Oracles, who gave wings to their tongues. Scribes, whose minds ran gauntlet of taunts. Stenographers of time and secretaries to the oppressed, who cried out like voices in the wilderness. Prophets, who had their heads handed over to the daughters of adulteresses, by the phallic insecurities of Tetrarchs in midlife crisis. Divine vuvuzelas, who claimed to commune with the new and the old gods: None of this class of minds, could ever be accused of suffering the illusions of grandeur, when they framed issues bordering on the dysfunctionality of societies in grandiose terms.
The same obtains in Nigeria. Those afflicted by the pathology, which Nigeria has become, tend to marinate their diagnosis in hyperbole.
It comes with the territory.
Nigeria is a whirlpool of dysfunction; a maelstrom of bullshit pretending to be a country.
Truth be told; Nigeria is cocktail of toxicity; a horrendously Hobbesian embrace, where the life of man has become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Any honest assessment of this country, would return only one verdict. This country has acquitted herself, not only as neo-feudal construct led by prebendal hooligans and political arsonists, but an Orwellian embrace, where social justice, equity and good conscience are non-existent.
Justice is so scarce in Nigeria, that the country is now a full-blown archipelago of robber-baronies; where the most debauched crooks of our clime, hold courts in pompous audacity,as lords and masters of our collective destiny.
St. Augustine of Hippo warned eons ago, that any sociopolitical enclosure, devoid/shorn of justice is but a den of robbers.True to Augustine’s insight, Nigeria is a paradise for crooks. The life and circumstance of the average Nigeria citizen is testifies to that.
Lets start from the head. Every fish starts rotting at the head.
In Nigeria, the government, which is an absentee-landlord, has finally yielded her monopoly of violence, to bandits, terrorists, and murderous herdsmen, who now control large swathes of our land.
The only conclusion that comports to reason, on assessing Nigeria, is that she is a geopolitical yoke, a social farce, an economic disaster and a political apology. The incompetent government of Muhammadu the son of Buhari, has brought all those internal contradictions to the fore.
Under him, the country has metamorphosed into
a brewery of terror. She became a prolific incubator of banditry, terror, insecurity and social unease. Under his mismanagement of governance, Nigeria’s destination as runaway epidemic of dysfunctions, where every virtue is corruptible, and every conscience purchasable, was accentuated.
Nigerian leadership at all levels is a joke. Achebe was right. The trouble with Nigeria is leadership. Nigerian leaders are goats and certified nincompoops. They have dutifully acquitted themselves, not only as ethical arsonists, burning down every pedestal of social legitimacy, to satiate their corrupt tastes for privilege. They are also the worst species of incestuous rapists, that Africa has ever witnessed. These cabal of brainless thieves entertain no compunction in sodomizing their patrimony without Vaseline, just to get at the sordid lucre and obscene, unproductive, and visionless privilege, native to the metaphysic and ephemerality of unexamined power.
What about the citizenship? Nigerians seems to have mass-immunized themselves against civic responsibility. This is to the extent that we have developed a herd-immunity against every social virtue, that comports to development and progress.
We are still clinging to our ancient superstitions, while manufacturing new illusions. We zealously defend the epistemologies of our exiled gods, while constructing new ontologies out of our primitive fatalisms. We still caress our clannishness, and canonize our parochialism,dressing our ethnocentrism in borrowed supremacist robes.
All these are diversionary distractions, offering us wooden excuses as to why we couldn’t bury our divisive illusions, explode our insular cocoons, and unite to overthrow the sociopolitical pathologies, tying us to the pillars of omni-dimensional poverty. Through our civic apathy, we became conspiratorial collaborators to our exploitation. We conscripted and lent ourselves to become the hangmen at our own execution.
To that end, there is no virtue, that Nigeria will not corrupt. No ethics that she would not disembowel. No morals that she would not eviscerate. No law, that she would not castrate.
And like JP Clark would have it, we all became “casualties”!
Polemics aside, it is reasonable to interrogate Nigeria’s progress and circumstance.
How has Nigeria till this time, acquitted herself, both as a sociopolitical embrace, and a nation-space? How would history judge this epoch or stage, in the trajectory of Nigeria’s evolution?
To assess the performance of this nation, one must put before him or herself, what the essence or raison d’etre of a nation is.
The entire gamut of the Western philosophical canon, which Whitehead argued, were all footnotes to Plato, converged at one conclusion, in relation to what the essence of a nation is.
It is, that the “Polis” or nation exists for the welfare of the citizens.
Plato believed that this welfare of the citizens of a Polis, would be achieved, when the best elements of the State, become the leaders of the state. He foresaw an aristocracy of merit, governing the State. For him, the King should be a philosopher or philosophers should become Kings. That is the sure way to guarantee that a state lives up to its essence, of guaranteeing the greatest good for the greatest number of her citizens.
These also found echoes in St. Augustine, who elaborated and took it in his construction of the City of God.
Augustine saw the essence of the State as guaranteeing justice for all her citizens. He contended that a State without justice, is but a band of robbers.
Thomas Hobbess’ fear of the State of nature, where the life of man is bound to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, made him realize that the society was born in a social contract, where each of us gave up some of his individual rights and liberties, and subleased them to the Leviathan, who agglomerated these powers, to enable it exercise a monopoly of violence as to guarantee us safety, security and welfare. For him, if this social contract, which creates governments does not exist, we would implode into a State of nature, where man will become wolf to man-homo homini lupus.
These all boil down to the fact that a State exists as a geopolitical, socio-economic and cultural construct, created for the security and welfare of the citizens.
The success of a State, rises and falls on how it fares in guaranteeing and providing for the welfare of her citizens, across all spheres, and vistas of their existence.
A State becomes great when it can guarantee the lives, property and welfare of her citizens. And a State fails, when the obverse obtains.
So how has Nigeria fared, if this framework is considered? How has Nigeria fared if the United Nations Human Development Indices are applied to all sectors of her national life?
Well, it no news anymore, that Nigeria has failed in the primary responsibility of a State. Nigeria is a cauldron of insecurity. The State has lost the monopoly of violence and can no longer guarantee the lives and property of her citizens anymore.
If that has been all, we would have argued for a blatant militarization of the State to restore order.
But Nigeria has degenerated to the extent that we need to commence a fundamental interrogation of the basis of this our existence as a nation-space.
We need to restructure the shit out of this country. It will dam the ethnic dissensions, put the people on the spot to realize that their destiny is now in their hands, and that every bondsman, in his hands lies the key to cancel his captivity as Shakespeare wrote.
We have to start talking to each other across our primitive divides, before we work ourselves up into the frenzy of murdering each other in another fratricidal conflict; which would finally show the world that we not only pretend to be stupid, but that we are actually stupid.
Gwazia ndi yard unu!!
