In search of a refreshing Nigeria

by Dele Momodu



Fellow Nigerians, I’m happy to send you this letter from Harare,
the capital of Zimbabwe, where I’m attending the wedding of a
young Nigerian journalist, Jide Agbeniyi and his Zimbabwean
colleague and partner, Miss Josey Mahachi, the beautiful
presenter of the popular Click Africa Show on Africa Magic. This
piece was inspired by the manner of greetings I discovered here:
“A refreshing noon or a refreshing evening to you”, are the
commonest ways of salutation in this tranquil country. It is
almost a mantra as everyone I met greeted me thus and it
sounded so sonorous and genuinely welcoming that it then
occurred to me that what human beings require in essence to
enjoy life to the fullest is a refreshing existence. This is what has
eluded most societies that are in deep turmoil such as ours.
James, my Zimbabwean driver, an interesting companion at all
times loves his country to bits. I asked him why and his answer
was excitingly revealing. He said Zimbabweans find it hard to
smash their heads in the name of politics and if ever they do the
police will catch up and deal ruthlessly with the political thugs.
He was proud that the level of violence in his country was very
low compared to that of South Africa. He lectured me on the
essence of peace and that no one should allow politicians to
waste their precious lives. I was hoping he would ask me about
such things in my own country. I was uncomfortable that I
wouldn’t have known what to say or how to direct my response
candidly without rubbishing a country I love so dearly.
It was another lecture session at an upscale salon where I met a
very intelligent therapist who gave me a clean cut. My barber
provided the answer to the question I was itching and aching to
ask the citizens of a country that has been totally monopolised
since Independence by Pa Robert Mugabe but was too timid to
venture: “How come President Mugabe has been winning your
elections permanently these several decades!” As if reading my
mind, David volunteered that the old man has managed to hold
Zimbabwe together by offering strong and purposeful leadership
and that whosoever wishes to show him the way out of office
would have to clearly convince the people about what he has to
offer and not just assume that he would win on a mere platter of
discontent. He rhapsodised about how President Mugabe at 89 is
still as fit as a fiddle. According to him, their President can still
play the game of soccer. There was no way to verify this seeming
hyperbole.These two guys made a lot of sense to me and I’m
indeed grateful for their great insight into what many Africans
don’t understand about their own continent. They provided me
with simple, practical and straight-forward analysis which many
Professors of political science may have found impossible to
proffer. I do not have enough empirical data about Zimbabwe but
one thing is certain life here is not as grim and grievous as being
regularly portrayed abroad by the international media. Like other
countries, Zimbabwe would have its dark parts, but however
what is readily visible to the visitor is a showcase of relative
development. I saw beautiful and clean roads all the way from
the airport to the city centre. As a matter of fact, the road out of
the airport has been recently upgraded and dualised.
The airport itself is small but very elegant and incredibly
functional. Immigration was friendly, welcoming and brisk. I did
not see Customs rummage through any bags unnecessarily.
Police presence around the city was minimal but effectively
competent. There were a couple of good hotels but the one I
settled for was homely with well-mannered staff who greeted you
endlessly as if pleasantries were going out of fashion. I met the
director of Tourism by chance over dinner and I was told tourists
now flood the country after surmounting the rash of negative
reports about the country. Shame that I couldn’t make time on
this occasion to visit the famous Victoria Falls shared by
Zimbabwe and neighbouring Zambia. I was astounded by the
number of white people I saw everywhere. I had to ask what
happened to our own legacy of colonial participation in Nigeria. It
was as if we deliberately obliterated the whites completely out of
our system as a result of boundless xenophobia and unbridled
nationalism. On our part, we were too much in a hurry to settle
indigenisation, nationalisation and lately local content. Whatever
Zimbabwe and other Southern African nations are enjoying today
must have come from the contributions of those white settlers
who have been cleverly assimilated.
Somehow the people of Zimbabwe have learnt to cope with
adversity and it seems the leaders are also trying hard providing
enough dividends of their strange variant of democracy despite
daunting challenges. Many Zimbabweans I met are scared that
their country may fall apart after Robert Mugabe. They have
pungent examples from what befell many African countries on
the exit of powerful leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu
wa Za Banga of the Republic of Congo which he changed to Zaire,
Felix Houphouet- Boigny of Ivory Coast, Muhammad Hosni El
Sayed Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and others.
This is the true secret of how President Robert Mugabe is able to
hold on to power till kingdom come.
If I was expecting to see a dilapidated country and a wretched
people, I was pleasantly disappointed. I marvelled at how a
supposedly bankrupt nation was forging ahead while the so-
called rich nations were floundering aimlessly and without visible
signs of intending to change for the better in the near future. I
was told a loaf of bread used to cost billions in their old currency
but today the country has wisely and dramatically taken steps to
douse the rooftop inflation by adopting American dollars and
South African rand as its currency. A cash machine is able to
vomit up to 1,000 US dollars from your credit or debit card at
once. You pay for virtually everything in those currencies and
there is no confusion whatsoever about the conversion.
The job of a leader is to find solutions to problems and not to be
unnecessarily defensive about why things are not working each
time questions are asked. Unfortunately, that seems to be the
case in our neck of the woods. If aged but ageless leaders can
still manage a country what’s stopping our new crop of leaders
from aspiring to greatness? The little progress I can see on
ground in Zimbabwe is the platform from which I’m launching
this column today. It has re-assured me that our problems are
man-made and they must be man-solved.
These are extremely difficult times in our long-suffering country.
The only time I felt as depressed about our situation as this was
during those days of the agitation for the revalidation of the June
12 Presidential election which was won fair and square by Chief
Moshood Abiola. The crisis was so terrible and suffocating that
many people actually thought Nigeria as a nation was going to
collapse and break up into smithereens. An election that
miraculously unified Nigeria was soon broken into pieces by
expert counterfeiters who turned it into a war of ethnic jingoists.
No one was able to persuade the gladiators and garrison
commanders to pause a minute and consider the collective gains
of validating that wondrous election against the selfish
advantages that encouraged the cold-blooded murder of our best
election. Perhaps we would have had a strong and refreshing
Nigerian leader in Abiola who had demonstrated beyond doubt in
words and in deeds that he loved Nigeria and all its inhabitants.
But that was not going to happen.
That was the point at which the rickety foundation for our present
mess was laid. As we continue to shilly-shally and refuse to get
serious about changing our silly ways of doing things at this end,
it is pertinent to once again remind ourselves of where we are
coming from and what we need to do to get off this road that can
only lead our country to perdition. Truth is we all know the
solutions to our problems, but it seems no one is willing to risk
his comfort zone, to make that change we all dream about
realisable at the shortest time possible.
Let’s now try to break it down to brass tacks. Ethnicity has
suddenly become the number one contributor to our
backwardness. The most educated Nigerian becomes rabidly
myopic and stupidly sensitive once a matter affects his tribe and
community. He instantly wears a toga of illiteracy and
foolishness. But someone needs to tell us once and for all that
Nigeria is going nowhere but down the drain unless we wake up
from our somnambulist state and narcoleptic stupor to follow the
modern trends of copying good manners from the comity of
responsible nations. Where you come from can never be the only
prerequisite qualification for selecting national leaders. The fact
that our Constitution promotes Federal Character is no excuse for
us to continue committing serial suicide by electing or selecting
incompetent and ill-mannered people into sensitive positions of
authority. The world has moved beyond such primordial
sentiments. Two perfect examples are the recent appointment of
a Canadian, Mark Carney, as the Bank of England Governor and
the earlier monumental election of a first generation American,
Barack Obama, as the most powerful President on planet earth.
Those who promote ethnicity in Nigeria have never been known
to do so because they expect their people to benefit anything
tangible from such appointment but because they expect a few
crumbs to drop on the plates of a few people from their zone.
They live perpetually on this misplaced hope and
phantasmagoria even when it is obvious what cataclysmic result
would come out of it. Let me therefore advise those already
warming up for the murder of all battles for the body and soul of
Nigeria come the year of our Lord 2015 to sheath their swords
and find something better to do.
The Nigerians I see today may be slow to action but we are being
steadily united by suffering. Even those who have are not too
different from those who do not have because the pressures on
the privileged ones have made nonsense of enjoying alone
without consideration for others. Only a most wicked fellow
would follow the litany of woes in Nigeria and not feel a
compulsion to do something that could drastically reduce the
cycle of debilitating poverty in the land.
All Nigeria needs now is a strong leader who has the capacity to
unite and not further divide us. The way to go about it is for all
interested politicians to see themselves as Nigerians first before
talking of tribes. Those campaigning for President Goodluck
Jonathan are spoiling his chances by resting his qualification
wholly on his Niger Delta pedigree. It is in the same vein that
those screaming that power must return to the North are heating
up the polity. What we need is a good leader from any part of
Nigeria. Nothing stops Jonathan from getting a second term if his
score card is excellent. And nothing stops others from kicking
him out if they can show how they are better in practical terms.
Those who expect the heavens to fall if one candidate or the other
does not win are enemies of Nigeria. The President more than
anyone else knows what he has to do in order to win the election
in resounding and convincing manner.
We must urge him to ignore those preventing from treading the
better route of performance. The new people he decides to inject
into administration will demonstrate what he has decided to do.
He still has a chance to perform and shut up his critics. But if he
prefers to play politics with the lives of country men and women,
he would have bungled the opportunity of a lifetime.
God save Nigeria.

Dele must be in great financial need. Always writing to seek attention.

ckkris: Dele must be in great financial need. Always writing to seek attention.

i really dont see it that way.. silence isnt what will effect the change we need in nigeria.. even if he is seeking attention, if he is not talking amiss, anything wrong with that??

ckkris: Dele must be in great financial need. Always writing to seek attention.

Can you pls table him the amount you need to get your life back on track? Ewu!!

ckkris: Dele must be in great financial need. Always writing to seek attention.

I think you reason with your a--hole and shiiit with your brain.
That is if there is anything upstairs

ckkris: Dele must be in great financial need. Always writing to seek attention.

I think you reason with your a--hole and shiiit with your brain.
That is, if there is anything upstairs.

This sholud be on the front page. makes sense