If I should hesitate to say these things, it will not be because they are untrue but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my imperfection. Let us leave religion out of humanity, the Nigerian heart confounds even evil. We have become that fugitive quirk we can find no word for.
How curious a land this is? Like a veteran virgin with a history of abortions, our hearts and privates are full of scars – scars of tragedy, scars of laughter, scars of luxury, scars of want…every scar a luscious testament to our poverty of life.
Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever gives. Beneath the parks and groves we lay out, within our mansions, shanties and worship houses, a lot we do is sordid, a lot we do is forced; a certain feverishness and unrest varnishes our world. And all our show and tinsel are built upon a groan.
Lest you begin to think that I’m inclined to spurious generalizations, I have searched carefully and I find that there is nothing barbaric and savage about anyone in this nation except that everyone gives the title of barbarism to everyone else and every thought that are not in consonance with truth, as they would like to see it.
Goaded by such erroneous belief, every Nigerian considers himself the quintessential patriot capable of the fairest truth and reason. And from this perception emerges the contemporary Nigerian with the perfect politics, perfect economics, perfect religion and the most exact and accomplished approaches to all things.
Thus our nation abounds with perfect tyrants and looters, our homes with perfect batterers and paedophiles; our industries pulsate with perfect quacks and the slovenly, our schools with perfect dullards and numbnuts. Lest we forget the perfect rapists, kidnappers, hooligans and assassins prowling our streets, baiting the unforgiving second, when ruthless neurosis pulsates with will, for a price.
Our much vaunted norms have begun to peer above our ego. The harder we flaunt, the more carelessly we reveal the swollen belly of our pride. Our talk is of the Golden Fleece; goaded by greed and spurred by desperate tendencies to stand out, we traverse our land and foreign lands spreading degeneracy, insolence and vile.
In search of the Golden Fleece, crime has become our cotton field; it sprouts frightful stamens of violence and blood. Thus this minute, a gubernatorial hopeful pounds a day old child in a mortar for goodluck charm. Next minute; a European widow will lose her life-savings to a street-smart, internet-activated Nigerian kid. The widow will slit her wrists and her scammer would retire to the blessings of his parents and family pastor.
Our factories die but crime remains a major industry in Nigeria. That is because it’s the surest path to the Nigerian dream. But what is the Nigerian dream? Swift, sudden reprieve from all that pathos, all that bathos ever gave? Comfort taken for granted because it comes too easy and cheap?
For whom is the good life? The insane market women of the sidewalks? Child-thugs and teen-rejects dying to be park thugs? The veteran who becomes drunkard and jester in our court of random realities? Perhaps the faithless who keeps the empty store on the lonely road, by the crossroads where the best of hopes lay famished. Maybe the privileged for whom the paths turned rose-beds, ever before they startled to a second pat.
What would you do for the good life? Everything and anything that gets you to sleep at night happily and fulfilled, perhaps. Now that everything and anything amounts to nothing, we do everything and anything to sustain the life that pleases.
We who have become treasury looters, armed robbers, advance fee fraudsters, mediocre teachers, unconscionable journalists, doctors and law enforcers, have learnt to espouse morals birthed where deeds run afoul the mouth.
Every Nigerian is a moralist even as we sow sodden seeds of decadence at sunrise through sunset. And still we manage to misunderstand the true essence of our mystery; the tragedy of the picture, and all that treachery as well as folly ever gave.
We who couldn’t handle the truth profess to seek it. Here is the shadow of truth: our dreams have murder in the eye and we fete murder in the heart claiming to be “only human;” as if being human requires that we are inhuman. And thus is the kernel of our folly; that blind, savage, ghastly unreality that inspires our maddened souls to debris.
Nothing works still, because we are incapable of making anything work. Politicians make hard calculations in the interest of the ruling class; multinationals depart our killing fields for lack of security, basic infrastructure, and desperately sought “excellent” returns.
Capital and operating costs belie hope and prosperity as we have learnt to have it. But even doom has nuances. In our motherland, it has a thousand layers of meaning. Hence we cry for separation, true federalism and insurgencies contrived where the blood froths hottest.
Forget our platitudes; many would die not to be part of the bloody revolutions they incite. I moot no bloodshed folks for it is hardly the path to the epoch of our dreams. For all our troubles, it is the tenor of our thoughts that sickens. We seem to be defective in reason. And the solutions we propound can neither loosen nor bind tragic knots we blow on the threads of history…our history, back when it used to be golden.
Now we trust our hopes to prevail violence and malevolence we espouse even as you read. Truth has become a cliché, when it’s spoken, our ears hurt. Truth has become what we wouldn’t say to get our hearts to lighten. And so do our hearts harden.
Bet you are beginning to wonder: “Where are his solutions to our crises?” Let it be known at this point that, I seek to profess no mean truth neither do I portend some wild and infernal analysis; the solution we seek defies logic and grit as we have learnt to flaunt it.
Education is the only thing that should wholly never fail but we have learnt too little and we have too little to pass on, save Ivy League mediocrity, insolence, and greed. For all the honours we flaunt, the knowledge we affect is shorn of insight.
Until we mature in grace; until we learn to live the cliché and apply ourselves to passionate pursuits for the love of the good, our pains shall run amok where we seek ease and bliss, always.
It’s a matter of choice; to which system of thought should we commit our lives to? Is there anything in our norms worth saving? Shall we define the Nigerian dream in the language of humanity? Shall we begin to officiate for posterity and humanity’s sake? Shall we begin to affect the honesty to which we pay lip service? Shall we begin to reject the same old intrigues, same old analysis, every minute, every hour, everyday?
Perhaps we would learn to refine the subtleties that would make the Nigerian dream something more than the dream of thieves, prostitutes and looters. The Nigerian dream: dream of assassins, arsonists, urchins, human parts dealers, child traffickers, religious fanatics, ethnic warlords, internet fraudsters…hypocrites.
