Ebi kiiwo ‘nu k’oro mii wo [When it takes up residence in the belly, hunger leaves room for no other thing]
A Yoruba adage.

With regard to the term Kunya in the title of this essay, readers might recollect that I explained its meaning and political context in Elombah about a month ago. Briefly, I stated that this was the nickname given to General Olumuyiwa Diya [rtd.] when he was the military governor of Ogun state in the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship. The nickname was an inversion and corruption of the General’s last name, Diya. Diya means to reduce, relieve or save completely from suffering while, on the other hand, Kunya is the opposite: a magnification, an intensification, a deepening of suffering. In that column, I explained that the inverse relationship between Kunya and Diya was a remarkably apt metaphor for the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship in particular and, more generally, all the military and civilian administrations in the country in the post-civil war period.
What this in essence means is that while the government periodically calls for discipline and sacrifice from the nation and the people, practically everything it does has little or no sacrifice, discipline or accountability about it. As a matter of fact, it is nearly always the case that it is precisely when a given Nigerian administration calls for disciple and sacrifice in order to end hardship and suffering that the regime is at its most undisciplined and arrogantly unaccountable.
Perhaps the best illustration of this point is the infamous so-called 53 suitcases case in the Buhari-Idiagbon regime when it enacted an edit banning the traffic in foreign currencies outside the banking system. So severe and thorough was the regime’s pursuit of those deemed to have flouted the edict that they famously detained, persecuted and charged the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti when slightly over one thousand pounds was found on his person upon his return from a foreign tour. But barely a month after this, 53 suitcases containing millions of dollars in diverse foreign currencies were impounded at the Murtala Mohammed airport and nothing, absolutely nothing was done to the guilty party because of strong connections to a top military officer in the regime’s upper echelon of shakers and movers. To the very end of its short rule, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime continued in this fashion: relentlessly calling for discipline and sacrifice from the nation while being absolute in its arrogant disdain for accountability. On this particular issue, that regime went so far as to pass an edict that outlawed doing or saying anything calculated to bring the regime into disrepute, even if what is said is true. Kunya is your lot and not even the truth will save you: welcome to regressive neocolonialism!
This is not a mere play with language, a self-indulgent dalliance with words and ideas, this talk of Kunya and something I am calling regressive neocolonialism. In some previous reflections in this medium, I have described regressive neocolonialism as a social order in which things continuously worsen to such an extent that nearly every preceding period seems much better than successive periods. Indeed, this process is so extreme in decadence and regressiveness that, mirabilis dictum, the colonial period itself may come to seem to some people as having been infinitely better than the postindependence period. In other words, in the concept of regressive neocolonialism, the neocolonial helps us to keep in mind the profoundly disturbing relationship to the colonial pasts of the present while regressiveness points to the fact that every step forward comes with two or three steps backward as things fall more and more apart. As I see the matter, Kunya is perhaps the best indicator of what is both regressive and neocolonial in the public, national affairs of our country at the present time. In other words and for me - at least insofar as this is not a mere academic exercise – as we try to make sense of the riot of illogicality and reason in the ethos and behavior of our ruling elites at the present time, we must keep in mind the absolute centrality of the intensification and deepening of suffering for the great majority of our peoples. Kunya, unlimited but not irremediable, is the bottom line, everything else either points to it or away from it. Dear reader, as long as you keep this in mind, nothing in the national affairs of the country will come to you as a surprise, as something natural and therefore unalterable.
Perhaps a few concrete observations might prove helpful here. Right now, the National Assembly is conducting a probe of the oil subsidy cabal involving hundreds of billions of naira paid out to both phantom and real oil marketers. Meanwhile, the sums paid out monthly to our legislators are as scandalous and unjustifiable as the sums entailed in the oil subsidy scam. And as if that were not ironic enough, we learn that recently, our legislators again dipped into national coffers and bought each legislator a luxurious car to the tune of 45 million naira per person. There is also the case of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor. He has reportedly spoken to the National Assembly on the scale and recklessness of the oil subsidy scandal, just as last year, he confronted the National Assembly itself on the scandal in the rate of remuneration they enjoy both statutorily and illegally. But then, we recently learned that Sanusi himself has been paying out huge sums of money from the excess account of the Central Bank, apparently at his whim and fancy and exactly in the same manner in which the legislators have been dipping deep into our national coffers. There was the controversial 100 million naira that he gave to his hometown consequent to the Boko Haram attacks in that city in January. This was followed by another 100 million that he paid to Madalla residents when he was quite justly accused of nepotism for the Kano payment. And then, lo and behold, we learn that he had much earlier gifted the University of Benin a half billion naira in an act that some see as directly linked to the award of an honorary doctorate to Sanusi himself. The chain of regress that we find in this series is interesting to track in order to make sense of it. First, the National Assembly shows its outrage at the oil subsidy cabal and the impunity with which it has robbed the nation. To this, we must ask not one but a series of questions: Why did the government itself - which first cried foul at the work of the cabal – not publish the names of the culprits and have them prosecuted? Why does the National Assembly in the very moment when it is piously going after the oil subsidy racketeers, then proceed to help themselves to more largesse from the national coffers? And Sanusi: Why is the mote in his own eyes not visible to him? Why does the impunity and lack of accountability with which he dips into the coffers of the Central Bank seem to him justified while that of the National Assembly is not? Is this because the relative sums are far apart in scale? Or is it because in his own case he cannot be said to have personally enriched himself at our expense? Is he incapable of perceiving the simple fact that no matter how genuine his testimony before the National Assembly might have been, he now appears as flagrant and unaccountable as our legislators in the way in which they seem so indifferent to how the rest of the society views them?
I would like to state, once again, that these questions are not coming from an idle, tired academic exercise that posits questions whose answers everyone can easily discern. For the point is this: after each and everyone of these questions has been posed and correctly answered, there remains the sobering fact of “Kunya” for so many in the land. Thus, after the oil subsidy national strike, after the intervention of the National Assembly and its probe, after Sanusi and his Baba ke, Megida generosities at our expense, our national coffers continue to be depleted relentlessly, incorrigibly. Indeed, we read with great anxiety and angst that the Nigerian state is currently, right now, going borrowing big time. It is not enough to have completely bankrupted the state now in the present, but the future is being mortgaged and compromised for our children and their children. Regressive neocolonialism is reaching out far beyond the horizon of the present to what will come after us. As Soyinka has put the matter in another context: forget the dead; forget even the living; think only of the unborn.
I would like to conclude these reflections on a cautiously optimistic hope. Regressive neocolonialism is not a natural and unalterable condition. It generally assumes that character only or largely because “Kunya” locks people into extremely narrow confines of trying merely to survive. Here’s how the first epigraph to this essay puts it: when it takes up residence inside the belly, hunger leaves room for no other thing. And based on this, larger frames of reference are either completely excluded or obscured. Some of these wider frames of reference that Kunya makes distant to the desperate struggles of our peoples are the are neocolonial foreign control and domination of our national economy; our competitiveness on the stage of global currents of economy and culture; the countless opportunities missed to make the best of the brand new techniques and means of production of our age; and the very kind of questions that we raise concerning where we are now and where we are headed. Fortunately, even a cursory perusal of our newspapers and weekly magazines will readily show that these wider contexts and frames of reference are not completely absent in our discourses, our national conversation. As the second of the two epigraphs puts it: yes, it is spoilt, broken, but it is not rotted, not at the endpoint of entropy.

Well stated.

Its so unfortunate that Nigeria is lead by those who are rap.is.ts, who continuosly ra-pe her.

A blind, deaf and dumb Nigerian to be exact!