Nigeria’s Birthday of Lamentations, By Lasisi Olagunju

Every 1st of October, we sorrow and lament that Nigeria is a failed or a failing state. States don’t fail in just one day. It is like a man’s head, if it will go bad, it starts by losing its moral shine – gradually turning its back on good manners, ethics and mores. When a child habitually leaves doing good for doing bad, there is a likelihood he is headed for disaster. Carousing and deep thinking are two acts possible for all men, but can you find a man doing both at the same time? One pauses the other. Nigeria is that “thing” engrossed in non-stop sizzling romance with vice. It stopped thinking straight a long time ago because it has no patience for ventures of virtue.. And that, sadly, commenced so soon after independence in 1960.

The country was 57 years old yesterday as an independent nation. America’s own day is called The Fourth of July. And for over 200 years, it has been an annual festival of feasts, fireworks, concerts and family reunions for all Americans. Now, you keep wondering why every October 1 has become lamentation day for the majority here. The founding fathers drove the white man away with the promise that political freedom would come with life more abundant for all. And they meant it. So, what happened? Why is it that every anniversary of that freedom only brings memories of abortive dreams?

Eminent Professor Ali Mazrui in a 1995 article, The Blood of Experience, identifies six basic functions of state: sovereign control over territory; sovereign supervision (though not necessarily ownership) of the nation’s resources; effective and rational revenue extraction from people, goods, and services; the capacity to build and maintain an adequate national infrastructure (roads, postal service, telephone systems, railways and the like); the capacity to render such basic services as sanitation, education, housing, and health care; and the capacity for governance and the maintenance of law and order. “When we look at Africa with these functions in mind,” Mazrui continues, “it is clear that many states in Africa are in trouble.” So, is Nigeria at 57 a failing or a failed state or just a nation “in trouble”? Whatever is gasping for life can’t be healthy – it is dying. Any reading of the history of Nigeria gives an appalling picture of a nation that hit the ground running in the wrong direction. Nigeria thought the change of guards on October 1, 1960 was enough to grow it. And our case leads one to ask what really independence means for a country. Is a nation free because it has succeeded in sending its overlord away? Or when it succeeds in changing its name and flag and national anthem from what the outsider gave it? Or is it when it behaves and functions in a manner that proves it is sane and well? How did Nigeria miss it?

At independence in 1960, Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, spoke of the national joy at freedom and linked it with “the task of developing Nigeria politically, socially and economically.” Precisely a year after that epochal event of October 1, 1960, the then president of the Action Group party and Leader of Opposition in the Federal Parliament, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was invited by the National Press Club to deliver a lecture on Nigeria’s 12 months of independence. Chief Awolowo’s speech at the event was neither a “blind adulation” nor an “unreasoning condemnation” of the emerging Nigerian system. He spoke on what he saw and raised the alarm that the first year of our independence was characterized by a “competition in vice,” warning that unless there was a change of direction, we shouldn’t expect a “happy and great future for Nigeria.” That speech (published in the Nigerian Tribune of Tuesday, November 7, 1961) clearly forewarned of the consequences of outlawing goodness in the life of the young nation. The speech answered, ahead of time, all questions associated with why we have a stunted nation as our country today. And I will quote Papa Awo copiously, focusing on the mess Nigeria became in just one year after the British left:

“Merit is no longer taken into serious account in making appointments to public posts or offices. However meritless you might be, if you could pay your way, if your region of origin is in the prescribed privileged list, and if your personal connections with certain persons are sufficiently strong, there is no limit to the height to which you could attain. With the result that in the membership of our government boards, commissions, corporations and committees, a large number of persons are to be found who are totally unqualified and unsuited to tackle the problems of their respective offices. In the civil service, persons are being appointed to fill posts of which they are ill equipped, if at all, either by education or experience.

“Already, there is a lowering of standards in all the departments of our governments. Because of illicit deals with certain disreputable persons and contractors, we now spend £2 where £1 would have been more than ample; the wealth of the nation is being pillaged by some unscrupulous foreign entrepreneurs. Notorious international financial crooks whose diabolical operations have brought miseries to some of the countries of Latin America and the Middle East, now abound in Nigeria under ostensibly respectable auspices, and so on and so forth. However, much as some of us might wink at them, the disastrous consequences to the nation of this moral decline have begun to stare us in the face and to sap our vitality.. And unless the decline is halted without delay, coupled with a revival of a true sense of moral values, there could be no prosperous, happy and great future for Nigeria.

“The driving force for any good government or public institution is the all consuming desire to cater to the welfare and the best interests of the people. Whenever and wherever this all-consuming desire for the interests of the public is present, the leaders of the nation cannot but attach the utmost importance to virtue and set the highest possible store by honesty, merit and experience. But, whenever this desire is absent and in its place personal greed and sordid self-interest are enthroned, then you have a spectacle of competition in vice which disturbingly characterized our first year of independence.” That was Awo 56 years ago.

Is it not amazing that a country that was celebrated with so much promise in 1960 could become so disgustingly rotten in 1961? Now, was there any fear Awo expressed in that speech that has not come true? Is there any bad behaviour he identified in that lecture that has not multiplied a million fold? The “spectacle of competition in vice” which he said characterized Nigeria’s first year, has it not become fiercer in our 57 year-old Nigeria? You could see that it did not take Nigeria’s ruling class one year to lay the sordid foundation for the ruination of the nation. You could see that what was lowered on October 1, 1960 was not just the British flag – the Union Jack. You could see that we also lowered standards in all things noble and virtuous. You could see that today, we have moved progressively from Awo’s alarm that Nigeria was spending two pounds on a project that shouldn’t take more than one pound to an unimaginable realm of graft and greed in project execution and financing. You wonder what Awo would have said if he could see Nigeria, especially his Yorubaland, today tarring a kilometre of road for one billion naira and dubious debts becoming adorable gold on the neck of his people?

So, 57 years down the road, have bad manners and rejection of good conduct not made Nigeria a failed state? Or should we just say that its growth is stunted by its addiction to what destroys destinies? They say an ass born with knock-knees cannot start dreaming of becoming a royal steed. We lament every first of October but Abu Bakr, the Caliph said there is no profit in lamentation. And Sophocles warned also that “If it were possible to cure evils by lamentation and to raise the dead with tears, then gold would be a less valuable thing than weeping.” The annual feast of sighs and despair won’t grow Nigeria out of its unwellness. Medical experts have said stunting is not final in all cases. It is reversible – the stunted can still be redeemed, a catch-up for him is possible. But they say the reversibility will happen only if the subject abandons the setting in which he became stunted. Lamentations and wailings cannot save Nigeria just as it cannot be weaned of its failings by tough talks, threats and illiberal platitudes that punctuated President Muhammadu Buhari’s speech of yesterday. Turning Nigeria away from its addiction to the desert is the way to its regeneration. Let this Springwater stop pouring its waters into extinction, the desert. And it will live.