By Theophilus
Ilevbare
As Nigeria performs the ritual of celebrating the country as
it marks 53-years as an
independent nation and a member of the international community, without the usual pomp and fanfare that has been associated
with such celebrations, this time would have added insult to our collective
injury, the journey to democracy and nationhood has been tortuous. The country is in dire straits. At the
time of departure of our colonial masters, Nigeria was considered to be one of the emerging great
nations of the world, like the proverbial child of great promise.
After a civil
war, military rule and now, democracy, with greedy and self-serving elite as
leaders, the country has continued to slide deeper into underdevelopment
despite the advantages which oil wealth conferred on us. Let’s not be deceived by the
ruse of a sombre celebration, typical of our government, it is a decoy, meant
to pave way for a more elaborate, yet
misguided, multi-billion naira celebration in 2014 to mark the centennial
anniversary.
The trouble with Nigeria, title of late Chinua Achebe’s book,
gives a fitting and explicit description of the state of the nation. “Nigeria
is not a great country. It is one of the most disorderly nations in the world.
It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun.
It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that give least
value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and
vulgar. In short, it is among the most unpleasant places on earth.”
Add to that, a country of “kleptomaniacs,” whose insatiable
quest for power has put a country of great potential and promise on an almost
irreversible track of imminent implosion. Those who had predicted 2015 as the tipping point may
not be far off the mark considering the fraud being perpetrated in the name of
governance and the fact that we’ve been on the wobbly part for too long.
Something has to give. Nothing else captures
the picture of the sorry state of our nation at a time like this.
We celebrate independence, at a time when
insecurity in varied forms like terrorism, kidnapping and armed robbery are at
an all time high. Government says the economy is growing when factories are
either shutting down or functioning far below installed capacity; they are
winning the war against corruption but indicted persons in monumental frauds
like the fuel subsidy scam are cosseting with their co-travelers in corridors
of power.
Misrule
and its resultant poverty are traced to the rise in religious extremists in
northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has crippled the economy of the north and sent
thousands of innocent Nigerians to their early graves, the latest, been the
massacre of about 50 students of College of Agriculture, Gujba, Yobe State,
while they slept in their dormitory.
It is unfortunate, that a country
that offered so much in hope and possibilities for its citizens at independence
has today become a land of suffering, insecurity and near hopelessness, teeming
youth unemployment, poor electricity supply, incessant ethno-religious crises, no thanks to rudderless and bumbling leaders who
have failed to lead a well-endowed nation to harness the talents of its
vibrant, energetic and resilient people. We can spend the next
few hours cataloguing the problems of the country and we would still not scratch
the surface.
Rather than fully maximise the
country’s potentials for mutually assured prosperity, a ‘privileged’ few have
hoodwinked the Nigerian people. The result is what we have today; a country
exhibiting all the characteristics of a failed state. The
problem of Nigeria is the ruling elite and the failure of leadership. There is
nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything
therein but the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the
challenge of nation building.
Unarguably,
those who started the Nigerian
project, the likes of Sir Ahmadu Bello, Nnamdi Azikwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo
and others had good intentions before it was hijacked by rogues and rascals
donning the garb of leaders.
The strong grip of rapacious,
thieving and vacillating class of people masquerading as leaders have turned a
promising country to the poster child of corruption and underdevelopment. While
it will be unfair to blame the current leadership of the country for all the
woes of the country, post-independence, truth is, the present administration
has proved as incompetent and visionless as its predecessors in its fickle
efforts to take Nigeria out of the doldrums.
The Goodluck Jonathan government
has shown little or no seriousness in moving the country forward. Over three years since the mantle of leadership
fell on him, first as acting president and in 2011, elected president, the
country’s future have never been this bleak. Fourteen years after the People’s
Democratic Party ushered in the present democratic dispensation, the people
have been left to gnash their teeth and rue lost opportunities. The nation is
forlorn.
Nigerians must turn deaf ears to the rhetoric
that celebrate growth without visible development. Federal ministers at every
opportunity, pontificate about job-creating-projects without jobs.
Infrastructural deficit has become the opportunity cost of corruption,
negatively impacting on our socio-economic development. The current cost of governance
is the highest in the nation’s history.
Recurrent expenditure gulps about 76% of our
yearly national budget, leaving very little for the execution of capital
projects. We must reverse the high cost of running our federal system of
government comprising over 40-members of cabinet and 469 members of our
National Assembly, if we are to tell a better story of the next 47-years of our
independence. Some have advocated a switch to the presidential system of
government.
At the milestone of five
decades and three years, we must do away with tyrannical tendencies that
engender impunity, disregard for the rule of law and the fundamental rights of
Nigerians. We are afforded another opportunity to define for ourselves, what
the value of development means to us as a country and if we have developed at the pace of our peers
– Singapore, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia. Successive leaders have failed to build on the
development framework of federalism with all its essential features as given to
us by our heroes past who struggled for our independence.
There
are many figures in the public domain about how much our leaders have siphoned
from the country since independence. From Nuhu Ribadu, former Chairman of the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), we learnt that the amount is
“more than six times the total sum that went into rebuilding Europe in the
aftermath of the Second World War via the famous European Recovery Programme. The
ERP programme was $13billion. The political class and the ruling elite must take
the blame for the abyss the country finds itself. We must as a matter of
urgency begin to build a nation of our dreams. We cannot continue to taxi but
take off!
From this tipping point we
dangerously totter, the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference, that
will allow Nigerians from all walks of life have a say on how they want to be
governed and suggest solutions to the country’s myriad of problems, in my
opinion, is the first step towards national recovery.
Theophilus
Ilevbare is a public affairs commentator. He can be reached via
theophilus@ilevbare.com. Engage him on twitter, @tilevbare. He blogs at http://ilevbare.com
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