Democracy here means money ritual, and the people are the ingredients. Check the roads in your state; what can you feel? A friend in Lagos bellowed in anguish at the weekend. At midnight, she was still trapped in a killing gridlock going home from work. The roads are bad, rough and killing, she wailed. My Lagos friend thought it was the anger of her jilted governor that dug the craters on the roads. I told her she was not right. I told her I felt the pains of bad roads too 137km away where I live in Ibadan. I told her that it appeared some malevolent spirits had descended on the roads everywhere, eating them into gullies. I asked her to drive out of the madness of Lagos through the sleazy, interminable reconstruction called Lagos – Ibadan expressway. Or ride the pains through the valley of death named Oyo – Ogbomoso road, then rock through the Sarakis’ Ilorin to Mokwa in Niger, the Power State. Or drive from Rauf Aregbesola’s Osun State through indefinable Ekiti, to Dino Melaye’s Kabba, and from there through Dangote’s Obajana to Yaya Bello’s Lokoja. I told my friend she would come back with the right questions on why we are so broken.
The roads are very bad not because the governors are very angry. They are bad because our governments, here and there, are busy doing something else – they are constructing election silos. Can’t you see that even the loud chattering characters in the Senate are also quiet? Now they can’t form quorums again to do what they earn maximum wages to do. They are silent and absent watching the hungry fight for minimum pay. Their inactivity is the silence you have when a plane descends into turbulence. No one thinks straight when a sentence of death is about to be passed. The coming elections threaten to offload big men who think they stand. That is why their demonic spirits are eating into the roads. And the roads are not the only victims; every part of our whole aches while our brand of democracy proves to be an ineffectual painkiller.
The bad roads are not stand-alone tragedies. They are apt metaphors for the holes scissored into our fabrics by the tailors of our system. This democracy promised a positive change but has it really been doing that? The sweet things of our democracy are felt only in the vaults and soup pots of politicians, their sultry mistresses and their businessmen. And it is not looking like things will get better. Just as the roads are collapsing, things are sure to decay further and fester into life-ending cancer. Democracy said it would make the land safe for all, feed the hungry, clothe the unclad, get jobs for the jobless, educate the unschooled and give hope to the hopeless. But it has failed the people – robbing them of the little they entered the vehicle with. Literally, for those who have lost their jobs and their homes, those who have died or who have had relations killed in the various wars we are fighting, this democracy kills; it destroys.
The country looks certain a diseased tree. Democracy, as we have it, is not curing Nigeria of its affliction – but rather, it is the affliction. A proverb would argue that every tree has something which hampers its growth. It is true. But democracy has worked elsewhere and is working well outside here. This our tree that is not bearing good fruits for the mass of the people, what is the problem with it? And that thing is not easily seen, despite costly probes, X-rays and scans. Sometimes it has to do with a faulty beginning, a mis-planting, farmer’s error or a sudden void deep down, or a rock. Sometimes it is the soil itself that is toxic. Whatever it is, what is apparent is that the country is dying from its poisonous existence. The deformity looks congenital, right from the womb. The Somali would say a snake-bite received at the age of six kills at the age of sixty.
Democracy kills. It kills when it uses the idiocy of the majority to trump the wisdom of the best. Governors can’t pay lean uniform minimum wage but they can earn uniform gubernatorial pay. Evil, once it is allowed to enter, takes a comfortable seat. We have accommodated wrong values for so long that it has sucked us in. Our leaders, with their withdrawal of knowledge from the streets have become our conquerors. The absence of knowledge is the absence of light. That is why the roads are bad and those who are paid to fix them still go out to ask for votes without shame and consequences.
It would appear that the craze for profitable darkness chased out knowledge so soon after we enthroned democracy. And so, in every state, political dynasties are springing up to routinely build ornamental roads and sustain their reign of falsehood. Even the saints who swore yesterday that they wouldn’t eat rotten meat now drink soup of carrion with relish. They know that dynasties of cheats won’t survive where the people are informed. And so, they have made sure that of all the countries of the world, Nigeria is, as confirmed by UNICEF, first among the top four with the highest number of out-of-school children incrementally since 1999.
Democracy promises freedom and prosperity. Can you have freedom while in darkness or can you have prosperity without knowledge? What UNICEF figures repeatedly tell us is that the queue of our out-of-school children lengthens as the age of this democracy grows: In 1999, Nigeria had 7,079,920 school-age children on the street – these were overgrown kids who were not in school. Nine years later in 2008, UNICEF said the figure was 8,455,579; in 2009 it was 8,462,200; in 2010 it was 8,735,046. The figure kept rising and would appear to have hit the sky with the current 2018 figure of 10.5million. “Nigeria still has 10.5 million out-of-school children – the world’s highest number,” said UNICEF a few weeks ago. “Sixty per cent of those children are in northern Nigeria. About 60 per cent of out-of-school children are girls. Many of those who do enroll drop out early,” it said. Yet, our 2018 budget for education is less than eight percent while the inanities of politics and elections burst the vital valves of our treasury. And can you quote our current president on this problem of millions out of school and the need to tackle it? You should understand then why this country enjoys living with its deformities and why its democracy would keep sustaining the greedy and enslaving the needy.
This democratic Nigeria is an overpriced, failed road to a future of uncertainty. With leaders and followers who loathe learning and hard work but love money, democracy is certain death. It will serve to empower a herd of voters who see no danger in anointing dynasties of false prophets. It does that. The millions who were born at least two decades before independence in 1960 chose the first set of leaders for Nigeria. Majority of them did not go to school but they had the right values which guided their political choices. The few among them who read law (and grew big) later gave us laws that now make it unnecessary to go to school before becoming leaders. Leaders who didn’t go to school or who are ill-schooled now see education with the same lens as Boko Haram. And so, the country has lost it. The 7,079,920 who were ripe for education but missed going to school at the beginning of this journey in 1999 – eighteen years ago – where do you think they are now? The subsequent millions who succeeded them these past years, how old could they be and where is their station in life today? Some of them would be dead – killed by ignorance, poverty and disease and by any of our other homegrown deaths. The living among them will decide the next elections. Another generation of sufferers and enablers of the pains of today must have come from the millions who missed the school in the past. They will vote and determine who leads and builds the roads of the future.
The vicious cycle spins furiously. And as the illiterate population grows, the problem multiplies, our democracy ages, we vote out the old and bring in new lords. Nothing changes for the better; we flip them and embrace new promises from arrogant leaders without knowledge. We serially empower foxy politicians for whom the people are worth nothing more than marketplace tokens and to whom democracy is all about power, money and how to win elections. That is why the roads will slide from bad to worse and the roofs won’t stop leaking.
