Date Published: 03/16/10

Nigeria’s Soul Cries for a Revolution By Idumange John 

It appears to me that Nigerians are the most resilient people on earth. Like the proverbial bed bug, Nigerians endure anything and everything. I know we can endure even tsunami and earthquakes. Nigerians endure darkness, deregulation in a war economy, spiraling inflation, lack of good goads, potable water and condone the bastardization of our educational system. A critical gaze at the behaviour of public office holders copiously attests to this fact. 

Since 1999, Nigeria has not implemented her budgets due largely to high level corruption. Federal Ministers do not feel obliged to implement projects in their Ministries. Members of the National Assembly are there to represent themselves and their pockets, hence crucial laws like the Freedom of Information Bill (FIO) has been confined to the morgue ad infinitum. The behaviour of State Law Makers is no less edifying. In most States such as Bayelsa State, Law Makers have transformed into full time contractors, as they divert Constituency Development Funds to serve personal ends.  The Governors’ Forum has become a cabal to determine who becomes President or not because they were not brought to power by popular consent. A great many of them cannot win elections conducted in their extended families. 

The ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is now greater than Nigeria. The Party and its corrupt leaders now decree who becomes what irrespective of what the Constitution says. It is only in a country like Nigeria that party autocracy would reign supreme without being challenged.  Party tyranny is a signpost of lack of national cohesion and it was for this reason that Professor Ben Nwabueze once said “everyone knows, Nigeria is not a nation. It is rather an amalgam of nations, a conglomeration of numerous antagonistic and incompatible nationalities. The various peoples comprised in it are yet to coalesce into one national civil society animated by a common spirit and a feeling of a common nationality and identity, and propelled by common social dynamics”. If anyone thinks Nwabueze is wrong, please ask the Governor of Plateau State. 

Nigeria is blessed in more ways than one. The Nigerian nation is endowed with a fertile agricultural land, numerous solid mineral resources and crude oil. As the sixth greatest oil producer and influential member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Nigeria’s source of wealth from crude oil and gas is unquestionable. The high level of official corruption resulting in  affluence among her leaders and abject poverty of the masses. Of all the blessing God has generously endowed this nation; the human resources are the greatest assets, but sadly, Nigeria does not seem poised to maximize these enormous resources.

The nation is blessed with crude oil yet there are only four refineries and no body has protested why more refineries have not been built. Unfortunately, the four refineries are not working as money voted for Turn-Around-Maintenance (TAM) is either diverted into private pockets or used to pay fake companies. Worst still, so much money has been expended on the power sector yet the country is in darkness. Worst still, the price of petroleum products was increased by more than 400 percent in the past ten years. In spite of all these man-made adversities, no Nigerian is angry enough to form a full-fledged rebel group. We are indeed “a good people and a great nation” suffering and smiling. 

Apart from occasional crises emanating from religious fundamentalism, the security-motivated groups such as MASSOB, MOSOP, and the rickety “militancy” that characterize the Niger Delta Region, there has been no major religious, political or ethnically-motivated guerilla or rebel group. The money for freedom kidnappings going on in the Niger Delta is the ugliest brand of hypocrisy. If the youths are desirous of controlling the resources of the Region, in other nations, the existence of well coordinated insurgency and revolutionary movements serve to checkmate the excesses of those in public offices.  

In most African cultures, if a young man is caught stealing or telling lies, he is stripped naked to dance around the town or better still given some lashes of the whip.  But if an old man commits such crimes, it is usually seen as a sacrilege and society is doomed. In such circumstances, the old are either ostracized or banished. In Nigeria old men have stolen; they have also told lies to sustain their corrupt hegemony. They have become a disgrace and liability to the Nigerian State. If it were not so, how do we explain the continued relevance of OBJ, Tony Anineh, Babangida, Atiku Abubakar and others who have raped the national coffers? None has come out to seek redress for the several politically–motivated murders in Nigeria. Nigerians are indeed religious without morality. 

Nigeria is also blessed with a docile class of elders who preach national unity at the expense of development. The class of elders is always on hand to plead with the Academic Staff Union of Universities to go back to class anytime lecturers go on strike. But they have never for once pleaded with the government to improve the working conditions of University teachers. This attitude of our leaders has led to the brain-drain of Nigerian intellectual to other lands to seek for greener pastures. The so called elders display the same attitude and refuse to tell our leaders the truth. For example, more than ninety percent of the elders and religious leaders paid solidarity visits to Aso Rock under the Obasanjo administration. Now the iniquities of the Obasanjo administration ranging from unauthorized expenditure of the crude oil money, land grabbing in Abuja and outright stealing of public resources have been unearthed. But none will seek his trial, and we are preaching transparency and accountability in governance.  

The self-styled elders may need to apologize for a second reason: their relentless appeals to the people have made the masses inactive and docile. The appeal for national unity has made the masses to bear seemingly unbearable hardship just to keep alive the propaganda of national unity. The emphasis on National Unity has obviously robbed the nation of much-needed development. Between the elders who resort to empty platitudes and the hostage taking militants in the Niger Delta, the elders are the worst culprits.  Thus there seems to be what the elders call “national unity”  when there is no development. This is not the case in most developing countries. 

Another problem in Nigeria is that even the intelligentsia could not galvanize the people through consistent ideological re-orientation. This is due largely to the fact that the political class has systematically suffocated the intelligentsia by denying university lecturers research grants and better working conditions. The ivory towers which had served as hotbeds of Marxist intellectualism and citadels of stimulating debates have been transformed into grim, joyless places where cultism and other matters that negate a healthy atmosphere for intellectualism now prevail. 

In Colombia, left-wing guerrillas the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have engaged in terrorist activities such as kidnapping, guerrilla warfare, espionage and politically motivated assassinations. These activities have put a check on the excesses of government. In the Philippines, the Moro-jihads under the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) are a separatist groups pushing for the establishment of an Islamic State and Government. Serbian efforts to force Bosnian Muslims from their cities and villages throughout the Balkans led to ethnic cleansing. In Zambia, a slight increase in the price of rice led to serious protests. Genuine revolutionaries after the mould of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Amilca Cabra of Guinea Bissau and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso are in short supply. What we have in abundance are economic opportunists wearing the toga of militants, pseudo-revolutionaries who push parochial ethnic group interests and political adventurers who masquerade as nationalists.  

In Africa, and especially the West African sub-region rebels or revolutionaries had emerged in various countries. While some are ethnic in character, others are politically motivated. Late President Samuel Sergeant Doe from the Kru tribes used his ethnic militia to topple the government of President William Tolbert. Charles Taylor was also ousted from power by the combined militia groups of the Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) the New Democratic Alternative (NDA) and the New Deal Movement (NDM). 

In Angola, Jonas Savimbi of UNITA raised militia to fight against the government of Edwardo Dos Santos unsettled the government of Ahmed Tijan Kabar with rebel and ethnic militia groups for nearly a decade. In Kenya, the Kikuyus found it difficult to condemn the brutalization of President Jomo Kenyanta. Similarly, during the inglorious administration of President Araq Moi many ethnic groups like the Kalenji and Massai did not condemn the misdeeds of his administration.  

Deregulation is gradually replacing the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) introduced by the Babangida administration. What followed then was a gale of anti-SAP riots which culminated in policy reversal. The Obasanjo administration increased the price of petroleum products for about 8 times but the most severe action taken by the Nigerian Labour Congress was a 10 day strike. Thereafter, NLC or any group for that matter could not even carry placards against glaringly unjust government actions. Nigeria is in short supply of genuine nationalists, and true rebels or revolutionaries who are committed to supplanting maladministration that has stifled development in the country over the decades. 

If Nigeria had genuine revolutionaries, most of the past corrupt leaders would have voluntarily brought back their loot or get them confiscated. Indeed, Nigerians cannot sustain any political opposition or insurgency movement designed to change inept administration. The result is that maladministration and bad economic policies can easily be foisted by the leaders on the people. That is why in spite of the massive discontent and the groundswell of anomie, the status-quo still remains. None of those persons gallivanting as reform-minded has clearly articulated the fact that the Nigerian State is over due for an overhaul. It is the propensity for reform and revolution by a section of the people that keeps government in check as in the case of the PKK in Turkey, the Kurdish rebels in Iraq, the Tu-Pac Amaru of Peru, the Zapatista in Mexico and many other rebel groups around the world.  

In Nigeria, we profess the Rule of Law in principle but conduct secret trials after the mould of the Spanish Inquisition during the medieval period. We deny oil producing communities the benefit of ownership and control of their resources and even transnational; oil corporations disregard Corporate Social Responsibility, but any time they protest against this  brazen injustice they are suppressed by an army of occupation. An average civil servant in Nigeria is reduced to the level of a real servant hence people devise devious means to appropriate the commonwealth. Prominent people are assassinated and the police will never conclude their investigations. Before we deregulate the down stream sector of the petroleum industry, let us deregulate the police force, the army, road construction, and the provision other infrastructure to demonstrate to the world government does not exist in Nigeria.  

The horrible experience Nigeria is passing through now calls of the emergence of genuine rebels and reform-minded revolutionaries, but in the interest of the corporate existence and stability of Nigeria our human rights activists, civil society organization have all surrendered to the Machiavellian tyrants and kleptocrats of our fatherland. How will they rebel when the leaders have incapacitated their psyche?. Indeed Nigeria’s soul cries out for a revolution. We cannot pretend to be too deaf to hear the cries of the nation for a complete overhaul. Like Jeremiah the weeping prophet put it ‘Israel is stained with guilt, faithless, hence it is time to uproot, destroy, and then to rebuild and to plant. I find it difficult to tell my children that this house shall endure. The yoke on the nation is heavy and only a revolution can lift it and resuscitate the nation’s vitality. 
 
 

Idumange John is a University Lecturer and Activist