When I contemplate Nigeria these days I focus on the vulture. The bird preys on carcasses but Nigeria, in spite of its fascination with death, has defied the day of the vulture.
Some analysts think oil is the reason, and the fluid of life will sustain this country afloat over the stormy waters of ethnic and sectarian malice and the failures of the state to convert hope to joy for the teeming masses.
Some say Nigeria is too interwoven in culture and history to cave in under superficial fisticuffs of cousins.
But whatever it is, Nigeria has dared the vultures for long.
The past year that ends today encapsulates how a country lives dangerously and still carries on as though immune from the temptations of the devil.
The country has been flogged by Boko Haram, harassed by flood, whipped by kidnapping, boxed in by inelegant electoral jousting, jousted by corruption, pockmarked by robbers, grinded by poverty, immobilised by impotent leaders, steamrolled by road accidents, gutted by air crashes, pin-fallen by failed institutions and knocked out by despair.
Yet Nigeria sleeps through all these and wakes up as though to a day of great expectations. It is like the character Nostromo in Joseph Conrad’s novel of that name. The character, a glorious thief just like Nigeria, has carted away great volumes of silver, and sleeps afterwards in a forest glade for over 12 hours. He wakes up to the presence of a vulture glowering greedily at him. But the thief stands up in his full masculine glory and exclaims to the disappointed bird, “I am not dead yet.”
We can say same of this country. We never die, we just live, hoping and clutching at an existence of false peace and majesty.
We see all the evils and the low moments. But we live with them. The problem with Nigeria is that it does not want to die and be born again. We want to live, even if imperfectly, if with corruption, if with probes without answers, if with bad roads comingling with deaths, if with the poor dying daily of preventable diseases, if and when we can have free and fair elections, if we can turn Boko Haram boys to assets of development.
This thought crossed my mind when I attended the launching of Wole Soyinka’s new book, Harmattan Haze on an African Spring. The famous poem Abiku written by the Nobel laureate was advanced as a metaphor for Nigeria, with respect to corruption.
Those who looked at the point included Soyinka, Pat Utomi, Oby Ezekwesili and they agreed that corruption was an Abiku and it keeps coming over and over again.
I did not get the chance to rebut their position.
Corruption, like many of the vices and institutional stumbles of our history, has not encountered the Abiku syndrome. The vices never die, they just come in different guises. They are more chameleons than carcasses. They have not witnessed the vulture visit.
Can we say poverty has ever died, or educational malaise or corruption has ever died? They just come in new colours and aggressions. We need to let them die. But for them to die, the whole system giving them life must die with them. We are not ready for that sacrifice. For corruption to die, we must have rule of law. For education malaise to go, we must insist on standards. To have these virtues all those persons and practices that allow them must go. But they will not.
“To be born again, first you have to die.” Those are the opening words of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel Satanic Verses. So we do not have Abiku yet.
Boko Haram is festering in the North because we did not address what gave birth to the sect. On the surface, it is religious inferno. At bottom though, it is poverty. It is the result of the absence of government. A government that allows an alternative society to breed under its very glare.
President Jonathan set up an al majiri school as though that will create a new set of educated young in the North. What that kind of school will breed is alienation. They will be branded the al majiri graduates, and rather than integrate them, they will become outsiders.
In the Niger Delta and the Southeast, we have had kidnapping, so much so that the Christmas was celebrated there mainly by the humble who had nothing to offer the greed of the rampaging goons.
Primary education is at an all-time low, but billions of Naira goes to the purchase of primary school books. Most of the schools don’t have them.
Roads are in permanent disarray; power in spite of the low boasts of the Jonathan administration is still epileptic. Something needs to give way.
The oil subsidy debate raged through the year. We saw strikes, and then probes and then reports. In the end, the Nigerian was duped by the Jonathan administration. The money they collected in the name of subsidy was never accounted for in terms of revamping the infrastructure and education and health sectors. Rather, President Jonathan is seeking more subsidy removal while his finance minister is asking for another loan. This is the same minister asking for us not to spend money in a nation where spending will ease the infrastructure deficit plaguing us.
The fuel scarcity is on us because the government that guarantees marketers to import fuel will not pay them. So they would not supply.
So what happened to the fuel subsidy money fleeced from the fuel consumer all year?
We also saw tragedies in high places. The air and road crashes that affected the mighty tell us that those in the marble places of power cannot avoid the tragedies their policies inflict on the poor.
As I write this piece, four governors who were in the saddle when the year began are not fully in charge as the New Year dawns. One is dead tragically through an air crash, another is hospitalised over an avoidable air crash, one is mysteriously ill in an overseas hospital and the fourth is in the hospital over a road mishap.
Never in our history have we had this sort of executive paralysis, except during the Gowon era when governors left the country on flimsy alibis.
In spite of all these, the nation walks as though in a swagger. How long shall we push our luck and think, like Conrad’s Nostromo, we can always wake up to a disappointed vulture?
We need the sort of leadership that wants to kill things in order to birth things anew. The Bible says: “Except a corn of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it abides alone. But when it dies, it brings forth new fruits.”
In Soyinka’s Abiku, also J.P. Clark’s poem of the same title, the child dies first before it comes back to life.
We cannot live a life of life-support. We must be willing to let the vermin go.
Many of them are half alive, half dead. The education sector, the oil sector, infrastructure, are all half dead. So the vultures hover, waiting for the time of the vanquisher.
In Chinua Achebe’s poem, The Vultures, he sees the bird
Perching high on broken
Bone of a dead tree
All these sectors are bleeding on broken bones. Let them die so as to be reborn. This New Year, we can start that process.
