NIGERIA, A PROMISE @ 53 The bright sunlight tells the story of promise. The smartly dressed men and women of the services marching as the Union Jack is lowered and the green white green is raised reassured men and women that a new dawn has indeed come. It’s a deserved celebration, a slow but sure march towards nationhood. It is hope tempered by reality and dream checkmated by happenstance. A new nation indeed is born. All these were on October 1, 1960. Nigeria was seen as a promise of the black race. A counterfoil of the domineering influence of the western world. A big brother for the rest of Africa and a behemoth capable of influencing the balance of the world order. With an emerging young generation in all aspects of human endeavours, Nigeria had all it needed to succeed. A political tripod typified by the three regions - East, North and the West - created a healthy competition that could only have had one beneficiary: the citizenry. Signpost of the industrious strides of the West was a cocoa industry, whose importance was underscored by the 1964 naming of a twenty-five story edifice in Ibadan after the crop. Today, Cocoa House still stands; a reminder of those economic Halcyon days. In the East and parts of Niger Delta, the rubber was the economic king as well as coal, a blessing from nature. The groundnut pyramids in Kano completed the economic tripod which placed emphasis on harnessing nature’s abundance for the common good. Between 1960 and 1962, the three regions had made massive investments in the future of the country. It started with the establishments of the University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria, Nsukka; the then University of Ife and then the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. They were built to help the determination of these early leaders to make the Nigerian experiment work. In terms of infrastructure, the country was evolving at such speed that momentarily, the promise of new dawn held out so much hope. Improving the quality of life could not be questioned. Roads were being constructed, towns and cities were being electrified and a work force motivated to run the country effectively. Nigeria was being seen in the same league with the Asian tigers-Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as India. Even if India’s independence came thirteen years before Nigeria got hers, not much difference was seen between what promise the two nations held. During this period, Nigerians loved and cherished Nigeria. It was never about the self but what benefited the country. The nation was living the independence dream. The reality check was the discovery of oil in commercial quantity, consequently setting in motion, the blessing and curse that ironically has killed the tripod that had previously carried the nation and the dream. Before this, the nation’s military had lost its innocence. The general elections of 1965 had provided the basis for a putsch that altered the political history of the country. Therefore, by the time oil came, the gladiators of independence had been scattered. While a couple was already under the earth buried, one was in prison and another on exile. The abundance of oil killed our imagination. Relaxed and lowering our guards, the challenge was not money coming in again but how to disburse and spend it. Then Nigeria lost Nigerians to corruption, carefree attitude and incurable appetite for anything foreign. Gradually, the groundnut pyramids of Kano disappeared and the rubber plantations of the Mid-West dried up. The cocoa merchants of West threw away their seedlings and oil became the king. Ironically, the coming of more free money from oil signaled the beginning of the end of the good days of nation first. As Nigerians thought more about themselves, the more the nation suffered. Roads were left unattended to. The water taps dried up and in a short time, Nigerian Airways, which once prided itself as Africa’s leading airline, lost its wings to mismanagement and corruption. While the nation bled, it strangely continued to create more millionaires and billionaires. The vocation called politics, whose allure in the days after independence was for service and service alone, became the single most lucrative business for bandits, gangsters, convicted criminals, societal misfits and others. And they did to the treasury what bandits and gangsters do to bank vaults. They looted the treasury, and are still looting it. Public office is now the easiest and safest route to easy wealth. Governors, lawmakers, councilors, council chairmen have been the reigning multi-millionaires and billionaires. As politicians lived fat on the nation, starting from the 1979 to 1983 misadventure in democratic experiment, infrastructure started to decay. They and their cronies and families live off the common misery of the larger populace. A populace, systemically impoverished could hardly ask questions. Today, hardly can any aspect of the nation’s life be said to be working. Those who were witnesses to the promise of 1960 and equally witnessing the despair of today cannot but ask where and when did the nation miss the way. Questions abound why that dream was aborted. Was it poor leadership? A docile citizenry ready to tolerate a bad leader? The structure of the federation? Or the ‘unworkability’ of the union? What exactly was the cause? Fifty-three years on. Fifty years to come, a complete generation would have gone. What we will have then is a generation that may only read about that national promise of 1960 in literature text books and oral history passed down. That is if we are smart enough to preserve our history. While the last 53 years have carried quite a considerable amount of frustration, it will also be unfair to completely label the epoch five decades and three years of doom and gloom. Within it, a bloody civil war had been fought and the nation’s sovereignty and unity had been preserved. Lives had been lost and many emotionally and physically dislocated for life, but the republic had survived the storm. A little over twenty years after that war, a political impasse, occasioned by the annulment of a free and fair election, had also threatened the unity of the country. After the nation had been given a foretaste of a return to democratic rule, a brutal military dictatorship crept in which forced quite a number of men and women to live at the barricades. Their days in the trenches helped install a democratic rule in 1999. Through hiccups, stuttering moves and faltering steps, the nation had trudged on. While the experience is far from perfect, the consoling aspect is the determination of all stakeholders that this time around, the democratic experience must work. But the reality on ground is depressing and hardly cheering. Many things call for attention: bad roads, insecurity, poor infrastructure and a social fabric being threatened by ethnic, religious and political fault lines. But together, we are walking to a future with profound fear and extraordinary hope of a new beginning, a bright new sunlight heralded by a visionary and compassionate leadership WHAT DO THINK
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:02:05 +0000