By Dan Amor
In 2015, during the Presidential campaigns, the ruling party, the
All Progressives Congress (APC) then in opposition, promised Nigerians heaven
on earth. They said they would turn Nigeria
to a new paradise in Africa . Boko Haram would
be defeated in six weeks. The pump price of petrol would be brought to forty
Naira per litre. Naira, the Nigerian currency would be made to be at par with
the American dollar. Primary and secondary schools students would be provided
free food daily. Unemployed Nigerians would be given a welfare stipend of five
thousand Naira (N5,000) each every month.
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| *pix: cnn |
The list included over 150 promises, too numerous to be
accommodated here. More than sixteen months of the APC in the saddle, Nigerians
are told to be prepared to make sacrifices, that the change must begin with
them. Boko Haram has been defeated only on paper. Sambisa forest has been liberated by federal
forces. But the insurgents have metamorphosed into killer herdsmen who are
being pampered and protected by security forces to kill armless Nigerians. The
Nigerian currency has nosedived several octaves below its metropol. It now
exchanges for almost 500 to the dollar from N165 to the dollar in May 2015.
Petrol which sold for N86 as at May 2015 now sells for N145 per litre. Millions
of school children are still at home more than a month after schools have
resumed across the country. Everywhere, there is hunger and gnashing of teeth
as inflation has risen above rooftops. But, in his October 1 independence
anniversary broadcast to the nation, President Muhammadu Buhari asked Nigerians
to hope for tomorrow, that tomorrow would be better. Are Nigerians hopeful of the day after? Will tomorrow ever come? The
collective answer to this poser is a resounding NO. Tomorrow hardly comes.
If Nigerians are no
longer hopeful of tomorrow, they deserve pardon. For, never in the history of mankind have a
people been so brutalised and tortured by the very group of people who are
supposed to protect and nurture them. They ought to be pardoned knowing full
well that their manifest state of hopelessness has extended beyond
disillusionment to a desperate and consuming nihilism. Which is why the only
news one hears about Nigeria Nigeria
Our record of
civilisation is ultimately a record of barbarity. Consider: we gained political
independence in 1960 and immediately, due to greed and lust for power, we
started killing ourselves. Almost six years later, the military took over the
political leadership of the country, a role they were not trained to assume.
This led to a civil war in which more than one million innocent people were
killed. For 13 years, our freedom and fundamental human rights were gagged by
the military. In 1979, Nigerians went to the polls to ward off the debilitating
effects of military rule in our country. This exercise ushered in a
democratically elected civilian government.
Unknown to Nigerians, this gang of
debt-ridden politicians suddenly metamorphosed into a monster. The result was
the conspiratorial looting of the national treasury into their private pockets.
Nigerians were worse hit for it. The government introduced a punitive fiscal
policy styled "Austerity Measures" through which a people already
denied the good things of life were asked to make further sacrifices. Millions
of Nigerians lost their jobs. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth as a
result of grinding poverty among the people, whereas the corrupt politicians
were swimming in affluence and under the best security system one could think
of. But their tomorrow eventually came. On December 31, 1983, the martial lords came
calling again with their logic as traumatic as it was compelling. They sacked their
compatriots in agbada with a consummate pledge to sanitize the leprous
political system.
For the first 20
months, there was a ray of hope in the system. But it was deceptive and
fraudulent with some avoidable ambiguities. Whereas some of the looters were
hurled into various detention camps, there existed some sacred cows here and
there. Certain blue-blooded aristocrats in whose veins human blood does not
flow were made to look as though they were above the laws of the land. The
media complained. But the men of command and diktat who permitted this double
standard vented their spleen on the men of the Fourth Estate of the Realm for
crying aloud. Their decree was that all was well provided that no voice was
raised against their draconian rule. Public outcry was to the effect that the
sledgehammer employed by the khaki boys was too heavy for the flies.
The men of
terror thought otherwise. But their tomorrow finally came. Even those who
overran them with a superior commandist logic in a palace coup did not fare
better. Their regime was even more beguiling than their predecessors'. There
were more pains, more anguish and more deaths, that most Nigerians were now
yearning for the day after. The regime introduced a time-worn capitalist
economic policy sponsored by the Bretten Woods institutions (the IMF and World
Bank) which structurally sapped and decimated the life out of a majority of
Nigerians. There was untold hunger in the land, just as there is today, as the
local currency was devalued to an unacceptable proportion and inflation rate
rose above sea level.
Even the people's
popular verdict freely given in June 1993, that a drastic change be effected in
the system, was vehemently resisted by the deans of the martial clan. There was
bloodshed, burning, looting and maiming. In the end, the deans saw their tomorrow coming and quickly stepped aside. His Chief of Army Staff
popularly called "the Khalifa", still forced himself on the nation as
a maximum, iron-fisted dictator. No Nigerian understood his hyperbole, not even
the acclaimed winner of the annulled decision for a true change. He clamped his
"enemies" into jail; others were either shot, bombed or chased into
exile in foreign lands. The custodian of the people's mandate himself died in
jail.
One of the jailbirds who was helped out unhurt was eventually crowned as
king for the second time. Unfortunately, he saw himself as a messiah whose
attitude to governance was gallivanting the whole world in customised agbada
and parroting like the dreaded etulubor masquerade
while looting the national treasury flat. With God's special mercy, his
successors managed to reboot the economy but because he was not allowed to rule
through the back door, he conspired with social pretenders who called
themselves progressives to bring the country once again to its knees. What have
we not seen before that we will hope for? God, where do we go from here? Are
Nigerians still hopeful in the midst of hopelessness?
*Dan Amor writes from
Abuja
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