The Nigeria Dilemma: What Is To Be Done? By Bayo Oluwasanmi

s the year trudges to an end, I
looked at Nigeria closely, my mind
racing back to 52 years. A surge of
impatience rose up within me.
I tried to shake off a rush of anxiety.
The progress so far jarred my
confidence. My stomach was
knotted with fear.
The memories of Nigeria’s
immediate political history of a
leaderless country cut like a knife at
my soul.
As I contemplate Nigeria’s future,
fatigue swept over me. Over the
years, the confidence I had for
Nigeria is quickly fading back into
skepticism.
Economic prophets with gloom
forecasts and political seers with
doom predictions are working
overtime warning us where Nigeria
is headed.
The unanimity of their prophecies is
summed up in one ominous and
frightened sentence: “A failed state.”
The image of a comatose nation in
a stupor of its former greatness in
the intensive care unit of rogue
nations is having a kind of negative
psychological contagion among
Nigerians.
The profound dilemma of Nigeria
has been a permanent leadership
vacuum.
I thought of a man who might have
had a chance to bring relief to our
people.
I thought of a man with position,
training, natural ability, and the
desire to help.
I thought of those who had the
unique opportunity to rescue Nigeria
but in foolish act after another, they
forfeited all the advantages they
might have used.
Ninety-nine percent of those who
run the affairs of Nigeria needed
complete reconstruction. All the
three tiers of government – local,
state, and federal – there is
leadership deficit. They seek to
bring about the right thing in the
wrong way.
The abhorrent mediocrity of the
elected representatives at all levels
of our government disqualifies them
from the service of the people.
Nigeria has been turned into a
football game in which millions of
spectators in need of exercise are
watching a handful of players in
need of rest.
The unending recycling of ill
equipped, witless, and myopic
technocrats, bureaucrats, and other
political appointees guarantees
imitation of the barbaric past of
their predecessors.
They have become silent enablers
and co-conspirators in defrauding
the very people they’re supposed to
serve and save. They find so much
pleasure in watching the slow
agonies of poor Nigerians.
The socially and economically
induced misery caused by the
corrupt representatives results in
deforming and depleting our
humanity and love for one another.
The meaning of events taking place
in Nigeria defies worn-out
vocabulary. It leaves us
intellectually debilitated, morally
disempowered, and personally
depressed.
There is pervasive intellectual
impoverishment. There is collapse of
meaning in life – the eclipse of hope
and absence of love for others.
No one, nowhere is safe in Nigeria
today: suicide bombers, armed
robbers, abductors, rapists, hired
assassins, exhorters, swindlers,
defrauders, ghost workers, robber-
barons, jet pastors, corrupters, child
molesters, looters, and leeches.
What we’re witnessing today in
Nigeria are the consequences of a
lethal linkage of economic decay,
cultural decay, and political lethargy
in Nigerian life.
What is to be done?
What shall we do to foster or
generate a new spirit and vision to
meet the challenges of post-
democracy, post-industrial, and
post-party politics?
First, we must accept that the
critical power, help, and hope lie
within us and our commonalities.
We must search for a new paradigm
to bring into the fore our
understanding of multifaceted crises
and overcome our despair.
Second, we must shift our attention
to the common good that focus on
how much we care about the quality
of lives together.
The neglect and non-existent in
most cases, of our infrastructure –
roads, highways, water and sewage
system, streets, bridges, hospitals,
schools, airways, airports, electricity,
safety and security must be
terminated forthwith.
The lack of these basic
infrastructures reflects (a) our
myopic economic and social
policies, (b) impediment to
productivity, and (c) the low and
primitive priority we place on our
common life.
Third, the tragic abandonment of our
children and the elderly clearly
reveals the type of people and
nation we are. It also shows our
deep disregard and lack of
compassion for the weak and the
most vulnerable.
Majority of our children are born
and raised in poverty. Parents who
are overburdened and overpowered
by poverty are ill-equipped to
provide lives of spiritual and cultural
quality to their children.
A way forward is for the government
and patriotic Nigerians with private
initiatives to assemble a large scale
public intervention that will ensure
provision and access to basic social
goods: housing, food, health care,
education, transportation, child care,
jobs, and social safety net.
Last, the most important and major
challenge is the need to generate
and nurture new leadership. There is
paucity of courageous leaders.
The mangling, bungling, and
manhandling of policies and
programs by the crop of present
leaders demand that we look beyond
the circle and recycle of old,
backward, worn-out, burn-out, tired
horses, close minded ancient
thinkers, and blind as bat elites.
We need leaders who can plunge
themselves into the oppressive and
unresponsive socio-politico-
economic narrative of our country
and craft a rewrite that will correct
the malaise.
We need leaders who possess the
acumen, integrity, intelligence,
foresight, and fortitude that will
grasp the complex dynamics of our
ethnicity, differences, and with
creative imagination chart the future
of a new Nigeria.
We need leaders, who will strap
themselves with ideals of freedom,
democracy, fairness, and equality
that will shield and shelter the
shoeless, homeless, landless,
luckless, propertyless, and the
marginalized that perch on the
fringes of poverty and penury.
We need visionary leadership that
can and motivate “the better angels
of our nature.”
We need a new leadership grounded
in grass root organizing that
emphasizes democratic
accountability and service. We need
leaders who will serve and not to be
served.
We need leaders who are givers and
not takers.
There appears no alternative route
to the above. Either we swim or sink,
or the turbulence this time we
consume us all!
byolu@aol.com