By Ken Ugbechie
Chinua Achebe’s swansong, There Was a Country, a compelling personal narrative of the civil war, best captures the state of the nation called Nigeria. Once the novel was released in the United States, it provoked acerbic debate among Nigerians in Nigeria, all of whom had not as much as sighted the book. Those who merely read excerpts from the masterpiece and those who never read a line from the book went on a literary dogfight. All too soon, what would have remained a contest of ideas snowballed into a verbal war laced with acrid swipes between the Igbo and Yoruba.
The ensuing debate turned the book to a bestseller in a country where people scarcely care about books. But the Achebe episode transcends a civil war memoir, it exposes the flaws and fault lines in the nation’s socio-political space. And it has always been like this. A good fifty-three years after independence, Nigeria is still clutching at primordial straws of ethnicity, indigeneship and sundry sentiments that do not promote nationhood.
Thus at 53, a country of over 167 million people (assuming the figure from the National Population Commission is to believed) and endowed with limitless resources is still grappling with issues such as infrastructure, lack of potable water, poor healthcare among others. The nation is still drifting, tossed to and fro by self-contrived contradictions. At 53, Nigerians are still debating how they should live, whether they should live together as a nation or be balkanized along ethnic or regional lines.
If Nigeria were to be a 53-year-old man, society would tag him a failure and a fool. His portrait would be that of a man who cannot fend for himself, a man who still lives off his parents, a man without knowledge or skill whose daily preoccupation is to sleep, wake up, eat, binge and party. Such indulgence is only found among people of basal values. Unfortunately, this is the portrait of Nigeria; a binging, partying and gluttonous nation. Fifty-three years after independence, Nigeria cannot feed itself yet it consumes the highest quantum of imported rice and beans in Africa. Aside France, the home of luxury champagne and the finest wines, Nigeria ranks tops in the global wine-consumption index. It is the only country in the world where citizens take up full page adverts including television adverts to congratulate their one-year-old babies on their birthdays.
It is the only country where a serving government official, a minister, governor etcetera would ‘arrange’ a pullout in a newspaper to celebrate his or her birthday. Fifty-three years after independence, Nigeria remains the only country where its citizens borrow money to bury their dead. Those who are well off seize the occasion of the demise of their loved ones to flaunt illicit wealth. Nowhere in the world would you see newspapers laden with ‘Obituary’ adverts or in some cases ‘In Memoriam’. Neither in Europe nor North America, the two most affluent continents, would you find such frivolity and naked show of vanity. But in Nigeria, it has become part of our culture to celebrate and canonize government officials with newspaper adverts congratulating them on their appointments and their birthdays.
Fifty-three years after independence, we are still searching for statesmen of the order of George Washington of the United States, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or Nelson Mandela of South Africa. And herein lies the problem of Nigeria: the dearth of leaders and statesmen. Post-Independence Nigeria is yet to produce a leader whose voice the people will obey. What Nigeria has had so far are episodic and opportunistic leaders who get into power armed only with short-term development plans which most of them fail to execute. In some cases, the leaders get into office before drawing up a plan, while in others, they remember the plan long after they had left office. Worst of it all, Nigeria has had leaders who were motivated by the dainties of the offices they occupied and to that effect they ended up looting the treasury they swore to protect.
Yet what Nigeria needs is not a long queue of myopic, quick-fix leaders but a leader who is incorruptible, one with a long-term development vision and who has the discipline to sacrificially implement the vision. Nigeria needs a leader who will rise above the noise and sentiments of ethnic jingoists, a leader who is not bigoted by the opiating allure of religion, or one who will not pander to the partisan pressure from politicians… in fact a leader whose voice all will obey.
Unfortunately, again, such a person is not among the crowd of vampires angling to rule the country. This is the challenge before the electorate….In 2015, they must set aside their sentiments and vote for the candidate who will lead them, not one who will ruin them.
