© Numero Unoma
For all those saying that this is not a battle of the generations, you are wrong. The fact is that even if there are some of us more mature folk who have never ‘chopped’ in Nigeria, and who have always supported not just real change, but tangible progress, the fact is that what we now have is a country of youngsters who have never known anything but dystopia in their own country, and at the same time who have a perception of utopia in other countries. Enough people have smart devices and data to know what’s out there. Many of them may not be accurate or informed in their analysis of what their devices feed them, they may or may not have been educated with skills like critical thinking, but they have the passionate and strong opinions that young humans tend to have had every generation going back, and for that matter going forward too. Youth is inquisitive and fresh and brave, intelligent and passionate, idealistic, dynamic, and adamant. But youth can get disillusioned and angry too.
I hope that our youths will get righteously angry enough to sustain their assertion that justice be done. Angry enough to put their foot down and insist on INEC being called to task, rather than taking the japa option. I was talking to a no-longer-so-young, young person just before the election, and his opinion on the subject of japa was really interesting. You don’t just move into your neighbour’s house when your own house is untidy, he said. Especially not if your house is a really good house. What you do is what your neighbour did that made you want to move there. You tidy up your house. YOU DON’T GO OUT, YOU STAY HOME UNTIL YOU HAVE TIDIED UP. Once you have done that, going to visit your neighbour becomes really enjoyable when you realise that your own house is in fact much better than theirs.
But then I suppose that after the disappointment of Saturday’s events, where what was clearly driven home yet again, is that the hijackers will always prevail in the cesspit that has become our country, nobody is trying to hear analogies about my house and my neighbours house. Clearly Fela knew what he was talking about when he coined the phrase ‘beasts of no nation’. We don’t have a house. There is one standing there, but entrance is only gained by some. And it is guarded by uniformed thugs who have the audacity to call themselves armed forces, when all they seem to the populace is armed robbers. The only people who own Nigeria are those who are prepared to do unscrupulous things without batting an eyelid, (oops, did I just say BAT?) or giving so much as a thought to the lives, needs and democratic wishes of the people of Nigeria.
Anyway, it seemed the youth of Nigeria had rolled up their sleeves to begin the clean-up operation of our house. They understood that it would take time to get the job done, so the sooner one begins, the better. Unfortunately, those who benefit from Nigeria being disorderly and dysfunctional had other ideas. It doesn’t matter that millions will suffer and thousands will die. Die on the crappy roads, die in the dead-end hospitals, die from the consequences of unrelentingly high levels of everyday stress, die from various consequences of ignorance because they are not properly educated, die even by suicide when they can take it no longer. All that matters is that they get the power, and that they can enforce it mafia-style using legions of minions, sycophants and of course not forgetting those disenfranchised by them, whose horrible conditions they then exploit…areaboys. As it was from Sicily to the USA, so is this a transplantation of Chicago, the installation of a mafiosi culture of flagrant extortion, blatant bullying and entitled owe-nership. Ugh!
I recently watched a bulletin on one of our television stations in which the data analyst cited the February 25th boxing match in 1964, between world heavyweight boxing champion, Sonny Liston and the then new kid on the block, 22-year-old Cassius Clay, who would later change his name and indeed identity to Muhammad Ali. Nobody could have predicted Liston’s defeat. He was the world heavyweight champion, and the kid that ultimately beat him was as good as unknown.
The reason the Nigerian journalist had cited this match was because of the wildcard factor of a young greenhorn blindsiding the entire establishment and snatching the world championship from Liston in a defeat nobody saw coming. Well, as per the data analyst’s analogy, a heavy weight fell leaving the entire world reeling. But there was nothing original about his prediction that a heavyweight would fall in Nigeria, just about everyone had worked that one out! One way or. another, a heavy weight was going to fall. So I’m going to be facetious and follow that fellow’s example of drawing pedestrian parallels, by casting our minds back exactly a century ago to that year when in 1923, after moving from New York, Al Capone aka Scarface bought a house in Chicago. The rest is history. The only part of Capone’s story that I simply cannot see happening in Nigeria is that it was an incorruptible police officer that ultimately took him down. Not like those lame uniformed heavies who stood by at the election and let pre-pubescent children vote, and then claimed that they had suffered stunted growth. Medicine was suddenly their area of expertise, not enforcing law and order, ha! Incorruptible policemen? How I would love to be able to tell such a story of Nigeria!
With any luck the youth may take us there. Even the area boys are on to the shenanigans of our very own homegrown mafia, as you can see in this video. Is the tide really turning? Has it already turned, and if so will it be sustained? Will you young people insist on consequences for perpetrators of criminal injustices against the Nigerian people. People who will go to the extent of bulldozing gullies through roads, people who will sit in a room finger-printing ballots for a political party from whom they have accepted money, people who dressed in a uniform, will stand by and allow the law to be broken, people who will steal the votes of others, and even those who bully others with violence.
Everyone is now talking about how it is not a sprint but a marathon. That’s all spin, if you ask me. Nothing original there, Nigeria’s trajectory since independence has been one exhaustingly long marathon. Countries like Malaysia opted for the sprint. Rumour has it that they even came to observe our marathon, and took ideas back home, which helped to facilitate their subsequent sprint. Just look at them now, a modern Muslim nation.
What people don’t seem to be considering is how much could go badly wrong if we don’t get it right one of these days pretty damn soon. Nigerians are sometimes like the most successful of viruses. We just keep adapting to everything they throw at us. That’s an inverted compliment, btw!
But as the saying goes, something’s gotta give. One day be one day, monkey go go market, he no go return.
So our options are to get a grip by insisting on best practice, or fall over the ‘precipice of disaster’ of which our Civics Textbook taught us back in the 70s. Now, best practice in the first instance involves due diligence. I mean whose bright idea was it to put that Mahmood Yakubu chap in charge of INEC? I simply refuse to call him professor, wetin him wan teach pessin? DUE DILIGENCE, my people! Check people out before you put them in charge of your life and your children’s future! Ask questions about who they are, how they are qualified and what their track record has been. Would you allow your son or daughter to marry somebody without doing due diligence? Why then would you think it okay to allow just any old person take control of our most crucial institutions?
More than anything else in the world, what I want for Nigeria right now is a watershed moment. I mean a real one. One where you can see a distinct difference between the before and the after. Will there still be a lot of work to do? Naturally! But we have to start somewhere, before we end up somewhere else.
So what’s it gonna be?