OPINION: Life in an unstable country

INSTABILITY is the only thing that is stable about today’s Nigeria. And that should be concerning. But nothing seriously indicates that we are perturbed. It’s still business as usual by our rulers. This house is on fire but our rulers have chosen to go after rats. There is no aspect of our national life that is stable and predictable. Not politics. Not economy. Not governance or the semblance of it. Not policies. Not programmes. Not education. Not trust. Not marriages. Not life expectancy. Not electricity supply. Not national power grid. Not elections. Not sundry personal relationships. Not anything, really. Our country is in the eye of a vortex. Everything is shaken up. And down. The centre and the periphery no longer hold. For sure, everything is falling apart.

The evidence of the nonchalance and insensitivity of our rulers and the resignation of the people is in plain sight. For instance, last week, Nigeria’s President, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu ‘summoned’ a meeting of the governors of the states to, among other things, discuss how to rescue the country from the vice grip of common and hardened criminals. It was difficult to imagine how the irony was lost on that motley crowd that gathered in Abuja. If the President, the governors, the ministers and sundry persons who assembled in that cosy chamber in Abuja had taken even a cursory or casual look at themselves, they would have found out that they, along with their cousins in the ruling and governing elite down the decades, are and had really been the problem with Nigeria. The sage, Chinua Achebe, said as much in his pamphlet, The Trouble With Nigeria. Or how do you explain, well nobody explains anything to Nigerians anymore, that the president literally left the venue of that meeting where solutions to the ills afflicting our country were supposed to be proffered, assignments farmed out and marching orders for immediate implementation issued, straight to the airport for a trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They said Tinubu was going to attend the summit of the Africa Union [AU], an organization that appears no longer fit for purpose.

It may be unkind to chastise Tinubu on his obsession for the spotlight. And for travelling abroad at the least excuse or no excuse at all. He may be in a race to outdo his immediate predecessor. Many of Nigeria’s presidents are vain, anyway. And cheap. And rulers of countries on the continent know the vanity of Nigerian presidents. One of the earliest ‘laurels’ won by our former President, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, on accession to office in 2015 was his crowning [really clowning] as the chairman of the Economic Community of West African States [ECOWAS]. Buhari was later decorated by the AU as the foremost anti- corruption crusader on the continent. His handlers made a song and dance of that ‘feat’. ‘How market’? as we are wont to ask in Nigeria. The evidence is that Buhari who left office last May after eight ruinous years superintended over the most corrupt regime in the history of our country so far. The feeling in town is that if Buhari and the All Progressives Congress [APC] had been succeeded by another individual from a different political party, the revelations about the looting of the country would have been staggering and numbing.

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ECOWAS did not waste time in adopting Tinubu as its chairman weeks after he assumed the presidency in late May. He posted a disastrous outing in his first major challenge as the leader of the sub region when the army in Niger, Nigeria’s neighbour to the north sacked their president, detained him and seized the government. Tinubu gave the coupists an ultimatum to restore the president or face military invasion from the phantom ECOWAS army. He cut off Nigeria’s supply of electricity to Niger and mobilized the sub region to impose sanctions on Niger. Tinubu’s belated resort to the Senate for authority to declare war on Niger was promptly rebuffed. Today Niger appears to be calling the shots. It has voted, along with Burkina Faso and Mali, to leave ECOWAS. Mauritannia had left earlier. So if these three countries leave in a year’s time, then Nigeria’s Tinubu will have the dubious distinction of destroying an organization which founding was inspired by Nigeria on May 28, 1975, during the regime of Gen. Yakubu Gowon. Like Buhari, Tinubu was in Addis last weekend to be decorated as the health champion of Africa. The claim was that he is doing so much to provide health facilities to Nigerians. AU must be an affliction to Africans. Or how do you reconcile the notorious fact that this African champion on health goes abroad, to France, even for the minutest of health issues? How do you explain the fact that this so-called health champion who is now the president of his country does not have the courtesy and respect to tell his ‘subjects’ whenever he goes abroad to seek medical help? Even a monarch in the UK did so recently with the attendant beneficial effects to the British people. King Charles 111 didn’t have to. After all he was not elected and monarchs don’t have to explain anything to anybody.

About the same time in Africa, the now late president of Namibia demonstrated openness with his health status and where he would seek medical help and the duration of his stay outside his country. It is obvious that the AU and ECOWAS have created a template for exploiting the vanity of Nigeria’s rulers to the pain of Nigerians.

Our country will be 64 years-old on October 1, yet it is still incapable of conducting free, fair and credible elections. The harder we appear to try, the worse the outcome of our elections. In 2023, a heist was passed off as an election. A critical tech to bring a measure of credibility and transparency to the February 2023 election managed not to work only during the hotly contested presidential election. One year on, the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] has not found it needful to explain to Nigerians what happened. Still on elections. Almost every year the national assembly embarks on amending the Electoral Act. Yet we are stuck with stone age elections marked by tears and blood and deaths.

Along the same line, the barely 25-year- old Nigerians Constitution has probably seen more amendments and alterations than the more than 200-year-old Constitution of the United States of America. Since the fifth assembly, the national assembly has been voting an average of N1 billion for the jamboree they call constitution amendment. Pray, how do you amend a fraudulent document? A document that was shepherded by a military regime to serve the interest of a military ruler who was bent on transmuting to an ‘elected president’. Indeed the fraud was manifest in the opening declaration in the Constitution…’We the People…’ We delude ourselves by pretending to be running a federal system of government with a unitary Constitution where local government areas are accepted as parts of the federating components. At the end of every month our rulers gather in Abuja with bowls to take their share of the ‘national cake’. The only significant outcome, howbeit adverse, of the monthly gatherings of the vultures is that once they leave Abuja, the value of the Naira against the Dollar will crash. Massively. It must be a case of the owl chirps in the night and the child dies in the morning. The culprits who are actually scoundrels will join the ordinary citizen in lamenting the rapid erosion in the value of the national currency.

Instability cuts across. Nothing is spared. In the 21st Century, our rulers still regard public electricity supply as rocket science. We claim to be the giant of Africa but our scorecard is sordid. Our country is energy- deprived and starved. Power supply for industrial and domestic use is a luxury. We are routinely derided as a ‘generator country’ with a diesel fuel-powered economy. Nigeria is acutely energy deficient yet our rulers fly all over the world claiming to be looking for foreign investors. If this is not insanity then tell me what it is?

Meanwhile, about 41 years ago, the slogan of a presidential candidate in that year’s election, Alhaji Moshood Abiola, was ‘Hope ‘83’. That Hope did not materialize. Forty years later in 2023, the slogan of yet another presidential candidate was ‘Renewed Hope’. Our country moved from ‘Hope’ to ‘Renewed Hope’ with only retrogression, privations and gnashing of teeth to show for it. In- between we won the laurel of being the poverty capital of the world. Even with ‘Renewed Hope’ the material condition of the average Nigerian is getting worse. Unemployment is rife. Inflation, especially food inflation, is climbing. And biting. Businesses are closing shop and some relocating to other jurisdictions. Many Nigerians have been reduced to beggars. Parents are auctioning their children for money and food. Families are being torn asunder and marriages are breaking up. Children are increasingly becoming rebellious because parents are unable to meet basic obligations. Even the deaf and some of those in the ruling class whose consciences had appeared to be seared now recognize that there is a ticking bomb. It will be cataclysmic if this bomb goes off.

AUTHOR: Ugo Onuoha

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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