The ongoing banter in social space is incantatory of Nigerian mind and nature. Whether online or offline, it is overtly ritualistic yet political.
Post-2023 elections, politicians and vocal segments of the populace reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of citizenship, power, and democratic dividends.
Each stakeholder manifests a peculiar morass of patriotic experience. Amid the drama, Nigeria thrives as a political theatre – an expansive stage where Nigerians of vast partisan stripes are entertained, misinformed, and informed.
The process, in recent times, assumes the course of indoctrination by courtiers.
The latter manifests as our most malignant affliction. Comprising journalists, politicians, NGOs, and rights activists, their machinations are oft inimical to nationhood, stability, and growth – perhaps because too many among them are deployed as weapons of adverse programming.
This may no doubt resonate as far-fetched to individuals and groups profiting from the status quo, especially the press and civil societies. That is understandable. It is like a bacterium responsible for a pandemic to deem itself the next best thing to happen to earthlings.
For a people programmed for conquest, Nigerians carry on with unabashed ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance is pitiable. But ignorance is expensive and quite scary. Yet Nigerians soldier on unperturbed by the ramifications of it all.
This is what happens when a nation becomes unmoored from reality. It retreats into a fictive nirvana. In this predetermined cosmology, reality is redefined to suit dubious whims, and facts are manufactured to soothe relative bias.
If Nigeria seems unmoored from reality, it’s because our lives and national discourse are dominated by fabricated events. From exaggerated grief over insecurity, misgovernance, and national disasters to celebrity gossip and pageantry of political artifice, the country is sold to desperate narratives at home and abroad.
Whether it is the soaring price of Premium Methylated Spirit (PMS), the insurgent creed of violence resonant with brainwashed minors and young adults, or the virulent manifestations of partisan politics, the compelling nature of the grievances articulated and the pervasiveness of despair are wielded to justify the rationale for Nigeria’s creed of carnage and enduring portrayal as a banana republic by foreign governments and consulates.
A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, has equally morphed into a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement by the masses.
These sentiments thrive in greater depths across geographic and virtual space; as Nigeria rejuvenates from the intrigues of the 2023 polls, a wave of validation and reproof of the incumbent political class and the opposition seeking to dislodge it has produced a charged atmosphere of warring critics and apologists, cynics, and anarchists.
Of the latter, the majority parade flawed presence because they have no real persona and moral substance. Yet en route to the polls, Nigeria suffered their storm of spunk and slogans.
Several media houses, civil societies, and journalists pitched their tents with certain candidates, even as they parroted the official propaganda of foreign governments, consulates, and non-profits pushing predatory self-interest as “impartial observers.”
The participation of large segments of the press, academia, and civil society pre and post-elections has been driven by funded partisanship but like Arundhati Roy would say, “I’m not against people being funded—because we’re running out of options, but we have to understand, ‘Are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Who’s the dog and who are you?”
The situation triggers existential questions about the quality of political participation before and after the elections. How do we determine real and funded patriotism? Are Nigerians inured to the precepts of partisanship astride the politics of reality and illusions?
The jostling over reality and illusion becomes most intense in an oppressive clime where both distort to preserve the status quo of exploitation or repudiate it.
A failure to achieve a balance between oppressive reality and the placebo of illusion eventually leads to anarchy and societal collapse.
In his book, Collapse, economist Jared Diamond lists five precursors to social decay, including a failure to understand and prevent causes of environmental damage; climate change; pillage by hostile neighbors; the inability of friendly neighbors to continue trade; and finally, how the society itself deals with the problems raised by the first four factors.
A common failing of the last item is the dislocation between the short-term interests of elites and the longer-term interests of the societies they dominate and exploit.
Diamond’s last point is critical. The ruling elite’s penchant for corruption, maladministration, and circumventing the law, almost always triggers widespread cynicism, disillusionment, apathy, and finally, rage.
Those who suffer the consequences of misgovernance characteristically scorn loyalty to the nation and increasingly nurse fantasies of violent insurrection as revenge.
The concept of the common good, mocked by the predation of the privileged minority, vanishes and is replaced by the self-seeking “Me-Credo” of the underprivileged majority. Society burns as individuals submit to primal lust.
It’s about time Nigerians grasped the depth and ramifications of misgovernance perpetrated by the ruling class; too many are hoodwinked by the smokescreen of politics as they sheepishly submit their necks and minds to the leash of deified demagogues.
The magnitude of corruption unearthed and currently being investigated by the incumbent administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should elicit somberness and widespread support for the surgical excision of the tumours of corruption from government machinery and public institutions.
Sadly, Nigerians are split between prejudices and base sentimentality, nourished through the means and devices of political actors.
The elections have been won and lost. Nigerians should quit bashing each other in public spaces. People should quit gloating and hurling blame at those who voted for Tinubu as the cause of Nigeria’s hardships. This is unforgivably puerile and infantile.
The task before us belies divisions spurred by political, ethnic, and religious affiliations.
If anything, the 2023 elections exposed our social institutions (cultural, political, religious, academic) as craven tools of prejudice, answerable to demagogues, the corporate state, and overseas predators.
As personal savings and retirement plans become worthless; as unemployment skyrockets and citizenry hopes plummet, we must scorn the call to insurgency by stooges and ragdolls posing as bleeding-heart revolutionaries and patriots.
Their modus operandi is to highlight economic hardship as a consequence of bad leadership resolvable only by their favourite demagogues.
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They seek to weaponise our daily worries into a crisis of faith against the incumbent administration. Curiously, their silver bullet theory conveniently absolves their sponsors – oft among the ruling class – and other partisan actors of blame.
They will not acknowledge that our current social crisis grew over six decades of misgovernance. They will not consider the massive depletion of the world’s resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and climate change as intervening variables in our social crisis.
They would not admit that for several decades, the NNPC, power sector, banking industry, civil service, regulatory agencies, and private sector engaged in frantic pilferage of public treasury.
They would not relate how these social actors jointly sabotaged the manufacturing sector and facilitated huge, unregulated international capital flows.
They would not acknowledge how they wrecked the local economy and perverted the banking and financial system to serve the rich and enslave the poor.
