Oby Ezekwelili. |
There is Time for everything. Figuratively speaking, a person or country can be asked, “What Time is it?” with an intention to trigger a deep rumination from those who should know or care. The start of the New Year after a bloodied end of 2023 with yet another mass brutal killings of over 150 children, youth, women, and men during the Christmas week, in several villages of Plateau State did provide the context for one to ask. So, I ask first, those among my fellow citizens who have only always hoped against hope that our country will ultimately Become, “What Time is it for Nigeria?” I next ask all those who have held and the ones currently holding political and public leadership positions in the country, “What Time is it for Nigeria?”
The blood of Fidelis Solomon and over
one hundred and fifty other victims gruesomely massacred in the latest Plateau
State carnage, and the blood of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians
cumulatively killed in the North Central, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southsouth
and Southwest regions of our country are crying, “What Time is it for Nigeria?”
What is your answer, fellow citizens?
This really is the hardest question that
all the people of goodwill in Nigeria must ask and answer candidly. Anyone who
attempts to evade asking and confronting the inevitable tough answer to this
question merely lives in delusion.
For me, it is the critical time to
confront the hard conversations on how to create a viable Nigeria that transits
from mere country to a nation of people who though diverse have collectively
negotiated to unite themselves around a shared sense of nationalism to build a
just, equitable, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, stable, resilient, and ethical
society based on shared values, national vision and common identity. It is the
most feasible way to avoid Nigeria becoming a truly bankrupt country
with all her people.
Bankruptcy, an extremely scary word was
recently used by Nigeria’s National Security Adviser (NSA), Mallam Nuhu
Ribadu to describe the financial situation of the country. In his words:
“We are facing very serious budgetary constraints. It is okay for me to
tell you. It is fine for you to know. We have a very serious situation… We have
inherited a very difficult country, a bankrupt country to the extent that we
are paying back what was taken. It is serious”.
Bankruptcy in corporate use, means the
death of an entity because it stops all operations and goes completely out of
business. Death is the loss of soul. Like humans, a country also has a soul,
and it contains the values and boundaries of what is acceptable or abhorrent
behavior. For example, in Nigeria, there was a time when a certain modicum of
values served as filters of what behaviors were rewarded and punished. The
soul of our country began to die when public leaders became bad examples,
disdaining values and rewarding vices. As the people either helplessly watched
on or simply did not care and many chose to join the leaders in sliding the
scale of values, the soul of Nigeria started to erode. The soul of the country
has eroded to a degree where today, the value and respect for human life is
closer to zero than to one.
The bankruptcy of a country and people
which relegates the dignity of life is much more damaging than empty public
coffers. Public leaders who do not value the life of their fellow human being
bankrupt the soul of their country. The cyclical pattern of empty coffers in a
country vastly endowed with the natural, human, and other resources to have
emerged as a globally productive and competitive economy is a factor of
Nigeria’s values bankruptcy. The Nigerian-State run by governments which are
inured to the debasement of human lives is bankrupt of soul.
We shockingly arrived a time in our
country when regardless of the number of mass abductions, maiming and killings
of fellow humans being in our country, the Nigerian-State moves on without an
iota of accountability and consequence for especially murderous criminals. We
are in a time when Nigerians have normalized and accepted that their governments
and leaders can conduct, enable, or ignore acts of impunity. A time in which
the lines between reward and punishment are so blurred that the country exists
without any form of deterring consequence for the most atrocious
behaviors.
So, even though evidence abound in our
public finance data to support Ribadu’s assessment of the current state of the
country’s finance, Nigeria’s reality is worse than mere financial
bankruptcy. An empty treasury is the least of insolvencies that stymie
Nigeria and Nigerians. The substantial and existential danger is that Nigeria
as a country is totally bankrupt of values, void of soul and headed into a
cataclysmic collapse of the kind that more money cannot change. What can more
money do to reverse the callous acceptance of a brutish, short, and nasty
existence into which majority Nigerians have now acculturated their
minds?
What will more money do for a people who
no longer expect their leaders to take responsibility for basic duties
including accountability for failure to produce results? What can more
money do for a country that kidnapping of citizens grew into an industry
nationwide? The Nigeria we all lament today is a sad example of what failure to
agree and uphold a national integrity and values system can do to any people.
Nigerians chose to be lethargic to how our country is governed, so our public
leaders willfully distorted incentives and
sanctions in our society.
Yes, the public coffers are empty, but
the time now is to tackle the cause and not one of the symptoms of our national
bankruptcy as a country and people. Nigeria must first overcome the existential
sustainability question as our top priority agenda at this time. Is it not
staggeringly alarming that Nigeria’s contemporary peer-countries are contending
to lead the 21st Century by shifting global economic dominance while we in
contrast are steadily regressing farther away from being a country? Nigeria’s
multiple existential threats to retaining the status of country are fiercer
than ever before. We now barely tick the boxes for the full status of a
country, properly so called.
A Nigeria that is fast losing most of
the basic criteria that qualified us to be included in the United Nations list
of recognized countries should alarm all patriots into action to save and avoid
the tendentious pattern of our political class tunnelling our focus to
addressing symptoms instead of their underlying causes.
Our evident state of affairs is that
Nigeria now more than ever before ticks closest to the box of a failed state on
the criteria of renowned Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. The index
annually uses Economic, Political and Social factors to evaluate fragility and
resilience of countries. Nigeria has every year over the last ten years
remained within the group of 15 countries out of 170 that rank closest to
fragile-failed country status. For example, on the economic front, Nigeria is
entangled with endemic issues of systemic and widespread grand as well as petty
corruption, “high economic inequality, economic development along group line,
low growth, severe economic decline and rising extreme poverty”.
In the context of the Fragility Index on
the political front, Nigeria experiences “breakdown of capacity of government
to function usually characterized by delegitimization of the state,
deterioration of public services, suspension, or arbitrary application of law;
widespread human rights abuses, security forces operating as a “state within a
state” often with impunity, rise of factionalized elites, and rise of external
political agents and foreign states”.
On the social metrics, the index
evaluates Nigeria’s “depleting social capital, loss of social cohesion, a
squandering and poor management of its diversity, demographic pressures and
tribal, ethnic and/or religious conflicts, massive internal and external
displacement of refugees, creating severe humanitarian emergencies, widespread
vengeance-seeking group grievances and sustained human flight” and such
like.
It will amount to a historical missed
opportunity if Nigerians do not in 2024 collectively resist the syndrome of
tunneling our focus to the lowest common denominator of our problems. The
Federal Government in its current narrative about public financial distress is
leading everyone down that path because even though it is true that Nigeria and
Nigerians are faced with the severest fiscal distress ever experienced in
recent history, our single-minded focus must be the battle for the Soul of
Nigeria. No amount of money from higher oil prices, tax collections and more
domestic and external debts can win this battle for us.
More money cannot save a country and
people that have lost their soul. Even then, the fact is that from all evidence
available in the public domain, additional money earned by Nigeria now merely
and mostly feed the avarice and voracious greed of Nigeria’s politicians anyway
as the budget process has often revealed. The question that should therefore
seize the minds of citizens of Nigeria and move all in the direction of the
right actions is found in the timeless words of scripture; “Behold, what does
it profit a man, nay, a woman and people of a country, to gain the whole world
but lose their soul?”
There is a raging battle for the Soul of
Nigeria, a country which has turned into a massive killing field and mass
graves overrunning with the blood of innocent children, youth, women, and men
brutally murdered, battered or abducted without any consequence to the
criminals.
Every Nigerian of goodwill – regardless
of ethnicity, religion, economic status, and political persuasion – knows that
the Nigeria we once knew is gone. The collective momentum must now swiftly
gather to the tipping point for Nigerians to compel a legally mandated National
Conversation that will fundamentally negotiate and determine the value we place
on our lives and the values that will uphold, preserve, and dignify a New
Nigeria and Nigerians. Throughout history, dead countries commenced their dying
when human life ceased to have worth. This is the kind of time Nigeria find
itself, but we can by a collective will confront the demons that have dwarfed
the realization of our country’s giant potentials and change the course of our
checkered history.
Could this be the ironic time a lethally
flawed government of President Bola Tinubu which continues struggling with
crisis of legitimacy, makes the urgent and historic choice to facilitate and
enable a New Constitutional Process credibly co-led by citizens? Will the
Tinubu administration surprise us and choose the good of Nigeria and Nigerians
this Time? Will he take up the gauntlet at this Time and ask himself the
question, “What Time is it for Nigeria?” Can Tinubu’s candid answer be that it
is “The Time for me to do right by the Citizens of Nigeria?”.
There is indeed Time for everything, and
Nigerians are anxiously waiting. It is Time.
Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili is a former Vice President of the World Bank, a former Senior Special Assistant on Due Process, former Minister of Education, former Minister of Solid Minerals, is Founder and Chairperson of the
Board of the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG).
Culled from ThisDay Online.
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