Iliyasu Gadu
Ilgad2009@gmail
08035355706 (sms only)
For effect this question is addressed to our addled elite across the country irrespective of ethnicity and religious persuasion.
We have cornered the bulk of the nation’s resources to suit our fancies. From childhood to date into the twilight years of our lives we have been what our people call ‘’government pikin’’. We have occupied all the influential positions of government there is to occupy amassing the wealth and power that makes us champions and leaders of society.
Yet what have we given back to the Nigeria that has given us so much?
Nothing but grief and contempt. The bulk of the stupendous wealth we have amassed is not invested here in the country. It is stashed away in various tax havens far out of reach of our investigative agencies. Our families are safely established in the bolt holes that we have purchased in many places abroad so as to enable us escape the calamities we have wrought upon our country by our deliberate misdeeds.
We have destroyed the modest but working systems and infrastructure we inherited at Independence. We went for grandiose projects and schemes not because we were actually thinking big for the country, but because we were thinking big for our pockets from expected kickbacks. Whether the projects were necessary or needed to be diligently supervised and justified in terms of national development was not our concern. All we wanted was the optics of an elephantine project usually built at three or four times the cost all to accommodate our greed. The whole country is littered with such projects and schemes which are not meant to last or work because they were conceived primarily as conduits to fill the pockets of their initiators.
In our hearts we do not believe in Nigeria and its future. Using our massive fortune we have acquired the citizenship/residentship of the major developed countries and of some far flung, wind-swept Caribbean islands as well as tax havens like Malta, Jersey, etc.
A former Attorney-General of Nigeria once said he operates two brains; the ‘’uncivilised’’ one for his stay in Nigeria and the ‘’civilised’’ one for use while abroad. A former Army chief was heard to call on Nigerians to take up arms and fight the very army he once commanded, a veritable statement about the contempt he holds that institutions of the country. He made this statement in the full knowledge that he will go scot free and not even attract a mild rebuke for his treasonable utterances.
Looking at antecedents it is really no brainer why the elite of Nigeria tend not to respect its sanctity. We never invested tears, blood and guts to fight and create the country in the first place. Britain the colonial power that clobbered the country contrived an arrangement where the elites representing the various ethnicities were kept apart politically, economically and socially all to aid their grand scheme of exploiting our resources while we kept at each other’s throats. We were supposed to see through the shenanigans of the British and fashion out our path to genuine national independence and development. We should have imbibed the examples of the Americans, Israelis and to some extent the Indians all of whom insisted in rejecting the booby trapped path designed by Britain for their nationhood. Today these countries having carved out their own independent path to national development have even surpassed Britain.
We the Nigerian elite on the other hand accepted without question the political arrangements of the British even when it was clear that it was not in the long term interest of the country. From independence to date we continued on the trajectory of divide and rule whose manifestations are found in the use of ethnicity and religion as tools for political advancement.
This brand of politics may have favoured us the elite in projecting us in the scheme of things over the years, but the flip side is that the more we go on practising it, the more we widen the fault lines of our country, thereby taking us farther away from evolving a national consensus on nationhood. Little wonder we the elite have found it difficult in trying to evolve a template for nation building.
Today the repercussions of our choice of politics have turned full circle and stares us in the face. We desperately desire to restructure the country to correct some perceived imbalances; we cannot find the way to go about it because we do not trust ourselves. Our efforts at constitutional reforms have come to nought for the same reasons of mutual suspicion. From the simple to the most complex things, we cannot find common ground. It has to fit ethnic or religious considerations first and other things second.
Because we have become so steeped in this brand of politics we cannot find the courage to shrug it off and break new grounds. Our existential challenges are mounting to such an extent that they are threatening to consume us yet we continue to stick with the ways that have brought us to this pass.
It is now quite clear that the remaining period to 2023 will prove to be most challenging in our history. We the elite have failed to provide the necessary leadership to put the country on the path of national development. We have failed to develop an inclusive system that will galvanize all Nigerians irrespective of ethnicity and religion to contribute their bit to national development.
As we have failed to provide the necessary leadership to our people, the tables may well turn. The people may decide to step in and provide the leadership that we have failed to exercise. And we are already seeing the manifestation of this in the way that informal actors and groups are now the prime movers of political activities. Politics is no longer the preserve of formal political institutions but that of ethnic and religious champions with their appeal to base divisive sentiments.
If the EndSars protests were anything to go by, it is that our country is so fragile and that we are heading inexorably to a point where the brittle ramparts holding it together may give way inevitably soon.
