How can we have so many engineers in the country and you are having to drive over bridges where one set of your tires are hanging and rolling in space and you are only able to cross because you know how to recite a hundred psalms in two minutes?
The polls have come and gone again, like bells tolling, this time for the governorship and state assembly candidates. I trust that you had a better experience this last weekend than you had two weeks ago. You were not only better prepared, you were wiser: you took your breakfast, lunch and dinner along with you as I warned you to. Oh yes I did; did you not read between the lines? Anyway, once, someone was said to have gone to commit suicide by jumping in the train track; but he took a sandwich with him because he did not want to starve to death while waiting for the trains to come since they were notorious for being late. Voting queues are notoriously long and late in coming in Nigeria, so never be caught out again – always go with your food to keep you alive, your chair to sit on, a mat to sleep on and a TV to watch yourself on.
While we wait for the results, let’s talk about Buhari’s win. The reactions to the APC victory in the last presidential elections have been nothing if not euphoric; mainly because many see the victorious candidate as the harbinger of the longed-for utopian empire. Now, that’s a tall order because my Encarta here says utopia is unviable and impracticable, just like an ectopic pregnancy. Yet, nearly everyone has been going around snapping fingers and consoling themselves with those soothing words: ‘just wait till Buhari gets there!’
Yes; nearly every page I flip in the papers, there are people setting agendas for the poor man. As soon as he gets there, Buhari should see about electricity. As soon as he gets there, Buhari should give us water. As soon as he gets there, Buhari should see about corruption. As soon as he gets there, Buhari should make my dog bark. People are not setting anything for themselves.
Nigeria, we may have a bigger problem to contend with, because I think someone somewhere is not being realistic about this situation. A nation that is corrupt from the tip of its toes to the very top of its hairs – from the palm-wine tapper who dilutes his new minted kegs of palm-wine with pails of water to make unlimited profit, to the assemblymen who award themselves emoluments higher than the entire US treasury – has elected an ascetic man as its leader. That scenario is to me like one sitting on a keg of gunpowder. Something will blow up on our faces, and it won’t be dust. No, think of something worse.
We as Nigerians have to quickly determine how much interference we can tolerate from this man. Do we want him to clean up the entire system and rid it of corruption or just confine himself to cleaning up Aso Rock? Quick, someone should tell the man o, otherwise, before you know it, he’ll be wanting to clean everyone up. He may want to begin with the civil service where nearly every contract is now self-awarded, i.e. the awarder becomes the awardee. After going through the rather frustrating system of the civil service, someone once said what we have is an uncivil service. To me, it is fast becoming a selfie-service: it sees only itself in the mirror.
Next, without any warning, the man may turn to the classroom. Normally, I am sensitive to the plight of teachers because I know how important they are. Nevertheless, I am quick to admit that many among them are not there for the job but for the pay, pittance as that may be. Oh my, wouldn’t he have a lot of cleaning up to do there. To start with, he may want to tell the teachers to go and teach instead of selling Coke and Fanta in their shops. He may tell the administrators to release the money meant for building classrooms but which they have kept locked up in their personal accounts. He may even find himself needing to tell the pupils to go to school and learn instead of hanging around the markets making money or brothels looking for money. Are we sure we want him to do all that, even if it will mean changing our lifestyles? Ok, let’s move on.
Next, he may call together the group of people called engineers and give them a blast of dynamited air. How in the world can they look themselves in the face (via the mirror perhaps) and call themselves engineers when our roads are so terribly constructed? How can we have so many engineers in the country and you are having to drive over bridges where one set of your tyres are hanging and rolling in space and you are only able to cross because you know how to recite a hundred psalms in two minutes?
Next, he may look at our hospitals and turn his nose up at the filth and then scour the place up. He may want to look at the patient treatment by both nurses and doctors, who is and who is not doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, what machines are or are not standing in the way of work … Are we really sure we want this man Buhari to come and upset all our carefully laid and horrible national ethos?
The more I think about this election result, the more I understand this present pope’s reaction to the news of his election. The story goes that when the report was brought to him that he had been elected by the House of Bishops, he was said to have, in a gentle, pope-like way, shaken his head and muttered, ‘what have you done?!’ And he added that they had no idea of what they had just done.
In the same way, I do not believe the Nigerian populace has clearly understood what it has just done because it is still holding on to its old ways. The fuel attendant is still undercutting the volume of fuel that enters your tank and billing way above the official price. The road engineer is still looking the other way while only one layer of asphalt is laid on the road instead of the usual nine. The local governments continue to be drain pipes for the nation’s resources while doing little or nothing. Are we sure we can endure any sniffing into all that?
I think we need to do a rethink. We do not need Buhari so much as we need to change our wayward ways. To make his job possible, we need to change our ways of conducting national affairs. This is about the place where we all need to ask not what the country can do for us but what we can do for the country. (That last bit is not original to me but honestly, we need it now). Anyway, Buhari cannot achieve anything if we do not begin to retune our national psyche from believing that we are entitled to the national cake without even putting in any effort towards baking it. No cake ever baked itself.
So, in the long run, it will not be so much what we want Buhari to do for us as what we want to do for the country. In the end, should things continue as they are, someone will get frustrated, and I am guessing it will not be one person. But, I take solace in what someone has said: his thumb is itching to go to the polls again. This time, it may well be for a new electorate.