Get well soon

Recently, a colleague of mine fell ill. I was immediately informed by a common friend who doubles as his neighbour.  Together, much later in the day, we drove to hospital where I was somewhat disappointed to learn that our common friend, Mosley, had succumbed to ordinary malaria. When he sensed my cynicism, he broadened his narration to justify his journey to his sick bed. His defense failed at once to abate my sarcastic resolve but, in another breath, he feebly underscored the helplessness of his condition as he reminded that a prominent politician had been to Europe recently for a similar medical attention.

I smiled and killed the matter for I perceived that my ailing friend was scheming to politicize the exchange. Beyond that, I quietly convinced myself that the place and time were not right to give Mosley the chance to vent his habitual disenchantment at people and institutions. By the next day, I had planned to offset part of his now climbing medical bill by procuring some of the recommended drugs and other related items that anyone in his condition, or Mosley, by his lifestyle, would find quite handy.

As I prepared, a ripple of dull excitement swept through my sprawling neighbourhood. That was NEPA! – after a week or two of disheartening service. It was only when I switched on my television, which came on as though convalescing, that I realized – or should I say remembered? – that a public holiday had been declared. It was May 29! As expected, Eagle Square and such other venues across the country, as I scanned through some local channels, were agog with celebration apparently stage-managed by respective state governments in spurious celebrations of their dividends of democracy. Not surprisingly, the light flickered and, like human life here, was gone!

On my way to Mosley, many thoughts crossed my listless mind in batches. I remembered him and his negative capability for denigrating the achievement of ordinary mortals. He is not a great achiever in the strict sense of the word, but he has this indescribable desire to see every man, in private or public life, live up to common expectations. As these thoughts flitted through, I drove past hordes of Nigerians going about their activities with nothing to suggest a nation in celebration. On some narrow and squalid streets, some teenagers helped their respective families with some domestic necessities that included the fetching of water at private outlets. Others too just walked the streets as though under some futile influence. 

I was jolted out of that state of mind by the manic, earsplitting horning from the vehicle behind me. The driver was in a hurry and in a flash he sped past my car. He only narrowly missed brushing some Okada men who had ringed a newspaper stand exchanging their own conjectures about the oppressive headlines of the day. In another ten minutes, I walked into the hospital with the items I had bought for my friend, Mosley. Within me, I knew it was a wrong day for him to be hospitalized for he would have taken the day as an exciting opportunity to castigate people and satirize institutions that had made it to his black book in the past one year.

Nevertheless, I met him trashing out some topical issues with some close friends of ours and another fellow who had come to see his next bed neighbour! Mosely, in good or bad times wields an uncanny ability of pulling a bystander into the whirlpool of his beliefs. His country, as always, was his problem! He squirmed unwittingly with every sore point he made about Nigeria’s misguided democratic experience. It only then dawned on me, from his string of disappointed expectations, that Nigeria, on such a day, could be joined as a co-recipient of the get-well card I had bought for him. And this was how I arrived at that conviction…

Nigeria’s return to democratic rule was earned after years of struggle that culminated in the May 29, 1999 swearing-in of Olusegun Obasanjo as president. By the character of all historical events, that date is thus marked as a national holiday in celebration of our democratic acquisition. Though like most historical dates, May 29 is not without a ring of controversy, for a growing section of Nigerians has strong reasons to take June 12 as the anniversary of our democratic accomplishment.  The event of that date in 1993 is well within living memory to require retelling.

Democracy is now in its ninth year in Nigeria, and its complex mechanism has, without doubt, engendered a myriad of experience for both people and institutions. Its basic dependence on the people as raw material simply presupposes that in a nation with over one hundred and forty million population, democracy would enjoy the prospect of reaffirming itself as one of the noblest forms of government available to human experience. We have only to cast our minds to the past nine years to appreciate the enormous investment of people who have participated in one capacity or another in the complex operations of this system.

It is though common to human experience to commemorate events, the anniversary of democracy in Nigeria commands a weighty dimension. Every anniversary affords Nigerians the salient opportunity to evaluate their experience against the background of their general expectations.  That opportunity came once again as we marked the ninth anniversary or, better still, the first year of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s administration. Unfortunately, once again, the general feeling is that the ailment of the years past is still being stitched up in future tenses; in the same manner that the immediate past government eventually bequeathed us a nation without refineries and electricity just like it had met it and, as before, with mind-boggling tales of wasted public funds.

We still remember how lofty Nigeria’s hope was in the wake of the elections of 1999. Aside from the strong prospect of the return to democratic governance after decades of militarism, Nigerians had assessed Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, from a combination of factors, as a man who had taken the fingerprints of nearly all our national problems and was poised to assume leadership for the routine purpose of delivering a well-rehearsed, people-oriented economic blueprint. However, that expectation was short-lived when too early in his tenure his best chances were predicated on a regular upward review of the prices of petroleum products; an act that soon became a nursery rhyme for his government and a source of deathly concern for the rest of us.

In many ways, in today’s Nigeria, Obasanjo’s name reeks of economic disintegration from his nine years in power. And it stands to reason that Nigerians who still possess the vile courage to take to politics as a profession led the rest of us into this and we followed rather unsuspectingly, for it was originally intended for the common good considering the emphatic importance that the proverbial definition of democracy bestows on the people. As it is, it is heart-breaking to witness democracy being so mauled and abused to the extent that it calls up uncanny images in our collective consciousness and that, worse still, the unscrupulous agents who propagate this sorry experience grow in number and depravity on a daily basis.

Following a failed attempt at a third term, the critical part of Obasanjo’s swan song was a devoted, personalized search for a successor whose political aura had no trace of corruption in comparative terms. The then president stopped his search at the doorstep of the present president and of course the rest of us felt, given the circumstance and available evidence, that some other overriding competencies had been gravely undermined. But as had happened in 1999, Nigerians acquiesced that the best to be done was to give the new leadership a chance amid the howling skepticism that enveloped the polity.

Nigeria is a rather curious if not perplexing country. Today, it is still a debatable question whether the first eight years moved Nigeria forward or backward or merely left it how or where it was in the pre-1999 years. It is thought-provoking that the provision of electricity, good roads, pipe borne water, quality affordable education and so on and so forth still form an active part of our politicians’ electioneering razzmatazz. And when one looks at it, there are sickening reasons to grant them such inclusions. Nigerians have never experienced such amenities in their civilized availability. Obasanjo and his 36 governors gave such promises and after eight years, Yar’Adua and his governors campaigned same to legitimate effect.

Yet, on May 29 we celebrated even when everyone is asking everyone whether Obasanjo’s government should be probed in the face of mounting evidence of how our nation was run aground during his time as president. The salient question to ask is what would it really cost the nation or anyone for that matter to carry out a postmortem on Obasanjo’s government? A probe, let us reflect, is not alien to governance for it serves the purpose, amongst others, of vindicating an ex office holder or holding him liable for wrongs committed against the common good; it is an intrinsic part of the enormous sense of responsibility that accompanies an individual’s acceptance of a public office.

We celebrated though we are caught up in a genealogy of corruption whereby huge corrupt practices that have either sunk or endangered the hopes of this nation are traced with living evidence to members of the same family. Or when we are living witnesses to the strategic arrogation of elective offices by members of the same political family or gang; an arrangement that further exposes the nation to the devastating eruption of the lava of corruption in the years to come.

We commemorated the ninth anniversary of our home-grown democracy though the Elumelu-led committee is still grappling with the Herculean responsibility of determining how some 19 billion dollars failed to brighten up our languid expectations for an improved energy sector; we celebrated even when Ribadu is coping with the realities of an enforced career course as the rest of us look forward to an etiolated EFCC. We celebrated even as Madam Etteh and her political synonyms are still members of the national assembly; when she still makes a living out of a grand system that naturally determines the intellectual, socio-political comportment of a people. Her presence in the NASS is a defilement of our quest for political purity.

Obasanjo might have formulated the best policies or fielded the most result-oriented cabinet or hired an unusually formidable advisory team and personal assistants, but the reality that confronts Nigerians today is that his two terms have brought more woes to the life of this nation than anyone had ever anticipated. This thinking is highly justified by the sense of urgency that has gripped the present administration. And it stands to reason that Obasanjo’s own admission of incontrovertible failure came in his inordinate quest for a third term. Apart from a grisly desire for continued personal enrichment, what else could have been a weightier motive?

The search for a replacement for the chair of the EFCC saw the senate, like in most other situations, playing to the gallery. In truth, the removal of Nuhu Ribadu was generally perceived as a regrettable disservice to the spirit of winning the war against corruption. Yet, the president told the nation, as he marked his first anniversary, that the ex-chairman’s proclaimed achievement should not confer on him the prerogative to head the commission for a long period as though he were the only one who possessed the sterling qualities that such a position required. In some way, the president was right but his rationalization is weakened by the growing feeling that there are others who should be relieved of their appointment on account of the spreading evidence across the land against their competence or achievement.

Regrettably, Nigeria still comes across as a pathologically ailing nation. After nearly fifty years of independence! Year after year, we have lived up to the morbid description given of Constaguana in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo where it is described as “a great land of …people, suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic immobility of patience”. Our reprehensible capacity to wait for a better tomorrow has calcified our collective enthusiasm and urgency for a nation whose economic buoyancy should of necessity be commensurate with the abundant resources available and accessible to this potentially great country.

It is quite clear to those who want to admit it that a certain dubious intent was preserved in the administrative outlook of the last government, for if it meant well the issue of the non-existence of a functional refinery should not remain with us yet. And this aspect of our national life is particularly ugly that our successive governments should speak of economic policies when none of such has zeroed in on a lasting solution to our moribund energy sector. 

I have strayed into the disappointed expectations of the first eight years for good reasons. If nothing else, it provided the dark-room in which the gloomy picture that democracy has cast on this nation today was developed. The first eight years were the years that corruption became a popularized experience and our hard-earned democracy turned out to be a highly prized acquisition for which reason those who had no business being leaders flooded the territory. It was the period in which political gangsterism was brazenly cultivated through the mushrooming of godfatherism; the period that democracy exerted hysterical influences on Nigerians to the effect that its traditional meaning and association continued to proliferate regrettable antonyms in our political lexicon.

Whether Nigerians take May 29 or June 12 as the date that brings them the sweet memories or the bitter taste of democracy, our hopes and aspirations, in the final analysis, have detonated in our hands. In this period of democratic commemoration, it is criminal to imagine that we have reaped the best that this noble system of government can offer a people; we have failed – dismally – against the magnificent beauty of democracy.  Many apologies if by some stretch of the imagination the title of this piece betrays an active sense of pessimism on my part; but in all fairness, I cringe to confess that it was the fairest of the possibilities that crossed my cynical mind as I checked our political temperature for some intangible hope in my poorly lit room.

As we continue to enjoy Yar’Adua’s gratuitous moratorium on another increase in the prices of petroleum products, and continue to keep our dreary vigil on some exciting times ahead, as he has promised, I honestly wish Nigeria well on its path of checkered destiny. And in all seriousness, may the sincere invocation preserved in the title of this piece materialize in its entirety in our life time. My friend has since regained his health but the pains of our ailing nation lives in his heart yet!