The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Sixteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.
Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.
Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?
As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.
Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.
Very few men are indeed capable of that humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.
These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.
This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo, proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.
Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.
It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior. That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.
What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains our choice of the incumbent leadership.
Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.
The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class, whose dominance he seeks to terminate. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.
No man, be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.
Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.
The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.
This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future mistakes. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.
It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class and youth divides learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.
Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.
Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the Nigerian youth and working class in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization. A veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office and elect a younger, less ethnic, less directionless, visionary and humane leadership. But to achieve this, the Nigerian youth would have to establish a more youthful, brilliant, truly progressive and detribalized political platform.
