Columnist by OKEY IKECHUKWU
As actors in a crisis-ridden political environment,
Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu
Buhari are not solely responsible for our present
national problems. .
The PDP, the APC, or the
two together, also do not bear exclusive blame
for everything wrong with Nigeria today. They
have their real and imagined shortcomings, of
course, but they are also victims of generations
of leaders and followers brought up on impunity,
consumption and arbitrary use of state power.
The many powerful people whose interests
differ from the national interest are partly
responsible for the trajectory of the two
presidents and of most past regimes and
presidents. So let us first calmly admit that our
crises have had long gestation. To fail to do so
is to ignore history, particularly the essential
elements of our own history, and replace it with
hysteria. As my friend, Bishop Kukah, said
during a recent joint television discussion
programme, and during which I agreed
completely with him: “The Nigerian nation has
been run as a criminal enterprise for too long”.
We have been building a mansion on quicksand
and with pillars of straw. The soil, quicksand as
it is, is further infested with two species of
ants, called presumption and nepotism. These
ants, which feed exclusively on straw, have
been nibbling away for decades. They have left
us with a hollow and painted frame that
conceals a lie. This lie has been on parade for
decades. It is described as an architectural
masterpiece by casual observers. An
architectural masterpiece that is not designed
to withstand the wind? Now that the whirlwind
has come, and the elements are in their
element, radical modifications (in design and
material) have become necessary.
It is not right that a nation should be
undergirded by untruth. It is also not right that a
nation should be under a political economy of
decay and corruption, warehoused and
propagated by a business and political elite that
lives in denial. When old lies are told afresh by
those who know they are lying, a time comes
when even the liars themselves won’t be sure
whether they are lying anymore. Reason? Others
would be repeating the same lies with great
aplomb everywhere.
Now that we have brought up children who have
seen shielded criminality as leadership, we have
a nation wherein hiding under the instruments of
state to violate natural justice, equity and good
conscience makes you not guilty of any crime.
Look at Nigeria today, 56 years after
independence! The dominant motifs are (1)
skewed values, (2) a flawed national psyche and
(3) an aberrant leadership recruitment process.
These motifs have given us several national
‘leadership pseudopodia’, or “false feet”.
Just as happens with Amoeba, the jelly-like
microorganism that pops out part of its
shapeless body in any direction it wants to
move, Nigeria’s leadership pseudopodia (or new
regimes with insular notions about nation
building) usually spring new agenda, new
national ideals and new aspirations on everyone
without warning and without consultation. They
have since replaced National Development Plans
with limited regime goals, and often without
plans or strategy. And it all vanishes without
trace with the demise of each regime.
A major misdirection of the State and people
occurred on January 15, 1966, when Major
Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu announced his
military coup d’etat. That coup saw a junior
officer issuing instructions to his superiors. It
saw murder as an instrument for leadership
recruitment and transformation. It saw an
officer peremptorily informing the nation (by
mere announcement about ‘Extraordinary
Orders’) that all local administration in the
country was now under the ‘local military
commander’, who would mete out any
punishment he ‘deemed appropriate’ to anyone
who disobeyed him.
It left right and wrong in the hands of
individuals of, sometimes, questionable
antecedents. It violated Service Discipline and
set new paradigms for the collapse of esprit de
corps in the armed forces. It also created a
dilemma in diplomatic circles, for which even
Ambassador Jolaosho’s experience as a
diplomat did not prepare him when the Germans
asked: “Why did your people kill your prime
Minister, instead of voting him out of office”?
That coup sidetracked the existing crop of
leaders and their ‘replacement generation’. A
generation groomed along ideological lines in
leadership recruitment stagnated for 12 years,
until 1979. The trio of Zik, Awo and Aminu Kano,
who would since given way to the likes of
Tafawa Balewa, Michael Okpara, Bola Ige and
others before 1979, turned up as presidential
candidates, because of the 1966 coup. This
created the backlog of two generations of
leaders that we are still unable to deal with
today. The average age of party youth leaders,
the National Association of Nigerian Students
(NANS) and the Nigerian Youth Movement
(NYM) says it all.
The Nzeogwu coup was ushered in by a series
of murders. It laid the foundations for
subsequent murders and abominations. It set
the tone for the eventual replacement of
professional military service and responsible
national leadership with personal and
ethnocentric desires, misuse of office and titles,
political illiteracy and petulant idealism and
exuberance. Everything forbidden by our
traditional values the popular religions
eventually became normal.
Many “Excellencies” emerged from this murk,
filling our post-1966 nationhood with sporadic
and spasmodic declarations of new national
goals, new federating units and much more.
These were the off springs of the high yielding
‘seeds of death’ sown with fertilizer on January
15, 1966. The discerning could see no deep
personal maturity, no national grand vision, little
real wisdom and no enlightened patriotism on
the part of many of the principal actors.
Do we know, for instance, that the Armed
Forces Remembrance Day we celebrate every
15th January affronts us all? That date
bespeaks impropriety and is inappropriate
accolades. Nzeogwu’s action, disguised for
decades under the mistaken notion that
“patriotism” excuses immaturity and unmitigated
arbitrary exercise of discretion, birthed many
institutional and axiological horrors that we are
living with today. It was on January 15 that
some highly respected senior citizens, and some
of our best senior military officers, were
murdered in cold blood.
One major further aftermath, over decades, is
the epidemic of prematurely retired military,
many of who have passed on, or are living
today, as frustrated and unfulfilled
professionals. Others were last seen, or heard,
as failed politicians, owners of failed banks and
failed airlines, failed philanthropists, failed
traditional rulers and much more. Yet they
initially joined the armed forces to become
military professionals, unlike some of their later
colleagues who joined during the triumph of
military regimes as a short cut to wealth.
So let us ask ourselves whether we should be
celebrating Armed Forces Remembrance Day on
the day families of some of Nigeria’s greatest
leaders are in mourning. We have several
military exploits, including the final triumph of
ECOMOG, or the day Buhari rallied the Nigerian
military to route Chadian incursion during the
Shagari Presidency, to make our Armed Forces
Remembrance Day. That will save us from
holding up a day that blights our collective
dignity as decent people to salute the gallantry
of our armed forces.
No nation develops by having its high quality
human capital and professionals, military or not,
routinely swept out of service. Not after so
much had been invested in training them! Now
that events have come full circle on all fronts
and we are seeing the impossibility of
sustaining untruth with layers of mud, there is
no good news out there. Look again: there is
only, perhaps, the dawning realization that the
nation is a grand scam perpetrated and
facilitated by public and civil servants and their
private sector allies. Look again! A dismantling
of Nigeria’s ‘false legs’, or pseudopodia, is
afoot.
We should not continue to project a day that
reminds us that a civil war ended in Nigeria with
the complete economic disenfranchisement of a
section of the country. The South East was not
really rehabilitated, reconstructed and reconciled
to the rest of the country after the civil war. It
is perhaps still not reintegrated, even today.
Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya and others protected
properties of Igbos in Lagos while the civil war
lasted and returned same to the owners after
the war. But the same Igbos lost their
belongings in another part of the country as
“abandoned property”. It was all taken over by
their fellow countrymen to whom they were
allegedly reconciled after the war. The nation’s
ill-fated leadership trajectory has been a
consistent violation of the cardinal principle of
sustainable leadership and national
development.
The nascent 16 years old democracy, has
thrown up leaders with sudden stupendous
wealth. That wealth has impacted only their
immediate and extended families, of less than
15 persons, and a few friends. Their local
communities, members of their religious
congregations, most of their friends and even
members of their extended families know how
poor or rich they were a few years earlier. Some
envy them even. The priests, traditional rulers
and other supposed custodians of public
conscience ask no questions.
They honour them, instead. Meanwhile, almost
everyone, including their kith and kin silently
regard them as thieves who got away with their
loot!
As the nation reels, let the friends and admirers
of Presidents Jonathan and Buhari pull
themselves together and stop thinking that any
criticism of the government, or person, of
President Muhammadu Buhari is an automatic
endorsement of the tenure and performance of
their man. It cannot be. The Jonathan
Presidency could have done much better than it
did, but allowed itself to be ruined by avoidable
blunders, indecisiveness, image deficits, and a
consistent failure to present an inspiring
comportment.
Friends and admirers of President Buhari, too,
should note that it can do much better than it is
doing at the moment. Insularity, with the risk of
crippling itself is the real danger. Let us realize
that there is mourning in the land and across all
divides. Nigeria’s flawed and overlooked
fundamentals have come back to haunt the
nation. .
It all boils down to the absence of truth,
deep knowledge, nobility of soul, propriety in
public office, dignity in self-presentation,
graceful ambience, competence and decency in leadership; for which neither Buhari nor Jonathan are solely responsible. Let 's continue praying!
