It is that time of year again when Nigerians, contemplating their country’s troubled past and uncertain future, engage in an orgy of collective self-flagellation tinged with self-pity, if not self-loathing; when an anniversary that should be an occasion for rejoicing and renewal breeds, instead, resentment and recrimination.
It is the time we rue the road not taken as well as the road actually followed; an occasion that stirs up wrenching lamentations about what might have been if the right people had taken charge and pursued the right policies.
For every ten persons who dismiss the occasion as unworthy of celebration, there is at least one person who regards it a great achievement worth remarking in and of itself that Nigeria has not gone the way of former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union.
In whatever case, the verdict was clear: if Nigeria was not already a failed state or well
on its way to becoming one, it had failed abysmally to live up to its vast promise. Its
name had been taken in vain repeatedly by a long line of rulers to perpetuate misrule, justify plunder, reduce citizens to subjects, and sanction hegemonic rule on a scale that has given independence itself a bad name.
And despite all the pomp and pageantry that was sometimes confected around the occasion, the attentive audience always seemed to be saying: This unhappy state of affairs will continue unless . . . And here, the apparent consensus breaks down.
From one year to the next, the narrative has rarely changed; if anything, it has grown darker and darker, with nary an uplift. Many a political official has cited this state of affairs as their reason for entering party politics. Instead of watching and wailing from the margins, they would enter the fray and strive to change the system from within.
The system swallowed them. It has never yielded the turf to those who are forever lamenting the nation’s woes. Speeches from on high, written by committee to mark the occasion, are laden with statistics on virtually every aspect of national life, from the mundane to the seminal, detailing how many roads were built or rehabilitated and how many miles of railway tracks were laid or rehabilitated.
From the National Day Broadcast, you could expect to know the gross tonnage of shipment cleared at the ports; how much crude oil was extracted, refined, or exported, and the gross receipts from those transactions; how much was expended on oil subsidy, and how tantalizingly close the nation had come to attaining food self-sufficiency, thanks to the new expanded and accelerated agricultural production programme.
Plus of course, the thousands of jobs that had been created or are in the pipeline, and the dozens of projects that are set to be commissioned or for which planning had reached an advanced stage, and much more.
With rare exceptions, the National Day Broadcast has been a slap-dash affair, and the audience attends to it only perfunctorily, if at all. Much of it reads like that of the previous year in tenor, if not in tedious detail. It makes hardly any concession to nuance.
The run-up to October 1, 2023 is shaping up to be even more dispiriting than the earlier editions. The General Elections ended more than four months ago, but they are being litigated and relitigated in the courts and in the public sphere and on every street corner and in the marketplace and in the darkest recesses of social media with unrestrained passion.
Increasingly, it has fallen to the courts to determine election outcomes employing parameters that the public does not fully understand or accept. Why, they ask, is the evidence of their eyes and their ears accorded little or no probative value, whereas some obscure Latin phrase or clause fabricated by some long-dead white men may hold the key to what the courts regard as justice?
The courts themselves sometimes move in mysterious ways that serve only to confuse the public and undermine whatever is left of the public’s faith in the judiciary.
It seems wholly improbable that the framers of a Constitution anchored on the equality of citizens could have consecrated residents of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory as
super-citizens, whose votes alone could determine who becomes president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This crackbrained theory was canvassed as the election results unfolded, and cited in the petitions of the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi.
The Presidential Election Tribunal saved some of its most trenchant censure for this proposal, which even students taking a first course in constitutional law would have rejected on the threshold. But some of the nation’s most senior attorneys espouse it and are set to urge it on the Supreme Court, the tribunal of last resort for the presidential election.
Many in the organized and unorganized Opposition are now looking to the Supreme Court to void the verdict of the PEPT, which unanimously affirmed the results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission. As I see it, and given the facts on the ground, the best that can be expected from the Supreme Court is a split decision, with the majority affirming PEPT’s verdict.
But nothing short of voiding the entire poll and ordering a new one is likely to mollify the entrenched Opposition. Doing so, however, could plunge the country into civil war, which not even the most reckless desire.
Judges handling election petitions in Kano had to deliver their ruling via ZOOM because of a clear and present threat to their lives. Allegations are rife of judges being suborned to deliver prepared judgments on pain of being visited with some horrendous punishment. The harassment has reached a point, it is claimed, where many judicial officers have contemplated suicide.
Nor will the mysterious fire which engulfed the Supreme Court in Abuja yesterday dampen
the threat to the machinery of justice in Nigeria.
So, it is just as well that this year’s National Day will be marked on the usual low key.
But the narrative of governance failure that has marked our post-colonial history would seem to have been punctuated by President Bola Tinubu’s much-acclaimed performance at the United Nations General Assembly. Even some key elements of the Opposition have commended his demonstration of leadership on the world stage.
It is a thin reed, to be sure. But it could serve as a platform on which Nigeria can forge a new, inclusive, inspiring, leadership-driven, nation-affirming narrative.
President Tinubu should launch that narrative in his National Day Broadcast with an invitation to elements of the Opposition to join him in a long-term search for common purpose at the table of brotherhood, around which all problems will be discussed honestly and solutions sought earnestly.
