Citizens must speak out for better Nigeria

Nigerians are not without hope or agenda. This story is far from finished; we cannot now tire of telling it. This is not to disallow for opinion or dissent – with a population of over 140 million, every man and woman is a political party unto themselves. However with the ink barely dry on the page, we cannot now stop telling our story. A story the way we want it, a story that you want to leave the next generation, to cheer, caution and cajole them.

And there it is, there it lays, here revealed is the problem. We are not writing this story, there are no more complete characters, and there is no sense of a plot, just a serial set of anti-climaxes, a resolute band of plot twists. We cannot remain absent in the character build-up and expect a rebounded Nigeria. Once more, this is not to disallow for a discount on government, but if we hold statistics and numbers to reason, government in all its might, its personnel, isn’t now nor has it ever been, a quarter of our population.

So it remains a case of many continually following few. Even Goliath must have had his lucid moment. Somewhere between being pelted with the fear of God, and submitting to the ground, he must have had it cross his mind, just how his significantly smaller opposition floored him. It feels like we have been in free-fall for 40 something odd years now. Between the buckling of its knees and the exact moment when the feet give way, the giant Nigeria still hasn’t figured out what tipped its balance, and the floor is getting awfully close.

I have not missed the larger point of Goliath being felled by divine intervention. I have witnessed our leadership, there isn’t anything divine about it, but I will concede they need intervening. So, apathy can no longer remain a fashion-statement or ‘cool’ for the larger population. Apathy is only permissible for teenagers, who by biological requirement and temperamental inclination, are about everything and nothing all at once. That’s fair, they belong to the ‘whatever’ generation. Perhaps also, apathy wears well on hippies, who despite their best herbal wishes of sticking it to the ‘man’ fail to stick anything, and that’s fair. It’s hard to stick anything to anything when you have to filter through many images, unicorns, trolls, smurfs et al. Stereotypes are apparently permitted too.

However apathy cannot, does not, wear well on a general population. Teenagers that have grown into adults can no longer disassemble themselves from a process that will hold the future for our own born or unborn teenagers. A random sample will reveal that most constituents do not know who or where their representatives are – this writer included. We cannot become adhesive to the ‘man‘ and the many men and women behind him without active participation.

Any nation deserves the government it gets. True. And while many will attest to the fact that that we didn’t put them our government in place, we have yet to remove them from place – acceptance by tolerance. There are countless arguments for not acting; and they will forever remain that – arguments, blessed by distant, spaced arm-chair quarter-backs, forever agitated, forever one step behind indecision, forever academic.

Ours is the never-ending Cinderella story, we have been waiting for our pumpkin to change to a carriage for a mighty long time. Nothing. Time and lesson are allowed to tell us to carry the bloody pumpkin to the market and trade it in for a decent carriage! To admit that we have a constant leadership problem is to admit that we also have a constant followership problem. If the citizenry have not engaged actively in a process, then they share in the results from that process, or maybe more precisely, lack of results thereof.

Nigeria has been asking questions for a long while now, and we its citizens have remained quiet, the country is not telepathic. We cannot continue to be mute; the reluctant whispering of 140 million is not the same as the consonant bellowing of several millions. ‘The Man’ has built himself a Jericho, raising its walls, shielding himself from the harsh Nigerian rays, allowing the walls to cast the perfect shadow for him. He has laid his walls with sharp objects, not because he fears that if were to be mounted he would be in serious danger, but that the faces of his constituents might remind him of his duties.

These walls will not fall with knocking on the doors, or worse still silence. We should bellow till the walls around his Jericho submit, and he is exposed to the same rays, and in the Nigerian faces he has hidden from so deftly, he remembers his call to duty. Silence is the best answer for a fool. True. Only when that fool, has not been in your way for 49 years. If he has, then the larger question should be who is the fool? Silence is not our best answer. We cannot remove ourselves from the problem, if we have not attempted to be the solution.

A thief is the mystery, the fellow or lady that you cannot identify, not the lad that lives down the street who you know, whose car, house and luxuries you have admired. Silence in the face of brazen thievery means acceptance. Time shouldn’t have to wait for some distant, removed self-described freedom-fighter journalist to denounce them – these men and women exist in most neighbourhoods, call them their names, not under whispered breaths. It is only fair; everyone wants to be recognised in their function and duties, they deserve credit and recognition. Thieves!

We are a beautiful people, borne to a beautiful nation. We do not whisper, we should not cower, we should let our voices ring so loud, that the nation expels the last contents of its lungs, so that the generations that come after us will not have to scream, but sing songs of a delivered Nigeria. Our range is limited, our choice short. There are no alternatives, this is not a drill. Nigeria must work. A crowd of single-minded people has more command than they realise – it is the fellow that has to stand in front of one to address them, that understands how much they can move.

Fortunately, the good architects at whatever foreign firm charged with building our national assembly – after all it is Foreign Direct Investment – designed the offices and lobbies of the assembly to hold more than one person at a time. The import of this is that the structure will not collapse if it were to be overwhelmed with an unprecedented number of constituents visiting their representatives, in essence performing the task it was purposed for.

Never a silent people, our countenance in the face of our collective national paralysis is curious. Observing Nigerians closely or from a distance, which might be the preferable, given the many decibels we can congregate when we feel cheated or slighted – observe the Lagos Taxi driver, hell observe any Lagos driver! Observe the Igbo spare parts dealer – stereotypes apparently are also observed – defending to the death his right to add hidden cost to his products to an irate customer. Consider Iya Temedun, who will swear to her Lord and all the many other Gods that are either married to, or gave birth to her God that her fellow shop owners have violated the market women’s code of professional and ethical conduct – which they were all given during their market women induction course – by stealing her customers. Watch the Alhaji that will disrobe himself and sharpen verbal daggers when a negligent driver grazes his Honda car. He himself in his misery will neglect that he was grazed by a Mercedes and the owner of the car is well within means to compensate him.

These are all Nigerians, and are more likely to keep silent when Nigeria continues to ask her questions. Perhaps you could even argue that because a contract exists between parties, or because there is an expectation or a hope, they are more vested. But when leaders enter service, that is a contract, and we are to expect and hope from them, how much more do they need to do before they get the attention they deserve? What happened to our national righteous indignation?

These leaders owe us nothing more than we owe ourselves, no one takes from you what you are vowed not to release. Every country owns its story – it should decide its own plot and twists, the full volume of its content and the development of its character. Nigeria continues to have the trappings of a bestseller, but continues to read like the never sold single-print paperback novel, growing dusty on the back shelves.

It is time that our leaders are informed that Nigeria as it is written now is not being bought. We are not buying. There remains a problem with leadership, and it is not being solved by followership.

Maybe this is just being overdramatic; perhaps there is no need to make noise or be active citizens, after all silence is not all that bad. In the silence of an entire nation, when all that is left is the hollow sound of the absence of a national conscience, we will all be able to place clearly, the rasping painful respirations of an already ailing giant.

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* Babatunde Oyateru has a Bsc in International Relations and an MSc in Business Management. He worked for a period as a management consultant in the Republic of Ireland and has relocated back to Nigeria.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.