Skip to main content

Nigeria: The way we are

There is a reason why many people like me have lost interest in commenting on Nigerian politics. What seems abnormal to me is really the new normal. Nigeria is what it is and there is this sense that I am crying louder than the bereaved. Our dysfunction is now deeply dyed into our cultural fabric. People have basically decoupled themselves from nationhood and community and are now looking out for themselves. It is so blatant. When I speak with people at home, no matter how you steer them into politics, they don’t seem interested. They seem focused on the self – by all means necessary. They just want to “hammer.” It is what it is. 
Why are we like this? Why are things the way they are? There is really no shame, no sense of self-reflection, words trump deeds and style is the all important victor over substance. There is no leadership, to be honest, and I am not just talking about political leadership. We are all the same in the communal hypocrisy and greed. I think about how public intellectuals are struggling to normalize, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, SLS, the Emir of Kano, Mr. Glib, Mr. Do what I say, a note what I do, and I remember, they normalized Buhari, they normalized Amaechi, they normalized El-Rufai, they normalized Obasanjo. Their job as intellectuals is to make you forget. #AnimalFarm. If you are a thief and a thug and you are generous to them, you can murder hundreds, you can steal billions, you can be incompetent and you will be fine. You will not be a distressed character in their insincere books and essays. 
You must not separate the messenger from the message; when you do you decouple them from their sins. These people have ruined our country. How can we soon forget SLS’s misdeeds? No, he is a charming soul, he says all the right things, and if he likes you, he will be your Robin Hood. He loves public intellectuals. This is my larger point: There is no hope for Nigeria. I do not see any progress through my generation or the generation coming after. Indeed the generation coming after promises to be much worse judging by their antics on social media. They are training you to be unthinking dolts. Do not ask questions, they say, this is church!

There is no hope. If you doubt me, do a survey of where our leaders and their families go to for education, health, vacations, good living. Not in Nigeria. Buhari’s dying veins are hooked to the laboratory machines of the secret agencies of the West. Imagine that, after billions of Naira budgeted for a medical clinic our president had to go abroad to the West to attend to his health. The CIA knows everything about his blood cells. We don’t. Go figure. Nigeria is not a country. 

For what will happen to much of Africa, look to where your leaders are. At some point we will have to tell ourselves the truth. Let’s all agree with our bumbling, thieving rulers and their intellectual enablers: We cannot govern ourselves. Today, we are in denial about that truth. We will admit this soon and outsource governance to WalMart and McDonalds. They will save our people just as the cell phone saved my mother from my father’s patriarchy and Nigeria’s incompetence. Walmart will sell us Do-It-Yourself governance kits. If you don’t have credit, you die… 




from Ikhide http://ift.tt/2pH2pl4

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more