Ayomide
Towards the end of our editorial planning meeting last Tuesday, we did a reflection on some of the most important landmark events of recent years in Nigeria. Two as such events that we remembered readily, were the change from left to right hand for driving in 1972 and the change of currency from the old pounds and shillings to naira and kobo, the following year. I recall that there were nation-wide campaigns which lasted a year in each instance. On the day that we changed from left to right hand driving. I think just one accident was reported in Nigeria!
It reads like a fairy tale today, but back then and up to the early eighties – even when very disturbing signs of deterioration had began to show from the Second Republic-there was still largely the presence of a state in Nigeria. Things didn’t work like a clock, but there was an unmistakable sign of a responsible and responsive state: functional healthcare; an educational system which molded our generation; a railways system which carried people, goods and ideas around our country and a sense that we belonged to a nation that was emergent and assertive. There was price in being Nigeria!
I was in Kaduna over the weekend and was again appalled at the death of the city’s quarters of Kakuri as an industrial area. Factories have all closed won and the import-substitution industrialization of the early postcolonial period, which made Kaduna the center of the largest textile industry in sub-Saharan Africa, has been buried, maybe forever! Nigeria’s early rulers gave leadership to a process of modernization which created industries around the country; Lagos, Ikeja, Oregun, Ibadan, Enugu, Kano, Kaduna and so on. They also opened up universities which created a national middle class with a patriotic Farvour plus the NYSC helping to further deepen national consciousness’ and finding dignity in Laboure.
By the middle of the 1980s, the military regimes began a gradual process of the deconstruction of the Nigerian society and the criminalization of the state. The implementation of the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s was the point of embarkation for Nigeria’s woes. There began a gradual withdrawal from the provision of social amenities. Education became an enemy zone because the campus was a locus of resistance, and a purge of radical intellectuals was the reaction of the dictatorial state. Nigeria saw a systematic hemorrhaging of its best brains from schools or hospitals. The situation today is that there are more highly qualified Nigerian doctors’ intellectuals and professional abroad, than at home; most of them trained with public funds!
The areas of societal development like education and health care that need the very best brains have been taken over by the most backward appeals, often religious confessions or ethnic identities. People make a show of their religious fervor or their ethnicity to mask inadequacies in qualification or professional incompetence. Many tales of woe have been told about how incompetent doctors compound the problems of patients or just kill them outrightly. My mother was in and out of hospitals over the past one and a half years having been wrongly diagnosed and treated for kidney ailments that we eventually discovered she didn’t even have. At a point, she was stopped from eating everything; milk, meat, salt, sugar, proteins and all! It was a horrible torture to see a once very vibrant woman, waste physically and was obviously at the point of losing the will to live, because she spent several weeks only on drips and after a while, she began to remove the needle from her arm!
I have recounted these stories today, against the backdrop of recent events in the polity. Last week, the PDP raised an alarm that Nigerian politicians were meeting clandestinely to plot against the incompetent regime ot Umaru Yar’adua. What struct me from the outcry was the utter lack of shame of that ‘thrive’ of incorrigible election riggers! In a ten-year period of power, the PDP has overseen a systematic spoliation of Nigeria. The failing Nigerian state has been further weakened by its criminalization by PDP operative. They must know a thing or two about conspiracies to be worried about what their opponents are doing clandestinely. But they must be told very honestly, that the Nigerian people do not regard their hegemonic control as a democratic process. It is alienated from the people because the mandate was not freely given; PDP rigged itself into power, using Muarice Iwu’s PDP and the security forces. The Nigerian maiden has been the victim rape in the hands of its PDP traducers in the past ten years. Just look at the manner they have been handling the power sector probe. It has been turned to an elaborate burlesque to try to protect central characters like Olusegun Obasanjo, Olusegun Agagu and Liyel Imoke. The so-called anti-corruption regime of Yar’adua connived to ensure that Liyel Imoke was re-rigged back to power, to ensure that nothing was done to expose his central role in the fleecing of Nigeria through the power sector.
Incredibly enough, it is this joke government that is embarking on an elaborate charade of “rebranding” Nigeria! In their backwardness, the effort is directed at convincing the gods of foreign investment to see in Nigeria, a land waiting to be exploited as much as the foreign investors want. They cannot understand why having declared themselves full converts to the religion of neo-liberal capitalism, Nigeria is still ignored by the buccaneering capitalists, except those who came to make a killing “sharp-sharp” in the stock exchange. Of course, that kind of pirate capitalism does not create jobs nor build industry. So, the “re-branding” litany was put on the lips of those who deceive themselves but wrongly believe all of us are gullible!.
The truth is that nobody can rebrand a bad product. And Nigeria today is a bad product: infrastructural collapse; a rapacious, thieving ruling class; a people voting with their feet and young people dreaming of opportunities to run away and a state which fails to perform the basic functions that will endear the people to their country. These facts are known to the foreigners our unthinking rulers are trying to woo; the elements running the “rebranding” project might end up becoming multimillionaires many times over, just as their predecessors, but they have embarked on an exercise in futility. They remind me of the tale of the old crank who rode a stuffed camel, but was lashing it with a cane insisting it must run because it is a race hors!.
Two years after coming into power on the basis of a tainted mandate, President Umaru Yar’adua has been unable to seize the moment in history to impact upon the live of Nigerians positively. Policy flip-flops, inability to correctly respond to emergent scenarios, a very provincial core (as I said last week, handling Nigeria like the Native Authorities of the 1950s in Northern Nigeria, albeit incompetently); stories of corruption in very haloed sanctuaries of the government and the general sense that the regime is very confused, are the perceptions which Nigerians have of the government of the day. In the meantime, the despair in the land deepens at a frightening level. The fact that the people fend for themselves just anyhow is what makes the scenario even more worrisome. It is on the crest of this scenario that criminal activities against the state are being perpetrated with increasing boldness. Afterall, those who take charge of the state are also criminally exploiting their accesses. A failing state that is criminalized is a real danger to all of us!
In the midst of all these problems, the PDP has used a combination of arm twisting, cajoling and bribery to get its members on board a scheme which offers automatic second term tickets to President Yar’adua, the governors and legislators. They have locked internal party democracy in indefinite detention and thrown the key into the sea! Surely, a PDP party that will not allow internal democracy can never provide the ambience for transparent, free and fair elections in 2011. The only thing remaining now is to declare that they have won all the elections: presidential, governorship and legislative. The National Council of States also endorsed the main points of Yar’adua’s tinkering with the Uwais report: Yar’adua will appoint the INEC chairman; governors will continue to use SIEC to right elections to be able to thoroughly fleeces local government funds and unelected governors like Agagu will be in power for up to two years before courts can legally remove them. In the interim period, they will steal their states blind! Yar’adua wond and Nigeria lost! Electoral reform died at birth and this week; its funeral dirge was sung at the Aso Villa. Now you know why Tony ‘Mister-fix-it’ Anteneh ‘prayed’ that Yar ’Adua should find the good health to enjoy the remaining six years in power. Nigeria is on the death bed and is PDP undertakers will not even allow it a decent funeral!
