When disillusioned youths under the aegis of Arewa took on the responsibility to answer their compatriots under the aegis of IPOB and MASSOB over their trenchant demand for Biafra, my mind went to Chinua Achebe’s epilogue: There was a country. In the part subtitled: Nigeria’s Painful Transitions: A Reappraisal, Achebe had remonstrated: “The post Nigeria-Biafra civil war era saw a “unified” Nigeria saddled with a greater and more insidious reality. We were plagued by a home grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling class.”
It is that plague that has made Nigeria, despite the billions of petro-dollars earned for nearly five decades, from the oil resources of the Niger Delta, a failing state. It is that plague that has allowed the elites to pilfer humongous portions of the resources and gift the country an army of incendiary youths who are ready to bring Armageddon on themselves and the country. Because the plague has exacerbated the natural fault lines of our country, instead of mending it, the inter-ethnic relationship has become like the fatal love in Elechi Amadi’s: The Concubine.
In his work, Amadi weaved an intricate web of tragedy around Ihuoma, whom Anyika, the medicine man, had identified as a sea-goddess. Perhaps, Nigeria is a sea-goddess? Talking of Ihuoma, Anyika had divined: “There are a few women like that in the world. It is death to marry them and they leave behind a harrowing string of dead husbands. They are usually beautiful, very beautiful, but dogged by their invisible husbands of the spirit world. With some spirits marriage is possible if an expert in sorcery is consulted. With the Sea-King it is impossible.”
With the kind of rapacious elite Nigeria is saddled with, has the Nigerian marriage become impossible? Has Nigeria become like Ihuoma, a potentate with great potentials, wished for; but who gifts misery and death, to those desiring to consummate a permanent relationship? When Wigwe, the father of Ekwueme, whom Ihuomma’s beauty had turned mad and desperate, consulted Anyika, he was told clearly that the Sea-king “is too powerful to be fettered and when he is on the offensive he is absolutely relentless.”
When Wigwe asked: “Is there nothing we can do to make the marriage work?” The medicine man replied: “Nothing.” Perhaps, it is oil and its oily corruption that is Ihuoma? As long as it flows and the desperate craving for it persists, maybe the marriage of the ethnic nationalities in Nigeria will bring only misery and death to its people? Perhaps it is the perfidious elite, the home grown enemy, to whom the misguided folks are beholden that is Ihuoma or are they the four-hundred Sea-King, that the doomed Ekwueme boasted, he would confront?
The grave challenge confronting Nigeria was identified by Achebe in: There was a Country, thus: “Nigeria needed to identify the right leader with the right kind of character, education, and background. Someone who understand what was at stake – where Africa had been, and where it needed to go, for the second time in our short history we had to face the disturbing fact that Nigeria needed to liberate itself anew, this time not from a foreign power but from our own corrupt, inept brothers and sisters!” It is the void created by failed leadership that all manner of potential warlords are striving to fill.
At inception, many thought the present government had the requisite potential. Unfortunately, through forced and unforced errors, there are now doubts. Those who never believed originally that anything good can come from the government have become even more trenchant in their determined opposition. Gradually, the country is sliding into a dangerous stalemate with all the potential consequences for our fledgling democracy and even for the country itself.
As I had argued here at the inception of this regime, the presidency needs to gain some insight from Lee Kuan Yew’s seminal work: From Third World to First. Part of the impetus for the rise of new Biafra agitation is the perceived abuse of public power by the triumphant faction of the party that won the last election. Believing in the notion of ‘winner takes all’, the faction had filled and is still filling key political space with relations and members of its own faction, to the detriment of national cohesion, and even that of the party.
Hopefully they will come to realise the need to seek out the best, to fulfil the urgent task of nation building, more so now that the country is in dire straits. Lee had admitted, in his work: “It had taken me some time to see the obvious, that talent is a country’s most precious asset.” The revered nation-builder went further: “After several years in government, I realized that the more talented people I had as ministers, administrators, and professional, the more effective my policies were, and the better the results.”
Lee also wrote on how to keep the government clean: “We made sure from the day we took office … that every dollar in revenue would be properly accounted for and would reach the beneficiaries at the grass root as one dollar, without being siphoned off along the way.” Even when the Nigeria President and his deputy are seen as austere characters not interested in the mindless accumulation of illicit wealth, the same cannot be said of other officials across the board.
For instance, despite promises of change, the modus operandi of the mega corporations through which corruption is fuelled in the country has not changed under this regime. Again in the legislative assemblies and the judiciary, cases and accusations of corruption is still rampant. While the government is fighting corruption, no significant structural change has been wrought to bring corruption to its knees. Again, Lee provides a guide: “The most effective change we made in 1960 was to allow the courts to treat proof that an accused was living beyond his or her means or had property his or her income could not explain as corroborating evidence that the accused had accepted or obtained a bribe.”
Instead of organising to confront their common enemy, the frustrated youths, the poor and even some educated hustlers, across the country, have been drawn into an increasingly dangerous rhetoric which can only bring more misery to Nigerians’ already miserable lives should the country implode? Whether it is the trenchant Biafra, Arewa, Oduduwa or minority agitator, the common denominators are frustration and poverty. Yet, unfortunately most of the victims are unable to realise that corruption and bad governance are the enemies.
Until ordinary Nigerians do, they will continue to suffer double jeopardy by fighting the wrong battle. As Achebe said in his other book: The Trouble with Nigeria: “Nigerians are corrupt because the system they live under today makes corruption easy and profitable. They will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and unattractive.”
