Before the post-2015 famine hit Nigeria so hard, the country was not exactly at a feast. But at least there was a table and many were invited. Post-2015, with the famine biting hard, and the guests at table greatly diminished, only a few have remained, greedily gratifying their gluttony, while giving neither grist nor gin to the great unwashed girded to the ground.
What has been falling as craps for the great unwashed consists of peppery privation deliberately designed to scald their tongues so they would be unable to eat any more when eventually the appetizer announces the beginning of the banquet. What has been served is maladies – a menu of it.
It was not always like this for a country now ripped apart by merciless mercenaries masquerading as messiahs. The prognosis about a once prosperous country of prodigious promise was not always portentous and delivered by pallbearers and plunderers posing as prophets. The lessons about a land lavishly loved in the laps of the gods were not always so dour and hard
delivered by torturers and tormentors posing as teachers. No, the descent down the slope made slippery by the slime of sabotage, the disintegration, the decapitation of values was not always dished by devourers posing as defenders. It was somewhere along the line that things went horribly south, with the wheels taking leave of a giant country.
Nigeria`s independence from Britain in 1960 finally snapped the fetters of a captive country. There was the hope as the chains slipped away that a country of such prodigious promise could finally begin to fulfill some of its potential so as to serve as an inspiration for other African countries. It was at about the time many other African countries were bathing in the breeze of independence.
However, the human experience has repeatedly shown that pain has always dogged promise, its eternal, infernal rival, with which it is always locked in battle with none vanquishing the other and both seemingly satisfied with the maneuvers of an epic wrestling bout. Thus, Nigeria, soon lurched into its season of upheaval. It was in 1966 that some carelessly concealed military folly slipped out of the barracks like some contagious virus to infect an entire country. The six years Nigeria enjoyed relative stability has now morphed into more than sixty years of rumbling instability on so many levels.
The brutal Nigeria civil war served the country a soup of ethnic suspicion that it is yet to exhaust even this day. The military continued to milk the country dry until democracys descent in 1999.Even with the return to democracy, some of those who complicated Nigeria s story while they wore khakis have simply hung around and done more damage.
In the days leading up to April 28,2022 which marked a full month since terror wrapped its claws around a Kaduna-bound train from Abuja killing close to a dozen people, injuring dozens more and abducting even more, images went out from the lair of the terrorists of those still held captive. A few days later, to show that they were not all about death, the terrorist released the image of a child born to one of the victims in captivity. What a way to welcome a child. If only children on sighting the hostility of the world could return to where they came from.
It is a lot going on in Nigeria these days. What used to be served Nigerians as cold as revenge was poverty, corruption and the occasional security breach. But today, with poverty and corruption in the country showing no signs of going anywhere, Nigerians must now also contend with terror, its warts and all.
What life has become in Nigeria today is unrecognizable to those who knew the country in its glory days. With the 2023 election drawing ever closer, there is no doubt that Nigeria must be entrusted to people who can return it to its glory days when terror had not turned vast swathes of the country into its playground.
To ensure that painstaking attention is paid to this urgent national task in 2023 and going forward, Nigerians must rally to send into political obscurity all those who have not exactly covered themselves in glory repeatedly passing up the opportunity to garland themselves in the service of a great country.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com
