So there we have it. Our leaders, our so-called leaders, those imposters whom we also call our elite just because they are better at being unscrupulous, have had their way with us again.
When I first returned to Nigeria after a long japa, I lived in Lekki Phase 1, and therefore I am registered as a voter there. In 2011 I voted and everything went smoothly, in fact the photos are still on Facebook. I then moved to Abuja, and so in 2015, when the time came to get my PVC, having not re-registered, I had to travel to Lagos to collect it. Back then, a childhood friend of mine had code-written the first of INEC’s clever apps, so I was able to check the availability of, and location where to pick up my PVC. I got to Lagos and started hearing stories. Naija storiii. So I had my friend check with his INEC padis, who told me the date my PVC was issued, the date it was despatched to Lagos, and the date it was signed for, once it had arrived there. For two weeks I went daily to the INEC centre in Ajah to which I had mysteriously been relocated, to pick up the ever elusive PVC. There were others who were undergoing the same torment, except they lived in Lagos, whereas I lived in Abuja. Through day after day of frustration and of comforting each other, we began to get to know one another. Just one of our many frustrations was not just watching, but being on the receiving end of the the discombobulated Youth Corpers, who had tens of bunches of PVCs, each held together by a rubber band.
Each bunch was a mix of voters from different wards, so every time one of us got to the front of the queue, Corpers had to go through each and every bunch of cards to find the needle in the haystack that was that person’s PVC. Those of us in the queue who were from the abroad saw the problem…and we also saw the simple solution. So we started helping the poor overwhelmed Corpers at whom people were shouting all manner of Nigerian expletives and abuse. Totally hands-on in our manner, we encouraged the hapless Corpers to organise the cards by ward number. Meanwhile, we took down people’s names in the queue as well as their ward numbers, ensuring that each of us kept their place in the queue but were then filtered to the Corper handling their particular ward. That way each Corper could handle one ward, and things would flow better. Or so we thought. Would you believe it, one INEC madam came out and joined us briefly in the sweltering heat, from inside her air-conditioned office, just to tell us that we had no right to do that, and that the Corpers were to continue doing things the way they had been told to do them. We were more flabbergasted than actually incensed, and the end of the story is that I have never to this day got my PVC. Back then I was told that it was because I was Igbo, and there was a fear that I might vote for Jimi Agbaje. That hurt. But what hurts even more excruciatingly is that this nonsense is still happening in our country a whole 8 years later, irrefutable evidence of how an APC government has slid us as a nation, back into the dark ages.
I am told that it is a mammoth task to get one’s PVC across the whole of the south of Nigeria, yet in the north scores of underaged children were able to easily get theirs. INEC is complicit in all these shenanigans. The same shoddy INEC that this year has once again cheated us Nigerians in multiple ways, of our right to make a democratic choice as to who leads us for the next portion of our ever waning lifespan.
So, given that the government and its institutions can just rape us citizens at will, what then gives them the right to insist on same citizens conducting themselves as so-called good citizens, by observing and complying with their civic duties? Surely there’s got to be give and take. Each side has both rights and responsibilities.
Some may argue that INEC is not a government agency, after all its nomenclature suggests independence. Well yes, all Nigerians are supposed to be independent of colonisation, and yet, after we got rid of the British, we have become colonised by our own home-grown oppressors. So give me break with that awful word, independence. We are only independent when we are able to act autonomously, and as the 19th Century American essayist, poet, philosopher and political activist, Henry Thoreau so rightly put it:
“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.”
According to the CRF, the Constitutional Rights Foundation in the US, “Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens. As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must choose whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and defy the government.”
And in a Forbes article titled “Thoreau’s Arrest For Tax Protesting Was Illegal — And It Changed The World” (readers of the article have the option of listening to the audio version while they work out in the gym, or drive to work), it is said that “Henry David Thoreau was a supremely efficient tax protester.”
In Thoreau’s 1849 rather wordy essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ he explains: “It is for no particular item in the tax-bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with – the dollar is innocent – but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.”
“I say, break the law,” Thoreau wrote in one of his more quotable passages from the essay. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
It was a dear Yoruba friend of mine who got me thinking about taxes in Nigeria, and in particular in Lagos state, where even my fair-skinned Yoruba friends were violated by APC troglodytes, with “One Drop” accusations akin to what once differentiated a slave from a free man, depending on how much black blood a person had in them. The irony of ironies is that none of my own fair-skinned Yoruba friends had even a single drop of Igbo blood in their lineage, unlike the unfortunate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, and yet they were denied their right to vote.
As though tribalism in this day and age were not enough of a travesty, the trogs have taken their perversion to new levels, and with the utmost of normally inconceivable impunity. What to do? How does one counter this sort of sub-human persuasion. Fighting fire with fire would drag us all down to the depths which these people plumb without shame. There has to be a more intelligent way to make a statement.
This is where Thoreau’s simple idea of civil disobedience becomes interesting, because if you do the math, such an act might actually have a significant, and for that matter, a significantly painful impact on the coffers of Lagos state and those of Nigeria at large. I mean imagine what it would do to their cashflow if all Igbos decided, as an act of civil disobedience, only to pay the utmost necessary taxes, and hold off on all the rest until somebody starts listening to them. And imagine if all their allies joined them in doing the same.
A Lagosian and Yoruba friend of mine who will soon be seventy once told me that as a young man his father had told him that when travelling, if ever he came to a place where there were no Igbos, he was not to stop there, but should keep going until he came to one where Igbos had settled.
I swear, I wish I knew somebody out there who could put plausible figures to the hypothetical scenario of such a civil disobedience in Nigeria, just to project an idea of what the cost would be in reality. It was none other than MLK who once said “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws?
Obviously that is just a pipe dream, and heaven knows, it is not igbo in my pipe, just Igbo sentiment and a dash of dogmatic disobedience…
