Nigerians and indeed football lovers across the world were enthusiastic beneficiaries of the efficient ordering of European football and, by implication, society on May 27, when the two finalists of this year’s European Champions League reaffirmed that football is perhaps the greatest entertaining event available to mankind today. While the ardent followers of the two finalists ruminated on the huge chances of their teams, the rest of us wore an attitude of critical detachment and basked in the excitement of being living witnesses to yet another wholesome game of football.
Traffic control on most routes in Lagos told more than a typical Lagos story; traffic had collapsed and, for one moment, one thought it was Christmas Eve or that a road rehabilitation site, considering the huge on-going development efforts in the state, was just some meters ahead as traffic deteriorated. In twos and threes or sometimes more, football fans made their way to filling stations for fuel in their pathetic resort to private generation of electricity. There was excitement in the air such that possibly no event in Nigeria in the last ten years had promised.
Every football fan was dead certain that the match would commence at the time it was billed: the world was, of course, going to be hosted by Europe! Earlier in the day, many football enthusiasts had ensured that they were fully prepared with the appropriate positioning of their satellite dishes while commercial viewing centers, at almost every corner of town, intensified arrangements, providing more seats and creating their own glamour with fresh football posters and other soccer memorabilia as they waited, without apprehension, for the excitement that was to sweep across the globe from Europe.
Ninety minutes later, the score line had been expected for some while for others it was a deeply felt rude shock whose effect is still perceived in football circles anywhere. Post-match analyses proliferated in different quarters as self-styled football analysts argued that the formation of the defeated team was a mismatch for the technical presence of the victorious side. While they faulted the formation of the defeated team they, with the benefit of hindsight, reeled out and permuted several formations that would have worked to earn the defending champions the coveted honour of being back-to-back champions of European club football.
As these strands of views and counter-views weaved into one another, however, Nigeria’s tenth anniversary, as a democracy, was just twenty-four hours away. And that, indeed, was the singular object that filled my mind as I struggled to locate any achievements Nigeria had made and would be proud to celebrate in the last ten years here distributed as the first and second four years of Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration and now Yar’ Adua’s two years, which altogether form our own 4-4-2 political matrix similar to the formation that is considered a strong tactics in the game of football.
In 1999, Nigerians did not doubt Obasanjo’s capability to deliver great leadership and turn Nigeria around in every sphere of life because the opportunity of a democracy was what Nigerians had hoped and waited for as the elusive prerequisite for a transformed Nigeria after years of Kafkaesque disorientation. The prevailing notion was that the military were not disposed to people-oriented initiatives because they had accessed power through the barrel of the gun. A complex combination of Nigeria’s years of disappointed expectations had thus equipped Nigerians with the ready knowledge and intricacies of the problem with Nigeria, and so they enthusiastically offered Obasanjo the fingerprints of our collective problems as a nation and supported him with a strong national will to succeed.
His first four years was expected to provide the grounds for the people’s familiarization with the humane pulse of democratic experience which naturally lent credence and currency to “democratic dividend”, coined by our politicians as a concise description of the beauty of democracy to Nigerians. As Obasanjo’s first term progressed, he struggled with orienting Nigerians to the presence of democratic dividends when he perceived that the people were skeptical of anything that went by that description in their environment. A media tour of the nation, headed by Jerry Gana, forced it down the throat of Nigerians that everything they had expected of the government had been conjured right in their backyard. Nigerians did not see anything and so remained bemused!
In quiet disbelief, they continued to hope for further crystallization of the intricacies of understanding the benefits of a democracy, though they remained convinced that at least the two problems of uncivilized generation of electricity and the sad realities of our refineries were active items on their report card for Obasanjo’s administration. By languid degrees, Obasanjo’s first term came to an end but the problems he had promised to solve survived. It became obvious that we had acquired a feeble and corrupt foundation for our democracy especially when policies that placed the masses on the receiving end consistently tumbled out of Aso Rock though Nigerians persistently raised the flag and clamoured for a different experience.
In retrospect, the first four years which could have established for us a solid foundation for democracy was as weak as the defensive line-up of a poorly built football team. Obasanjo’s first term conceded numerous opportunities for both failure and corruption and never recovered from a general insensitivity to the basic problems of our common existence. Corruption became institutionalized and the politicians’ capacity to trivialize the sanctity of democratic governance assumed disgusting dimensions.
Of course, the power of incumbency earned Obasanjo a second term much against the better judgment of the generality of the people. He campaigned ‘continuity’ and told Nigerians that a second term would enable him and his party consolidate on the ‘gains’ of our ‘hard-earned’, ‘home-grown’ democracy! Ordinarily, in the life of a vibrant, people-oriented democracy managed by scrupulous men and women, a second term should have been a sheer consolidation of a people’s democratic fortunes, but Obasanjo had proven not to be the human being to oblige Nigerians with the basics of all democratic expectations because his first term was an inexcusable shame. The second term, like the first, was a political wasteland that promised nothing but the futile harvest of a deceptively cultivated phenomenon. Again, with football as metaphor, Obasanjo’s second term was a midfield that dismally connected with the unspeakable deficiencies of its own foundation. In a pathetic immobility of our collective dreams, we waited to see whether Obasanjo was saving the best for last but what came was worse!
The campaign for an unconstitutional third term, unknown to Obasanjo and his cohorts, was an explicit admission of the huge waste they had made of the two terms. When the third term bid failed, the PDP in its continued demonstration of perverted wisdom, presented Yar’ Adua as Nigeria’s next president. In their assessment, Yar’ Adua was the best man for the job because he was the least corrupt governor. At that point in their disorientation, it was obvious that the search for a competent leader was as critical as the search for a leader without a brazen record of corruption. Nigerians had their honest doubts about the man who the PDP forced on them. Yar’ Adua came, one might argue, as a cursed imposition on Nigerians in retaliation of their massive disapprobation of Obasanjo’s third term bid.
Nothing happened to convince Nigerians that they were on the road to a different destination than the one Obasanjo had taken them. Out of sheer political grandstanding, Yar’ Adua on assuming power in 2007, programmed the nation’s recovery on a seven-point agenda! Sadly enough, his second year was celebrated without any of the seven points registered on the credit side of his administration. So far, in Yar’ Adua’s own wisdom, there exist only nostalgic vestiges of Obasanjo’s policies and indeed, it is instructive that only the PDP has given Nigeria the ten years leadership we bemoan today. A gradual phase out of Obasanjo’s policies does not in effect mean that Yar’ Adua has demonstrated a superior competence because his lethargic disposition to governance has invariably complicated our national malaise. If the last two years could further be likened to the formation of a football team, in the attacking position, Yar’ Adua’s performance has not scored any table-changing goals; his ‘great policies’ seem benched for vision 20-2020. Altogether, it is safe to assume that the unpopular leadership imposed on Nigerians both at the national and state levels in the last decade is a regrettable party-specific heritage.
Not surprisingly, the kernel of Yar’ Adua’s anniversary speech for our ten years was that we had successfully transited from one civilian administration to another! That had been our problem! Of course, there was nothing more important to write a speech about other than an uninterrupted transition, yet Nigeria is not short of problems that have terminally bedeviled our existence since independence. On October 1st 2010, when the PDP will have been in power for eleven years and some five months, Nigeria will be fifty years as an independent nation. It is not likely, at the soporific rate of the present administration, that the quality of Yar’ Adua’s speech on that occasion will be any different from what it was on May 29, 2009. The provision of civilized power supply which has been juggled from Obasanjo’s wasted years will still be a problem, since our emergence from decades of darkness has been programmed for 2011!
Because we are Nigerians by birth and inclination, we are irrevocably committed to the hope and aspiration that Nigeria would one day be a great nation much to the magnitude it had been destined by its available natural resources. This prevailing ugliness cannot be our destiny for much longer! Our present description as one of the globally recognized corrupt nations cannot qualify us to play in the champions’ league of nations by whatever timeline gratuitously set by our leaders. Nigeria’s fitness and readiness for this standard of governance and development will inevitably compel our brothers and sisters and non-Nigerians alike from over the world to come home, like we rushed home for UEFA Champions’ League finals, for the beauty of our democracy. The possibility is from within each of us in our respective obligations to the greatness of our country. Ω
No comments:
Post a Comment