Despite its very evident prosperity, many people
in Nigeria are in excruciating pain. That distress is
most visible to the poor majority while the ruling
elites do not see it or pretend not to see it. The
broken covenant – the social contract – between
the government and the governed illuminates the
ineptitude and callousness of those elected by the
people to fight on their behalf. Romantic yearning
for Utopia and revolt against a polluted society
are the two poles which provide the tension of all
militant uprising or civil agitation.We see things
differently. While the psychiatrist sees the craving
for Utopia and rebellion against the status quo as
symptoms of social maladjustment, the social
reformer sees both as symptoms of a healthy
rational attitude. Max was right when he said that
a moribund society creates its own morbid
gravediggers. Revolt against injustice is not only
honorable but it is imperative.
Since Independence, Nigeria has been blessed
with unwilling leaders. Leaders who perceive no
need-spots for specific problems. Leaders who
possess no gift and no competence to address
the needs of the people. Leaders who cannot
persuade people. Leaders who are not able to
attract others to join a cause. Leaders who pursue
no purpose and employ no measures to
accomplish the desired goals. We lack a strong
leader who could cast a national vision. In these
days, there is no one in charge in Nigeria:
everyone and everything seem to thrive in chaos.
The federal economic and finance minister/
coordinator, manipulators, and other self-styled
economic gurus, continue to deceive Nigerians
with voodoo economic analyses that things are
not as bad as they seem. But behind closed
doors, they sing different tunes.
One thing however they cannot refute is the
reality of the perpetual chasm separating the
poor and the ruling class. The ruling class
inflamed the anger and the pain of the working
class by refusing to talk about it and being
disinclined to listen. The impoverishment of our
people keeps me awake at night. I hear them in
the darkness around me. It is the cries of these
countless victims which rouse me in the long
watches of the night. It is the willing silence and
sheepish submission to subjugation, poverty, and
oppression that infuriate me to write today and
always. It is thinking of the martyrs who fought
and died for the starved and strapped Nigerians
that egg me on.
The members of the ruling class have destroyed
the vision of the future. They have turned their
backs on the future and embraced the past. The
addiction of these vultures to corruption and
wickedness frankly and nakedly set them against
all human values and democratic norms. The
slightest opposition and the merest criticism
expose the few Nigerians who dare the authorities
to the severest penalties. People in our reform
social ladder are instantly suppressed and those
who stand out independently are mown down.
Nigeria is in a mess. Able-bodied Nigerians turned
beggars wandered through the streets. Petty
street hawkers of underwear, socks, rubber heels,
corsets, silverware, and other ancient objects
appeared like a rash over the face of Nigeria
towns and cities. Graduates at all levels across
disciplines drive danfos, molues, and bolekajas for
a niggardly amount. Others settle for the “Area
Boys” specialties and dark alley businesses of
assorted brands.
Our unemployed youths in the millions have
become a wild and homeless lot, socially
disinherited, candidates for Aro, morgues,
prisons, and the electric chair. Our elderly are
hungry. They depend on public charity and their
Good Samaritan neighbors for food and for a
place to sleep. Days of somber discouragement
follow our pensioners. Some died in penury, of
hunger and disease. The rest of them live a
vagabond, lonely, and perilous lives. Their
depression soon reached that extreme stage
when the will is paralyzed and physical resistance
suddenly gives way.
Like inflated currency, Nigerian workers have lost
the real meaning of living. They look like a huddle
of stragglers from a beaten army. Irony and
shame kept intruding in their chosen vocations
and careers. Their former passion for dignity of
labor has turned into perversion. The once virile
and vibrant Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) of
Michael Imodu and Wahab Goodluck has become
a castrated giant whose brag and bluster only
served to cover its lost virility. Oil – our
commonwealth – has been cut into cubes and
blocks shared among the military hyenas and
civilian vultures.
Nigerian governments – federal, state, and local –
always stand for swindling, intrigue, and privilege.
They could not stand for anything else. Neither
law nor force can change it. If retribution
occasionally catches up with them, this can only
be by the dispensation of God. The hopelessness
of Nigerians’ limited lives – lives truncated and
impoverished by the oppressors – keeps the rest
of us wondering what next?
Majority of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day.
And it is their starvation wages which permit the
swollen pay packets of the ruling class and other
privileged economic saboteurs. Once Nigerians
started on the slippery slope, nothing could hold
them back. At every turn, they are forced to
advance, sliding further into the abyss of shame.
Each federal legislator takes home N29 million
every month. The governors, state legislators, and
local government chairmen and council members
receive criminally huge compensations. The same
governors said they couldn’t afford the minimum
wage of N18, 000.
The ruling native tyrants have seized as it were,
all available prime land and jerked up prices
everywhere in the country. Few days ago, I read
that a plot of land in Banana Republic in Ikoyi sells
for N1 billion while the landless poor have
nowhere to lay their heads. Also last week, I read
that a village head in Akwa Ibom State had begun
a three-month hunger strike in protest of a
dilapidated high school building erected 31 years
ago. He said the governor had repeatedly ignored
his pleas to visit the school.
Here is a story on Governor Godswill Akpabio of
Akwa Ibom State reported by SaharaReporters
June, 30:
“Three stewards working in the Akwa Ibom state
governor’s lodge in Asokoro, Abuja was on Friday
summarily dismissed by the governor, Godswill
Akpabio, over missing bundles of mint fresh
dollars valued at over $250,000 (N40 million)
kept in the governor’s bedroom. The governor
who reportedly issued the instruction to dispense
with the services of the political appointees
personally found out on Wednesday during his
visit to Abuja that four bundles of the foreign
currency he left in his bedroom had been stolen
while he was gone to a dinner with President
Goodluck Jonathan at the Aso Rock Villa.
Saharareporters gathered that the bundles of
dollars kept in the drawers in the governor’s
bedroom were leftovers from stacks of hard
currency stashed away in a private security safe.”
Instead of building new roads, the rulers have
resorted into buying jets with stolen money from
our treasury. As at the time of writing, 400
privately owned jets were reportedly parked at
hangar of Abuja International Airport. The death
trap roads are now exclusively reserved for the
poor. Meanwhile, Nigerians are dying in abnormal
numbers every day on these roads.
Our local schools, colleges, and universities are
but wastelands of academic refuse. The
institutions have been abandoned long ago by
the children of legislators and other robber
barons. Our hospitals have become death houses
for the poor – the only patients that still patronize
such institutions.
As humiliated and downtrodden people, Nigerians
endure the worst abuses without complaint. One
would have expected Nigerians to develop a
strong hatred and dislike of the obviously rich-
the thieves, crooks, scammers, embezzlers,
looters, and leeches – of the economy, not
because they could afford to buy things at any
price, but because they were able to do so
without a guilty conscience.
Few among the suffering Nigerians deny their
anger even as they show it. A large number has
been beaten into almost numb submission into
accepting poverty as an act of God and that
they’ll never reach the goals they once thought
possible. But the few, very few, refused to accept
being treated as lesser human beings and they
respond to the insult with furious indignation by
brief sporadic, uncoordinated, protests and
resistance.
For a moment or so, the cultural atmosphere
would be saturated with experimental resistance,
protests, and movements. With the exception of
one cleric who always pitches his tent with the
poor masses, the rest of legion of jet pastors
would admonish the poor to embark on marathon
night vigils and fast for their deliverance from the
oppressors.
For once – Occupy Nigeria – looked indeed as if
Nigeria convulsed after the subsidy removal,
underpinned by scourged inflation, depression,
unemployment, and the absence of a faith to live
for. Composed mainly of handful of Nigerians,
Occupy Nigeria attests to the all time truth that
at all times and in all creeds only a minority has
been capable of courting trouble and committing
emotional hara-kiri on behalf of the proletariat.
The bedroom confidence of the protesters soon
evaporates like a puddle under a scotching desert
sun. The protest was high jacked by lukewarm
labor leader corrupters. The uncompromising fire
of radical, and purist zealotry lit by the organizers
was instantly put out by the union bosses who
clung to the empty shell of greed driven by
polluted civilization.
After Occupy Nigeria protest (and like many
previous protests) had been effectively
neutralized and vanished like a tantalizing mirage,
social life went back to normal. Nobody asked:
Why can’t the oppressed prolonged and
sustained the protest longer? Why can it not
become a permanent basis for the reorganization
of our public life? It is not a false interpretation to
conclude that the major obstacle to Nigeria’s
version of Arab Spring is fear. Nigerians are
cowards, spineless, and weak.
Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with your
shoes? Or tighten a screw with a fingernail file? Or
shield yourself from a rainstorm with just a
newspaper? When do you need a hammer or
screw driver or umbrella? The ruling class has
provided the ingredients necessary for their
successful overthrow. So far, Nigerians are
substituting lethal weapons generously supplied
by their oppressors with shoes as hammers,
fingernail files to tighten screws, and newspapers
as umbrellas for rainstorm.
The rigor of the economic clime, the poverty
colony, and the harsh living conditions should
have made Nigerians one of the toughest,
hardest, and enduring protesters and resisters in
the world. The cautious, calculating, submissive,
nervous time-server Nigerians watched their
steps, looked over their shoulders, loudly
professed loyalty, and monotonously repeated the
official propaganda in exchange for crumbs from
the master’s table.
Everything about Nigeria is different. Everything
is in the reverse. Things that worked in other
countries won’t work in Nigeria. Which is why the
country is not moving forward and it would take
eternity for it to advance with the rest of the
developed world. Nigerians are afraid of police
arrest, police clubbing, police shooting, afraid to
be handcuffed afraid to endure the sun or the
rain for a little longer than necessary, and afraid
to confront their oppressors. They are easily
cowered and easily bought. They forget that
freedom is not free. And that the only language
that oppressors understand is force or fire.
A poor, powerless Black woman by the name Rosa
Parks ignited the American Civil Rights
movement. She risked her life when she dared
the white oppressors by refusing to give up her
seat for a white passenger. Men, women, and
children were killed, maimed, beaten, and jailed
in the fight for racial equality.
Steve Biko and other countless patriots sacrificed
their lives to end Apartheid. Of course our
legendary President Nelson Mandela spent 27
years in prison for the cause of freedom.
Not long ago, a young unemployed Tunisian
graduate preferred to be immolated than
surrender to the oppressive Tunisian regime. His
personal sacrifice gave birth to the Tunisian
Revolution.
Egyptians have taken to the streets again calling
for the ouster of their newly elected President
Muhammed Morsi. Brazilians came out in
thousands to protest against increased fare in
public transportation. President Dilma Rousseff
had since bowed to the people’s will.
Remember President Ferdinand Marcos of the
Philippines whose wife owned 2,000 pair of shoes?
Well, the dictator was brought to his knees by the
People Power Revolution in 1986 comprised over
two million Filipino civilians as well as several
political, military, and including religious groups
led by Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of
Manila.
Lech Walesa the unemployed Polish electrician
organized the illegal 1970 strikes at Gdansk
Shipyard in protest of government’s decree
raising food prices. Because of his singular act of
bravery, the Solidarity Trade Union grew into a10
million-member movement. The government was
forced to accede to the workers’ demands.
The list goes on and on, and on.
The world watched with disdain and mockery at
the stupidity of oppressed Nigerians:
If these native oppressors are worst than colonial
masters, why didn’t they rebel?
How could small band of thieves in government
enslave so many people and exert complete
control over the rest 99.9 per cent of the 160
million people?
How could they have successfully immobilized
and sterilized so many Nigerians mentally,
spiritually, and physically?
How could they have successfully perpetuated a
blend of covert and overt tyranny, public policy,
and secret alliances with the very oppressed?
Why didn’t the tyranny, humiliation, and
primitive stagnation of life of the poor caused by
these vultures in government provoke a rebellion
on the part of the oppressed?
The answer to these and other nagging questions
could be summed up in one sentence: 160 million
fearful Nigerians!

Lamentation n more lamentations.

Nice write up but its still lamentation upon lamentations.