victory of the national team, the Super Eagles, in the African Cup of Nations soccer competition, has almost run its course. At least, it is being tempered somewhat by a return to the harsh realities of life in Nigeria.
While it lasted, nothing else seemed to matter.The bestial murder of three Korean doctors in Yobe, hard on the heels of the drive-by murder of eight nurses administering vaccines to infants in Kano, passed off as just another grim statistic in Boko Haram’s macabre harvest
The kerfuffle generated by plans to spend N2.2 billion Naira to build a banquet hall in Aso Rock “befitting” the formerly shoeless boy who now lives there, and N9 billion over and above the projected cost on the vice president’s official residence, might well have occurred in an era long past.
Even the request for N4 billion to build a headquarters for an aberration that calls itself the African First Ladies Peace Mission no longer seemed a grave provocation in a country where police officers are trained and housed in hovels.
“Peace mission my foot,” millions of Nigerians might well be saying in indignation.
What peace missions hasthis unelected and unaccountable conclave of freeloaders undertaken? How many of its members can locate Darfur, Timbuktu, or Potiskum on the map? How many refugee camps in strife-torn countries have they visited? How many peace talks have they initiated or staged?
How many peace missions has their host and leader who should set an example — how many peace missions has she led to Yobe and Borno and Bauchi and Jos, or for that matter to those communities just outside Abuja that have been ravaged by Boko Haram terror?
To echo novelist Chinua Achebe in another context, they came, they ate, and they went — the so-called First Ladies, that is. And now the Nigerian taxpayer is being asked to finance what is at bottom a monument to the vainglory of their host.
That such a proposal was ever presented before the National Assembly is at once a comment on its mover’s overweening sense of entitlement and utter lack of a sense of proportion and propriety on the one hand, and the gutlessness of the officials who should have told her that the whole thing was flagrantly indecent, given the country’s circumstances.
Maybe that was the Patience Jonathan of a bygone era. The new, resurrected Patience Jonathan should withdraw the request.
The National Assembly will be legislating itself into infamy if it approves this unconscionable proposal. If the proposal clears the Assembly and President Goodluck Jonathan assents to it, he would be saying to Nigerians that gratifying his wife’s delusion of grandeur that seems woven inextricably into his, rates higher on his Administration’s scale of priorities than providing relief for a burgeoning army of jobless university graduates, to cite just one group, in need of urgent remedial action.
While the euphoria lasted, the farce that the National Assembly has been carrying out in the name of constitutional review drew scant notice. A thoroughly unreliable poll purportedly reflecting the views of Nigerians on the matter was doing the rounds. So were documents purporting to be a “collation” of the views purportedly expressed by Nigerians at consultative conferences that lasted just several hours during which befuddled attendees were asked to vote yes or no on a narrow range of proposals they played no part in formulating.
Those who crafted that instrument also took it upon themselves to “collate” the results. “The people”for whom and in whose name the Constitution is being prepared were virtually shut out of the process.Even the British enforcers of the imperial order in Nigeria, the centennial of whose subjugation of our peoples Abuja is now planning to celebrate on a prodigal scale, accorded their colonial subjects far greater respect than that.
All this, and much more, was swept off the front pages and the headlines and the discussion platforms by the euphoria, the delirious jubilation unleashed by Nigeria’s crowning as Africa soccer champions. It had been 19 years since the national soccer quad last won the trophy. The celebration was therefore understandable.
Reward in cash – in the resilient U.S. dollar and the anaemic Naira- has followed bounteous reward for the players and the coaches who groomed them and the supporting, crew, and so has reward in kind. Members of the team now own choice land in Abuja worth hundreds of millions in Nigeria.
By the time the shower is over, the players will each have amassed from their epic outing a huge and complex property portfolio that nothing has prepared most of them to manage. Some of them may spend much more time thinking of how to handle their fortune than they devote to sharpening their skills. The fortune could turn out to be more of a distraction than an incentive, and some of them may end up wishing it had not happened, at least on that scale.
There is example for it. About two decades ago, The Mac Arthur Foundation’s so-called genius award, designed to free recipients from financial worries so that they can concentrate on their cutting-edge work, went to a young man just out of his teens, a computer geek.
After several weeks, the young man returned the award, worth some $200,000. He said he was spending so much time thinking about what to do with the money that he could no longer concentrate on his work.
To return to the euphoria and the orgy of celebration: To the extent that it gave honour to whom it is due, a rarity in Nigeria, it was unexceptionable.
But it should have been tempered by a sense of proportion. In the excitement of the moment, the Minister for Sports and Youth Development, Bolaji Abdullahi, was reported to have said that if the Super Eagles won, they would be the first inductees in the projected Hall of Fame.
What of those who came before them? I am thinking of Tesilimi”Thunder” Balogun and Elkanah “Ballington” Onyeali who made their mark in professional soccer in England decades before the current stars and even their officials were born. I am thinking of the team that won the gold at the 2nd All-Africa Games in Lagos in 1973 and the team that won the Olympic gold medal in Atlanta, not forgetting the teams that had won the African championship in two previous appearances.
If the team were to win the World Cup in Brazil next year, the nation would have to give each player an oil well. And that would be just for starters. Then the government would rush to appropriate the feat in every conceivable way as proof that the system works and that all is well with the nation, and those who claim otherwise be damned.
This was why, in the time of the dictators and usurpers, a good many of our compatriots were indifferent about the outcomes of soccer competitions in which the national team was a strong contender. They wished the boys would do well for the sake of their own playing careers. They did not want to see Nigeria disgraced.
At the same time, they did not grieve it the team lost, because the government would have conscripted the victory to create the illusion of progress and to serve other dubious ends.
In the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida, cup-winning outings of the nation’s soccer teams were advertised as gains of the doomed Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). The debauched Sani Abacha wasted no time in advertising Nigeria’s soccer gold in the Atlanta Olympics as proof, were any still required, that he was the person Nigerians had been yearning for.
Time to get back to basics, then, before the Jonathan Administration pivots the AFCON victory as a dividend of the Transformative Agenda.
