Nigeria’s politics: This shoe does not fit

‘Let's walk our own walk, and stop following the path of others…’ The politics of our fatherland amuses all around the globe as the ridicule of the world. Because they call it democracy, we do the same. Because it works for them, and that country praises it, we should not deceive ourselves. This shoe does not fit. A Cinderella story does not await us somewhere down the line, but we still stubbornly insist on not yet counting our losses.

Why don’t we all just call it a night, peel off our political costumes and stop trying to parody the politics of the West, so we can return back to our roots, back to the truth that will always be there waiting for us – like a faithful but annoying friend with an I-told-you-so grin – back to an era when the government still believed in working for the people, and the people were not so easily consumed by undeliverable campaign promises from crooked politicians, because their election bribes in sealed envelopes caused amnesias so strong that the struggles and failures of the past were easily forgotten.

Why do we keep insisting on jumping on the wrong bandwagon when the evidence from the failure of a decade-long experiment called the 1999 constitution clearly shows that our system of governance is flawed because it allows one political party and its most influential members to gain, and to do so excessively, to the detriment of the population at large and the so-called opposition parties.

This is not democracy. Our leaders are not popularly elected. No, they are shabbily but surely enforced on us by the forces that are, and the powers that be, that insist, and have always insisted – due to the absence of a revolutionary mindset in our people– that Nigeria will not thrive. They insist, because we do not tell them otherwise, that the once-great giant of Africa will not rise. They mock us because they believe that we are too preoccupied with our own internal dissent to realise that we are almost so far gone – almost at the point of no return – and they pompously await no retribution.

And as they wait and mock us, they also laugh at us. They laugh at us because the south rises up against its northern brothers and sisters, ignorantly proclaiming ‘We are not one!’ But they do not stop there; they strike up religious resentment in the form of riots that make Muslims antagonise Christians in Nigeria, and vice versa. And please, because we claim to know so much from the very little we have picked up about ourselves, from the history of our fathers that they so begrudgingly offer us, let us continue to delude ourselves into believing that these complications in our country are unrelated and that these symptoms should show us that as diverse as we are, we should not be forced to share the same land mass, the same federal institutions and the same great identity – Nigerian. We are blind, and they make it so, because they know, and soon we will all come to realise, that it is for this very reason – our diversity – that the world at large fears us, because we are larger than life, great in number and strong, because we are different.

Our indolence should not stand. The answers to a greater Nigeria do not lie in the hearts and minds of a nameless and unforeseen future, it lies in the power and potential of the present. They are not the corrupt ones, we are, because we have let them plunder away at our national pride unchallenged, with only the faintest of castigations. We have gradually, but surely, fallen in line with the penny-pillaging policies of our oppressors. We are not Sweden, Nigerians, so why do we praise the captors of our futures like we suffer from a sorry case of Stockholm syndrome?

When they come to our workplaces, like sycophants and fanatics we greet them with our heads bowed low, like we just love acknowledging that we have the best tormentors ever. When they come into our schools and other once prestigious institutions of learning, we honour these same men and women with accolades that they do not merit. When we see them when strolling down our unsightly streets, as their convoys pull past with soldiers holding kobokos that tear indiscriminately at the skins of our brothers, we rush away to avoid being whipped, without stopping to ponder at the inhumanity of the situation. And most disturbing of all, when they step into our mosques or churches, we give them cushioned front seats, like they should stand first in a line for the righteous.

We can claim that others have tried, and they have failed, so they now rest in the earth under our feet. But does our fear reward the efforts of those who have either sacrificed their lives or dedicated it towards this endeavour? Should the lives of the Saro Wiwas and the Fawehinmis of our time, and those past, be rewarded by cowardice? Or should we put the names and faces of these men, these warriors, up on pedestals as the emblems of our cause – a free and fair Nigeria?

Sad as it may seem, the Nigeria of today would please our most notorious dead, or alive, dictators. It would do so because we claim that progress has been made on many fronts since our return to democracy, but an overwhelming majority of our families still go to bed hungry every night amid the inflation of our currency, and the lack of opportunities presented to the masses to enable them to further themselves. Even the archaic methods such as kidnapping and murder we still use to stifle political dissent these days should make us understand that the ‘good life’ in Nigeria is just a façade, and beneath any mask or costume lies the real deal – the real face of our nation – that patiently waits to reveal itself.

Now, with all this presented, we can choose to still try on other people’s shoes, hoping, just hoping, that this will be the pair to take us where we want to go. Or, like all great nations today have done, we can discard our ill-fitting shoes and fashion for ourselves our own pair, or many, so that as we walk and work towards the great future that so steadfastly awaits us, we will do so with the full understanding that our hands made these shoes, and fairytale or not, a generous story awaits us.

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