It is two years already that President Buhari assumed office as the President of Nigeria. He came in with high expectation on the demand side. CHANGE was the vehicle! It now seems that the road is either too rough and slippery for the vehicle or that the driver does not understand the signs on the dash board!
Nigeria is fast receding into brutal life of primitivism. The recession of logics, thought and reasoning has been worsened by fratricidal ethnicism that have engulfed every space and sphere of the country, including its cyberspace. A people overloaded with burden of survival in environment with slim and unequal opportunities is bound to be characterised by identity –stress and anxiety disorder. The frustration-aggression space created by socio- economic cum political injustices has opened desperate vista for survival. The people live in wide unfilled integration –gap that has expanded the width, the depth and the height of their vulnerabilities. Religious and ethnic baits have become the snare for national death. It now fits into the assertion of Uvin P. that; ‘a population that is cynical, angry, and frustrated is predisposed to scapegoating and projection, vulnerable to manipulation, deeply afraid of the future, and desperate for change’. This is the nation that was handed over to President Buhari and he needs to understand this; and very fast too!
In this respect, the President needs help; urgently and swiftly too! He needs to be rescued; from foes and friends; and much more from himself! From foes, because of hatred without repentance; from friends, because of the dangerously expanding see-no-evil- cultism and from himself, because he does not understand the chemistry of a mentally broken country that he has the privilege of presiding over. The President might have inherited an economy poorer than he imagined before assuming power. He can be pardoned for that. However, it is an unpardonable oversight if the President was ignorant of the social state of Nation when he assumed office. He ought to know by the callousness of the campaigns that were run by parties on the road to the 2015 elections. In character and contents, the campaigns were not only obnoxious; they were genocidal! They fed on ethnic and religious differences and feast on fratricidal faith and ethnicity. The political entrepreneurs mobilised along the fault lines. They built the consequential mass movements on ethnic and religious explosives. The predatory Big Bad Boys received incentives from their principals to portray rivals as malicious contenders. Onshore and offshore media were awash with our elasticity for intolerance and inherent capacity for mutually assured primordial hatred. All these loud indicators were there to guide President Buhari that he was not elected to lead a nation. That he was at best elected to gather together pieces of a broken nation, re-assemble a people torn apart by fear and hate and re-integrate communities of friendly foes. The President ought to know by now that most Nigerians of different ethnic groups have lost confidence in the ability of any government to redeem their country. The fabrics of the nation have been severely weakened by diverse forms of injustices and exclusion. Shrinking opportunities for large majority of young people and the mobile part of the population have been advantageous to the Big Bad Boys, who have seen in it opportunity for their mobilisation along ethnic and religious lines. President Buhari cannot afford to join the Big Bad Boys; in word and in action. He must be seen and heard to be leading the crusade for National Integration; re-building a broken nation, not furthering its polarisation. Having inherited a country of people with unwarranted hatred for one another, I wish Buhari had prioritised the people and regions that did not vote for him for re-assurance of one Nigeria, and more so in his first major appointment. I wish he fashioned his wonderful word line ‘am for everybody and for nobody’ into weapon that could make the Nigeria’s Template for provincial thinking into article for spasm in deleted memory file. I wish he had fired the first shot for national integration by consciously mobilising diverse ethnic groups and recognising each as critical bloc in re-building a nation whose citizens have been lost to tribes, religion and political parochialism. No amount of good work will endure in a country with maximum mutual hate like Nigeria of today. Just imagine a cohesive nation that rises against Boko Haram together, uses tool of justice to frustrate opportunity for emergence of Niger Delta Avengers, makes irrelevant the continued existence of Biafra, OPC and Arewa fronts. Such is a country needed for greater output of products for export, Agriculture and other products for re-vitalising a wobbling economy.
As good as fighting corruption may be, it cannot replace the need to re-construct our ethnic diversity and mobilise it along national line; using the outcome of dialogue with the blocs as tools for addressing collective grievances and curtailing individual greed. Grievances are drifting us apart; and leaders must rise to address them. For instance, People want to know what murder means in a secular state. In a secular state, the definition of murder must not defer to any religion or tribe; more so that the Nigerian Constitution has no space for ‘unbenched Judges’ who at slightest opportunity, commit murder by imposing death sentence on others under the guise of religion. Nigerians want to live in a country where no one has the licence to kill or maim; whoever they are; Herdsmen, Boko Haram, Avenger or foreigner. Nigerians want to live in a country where the only citizenship, killers and murderers wear, is that of criminals.
The narrative of citizenship has changed. No Nigerian Leader of today can afford to be blind to ethnic grievances in a severely polarised country like ours. That will be frighteningly insensitive at a time when the economy is being crippled, allegedly for the same ugly reasons !
We cannot continue to create opportunities for flourishing Stock Market of violence by narrowly concentrating political power and economic opportunities in few blocs at the expense of others. Policies and practices must recognise our diversity, acknowledge our weaknesses and leverage on our capacity and strength to evolve a just and flourishing nation built on social justice. There must be a paradigm shift; a new way of achieving enduring peace without leaving anything in reservation for future war! President Buhari must urgently come up with a working strategy that will counter the narratives of Nigeria being a mere geographic expression; a country without citizens! He must realise that to make a good President, there must be a good people; bound in unity! Unity is impossible in a country where some continually hold the horns of Cow for others to do the milking! Nigeria is too structurally defective to carry the weight of justice. A federation with omnipotent centre and prodigal peripheries (states) can never generate the quantum of centrifugal force needed for development to happen. Buhari has two years more to fulfil the demand of justice by restructuring the country. Like Frantz Fanon, he ‘either fulfils or betrays it!’
Gbenro Olajuyigbe is an Abuja based Human Security Expert
gbenroolajuyigbe@yahoo.com