![]() My pessimism has nothing to do with my personal ambitions but the national behemoth called Nigeria. ![]() Now, let me make a confession: I am one of the most pessimistic Nigerians alive. In my quiet times, I try to sift through daily issues as reported by my industry – the media. I know because my favourite past time is to read opinions on the comment section of online reports where people hide under the anonymity provided to unleash ethnic vomit on public spaces. Take it or leave it, the sectional interests championed by our founding fathers will never go away – even if you legislate against it as has been done in Rwanda. I have long accepted this reality but many Nigerians will not. Today, several decades after those seminal stages, we are still being confronted by the historic, perhaps permanent, hangover of those times, our foundation years. We have not recovered from that detour, and never will. The men who held the light in the path to a great future were the same who put out the light in their epic ego battle. For me, it remains a historic irony that the foundation for the present socio-political malaise in the country was laid by the best men Nigeria has yet produced. Now, you can begin to decipher where and when the trouble with Nigeria began. However, their intellectual firepower remained intact – something agonizingly missing today. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Tafawa Balewa (Ahmadu Bello’s proxy) – all fell into this unfortunate descent. Their ideas of national progress became defined or determined by their localized sensibility. And from their local platforms, they launched the frenetic aspiration to become national leaders. Thus the great African leaders who set out to be continental champions became local deities. Whatever may have happened to their vision remains a mystery but what is not a mystery is that at some point the idealism which powered the struggle for national independence gave way to ethnic bigotry, acquisitiveness, and megalomania. So great was the optimism! But, alas, they never reckoned with the booby-traps of imperialism and their own narcissistic instinct. The future which they saw was awesome – a future of African renaissance. ![]() They had great ideas of the future and the people were fascinated by them. Those were the promising days and the leaders of thought were also the leaders of the people – they showed the light and the people followed. And their imagination was fired by the ideal of racial equality, freedom, and egalitarianism. The leaders then were the best their societies could offer in that they were educated and confident, and could hold their own in every situation. To be honest, it seems to me rather mischievous to refuse to admit that progress has been made in our political evolution no, much progress has been made but in one direction: backward.Īll the real progress Nigeria has made occurred in the era of nationalism when western educated Nigerian leaders became voices of their people and fought European colonialists with intellectual weapons: knowledge, ideas, and a compulsive sense of mission. Maybe that distinction should actually be assigned to the Kwankwasiyya leader, Rabiu Kwankwaso, whose influence however is not as widely spread – but of course we have seen the opium effect he appears to have on his followers in some Northern states, especially Kano. Where, for instance, Sir Ahmadu Bello exerted an unquestionable pull amongst his loyalists, the same cannot be said of his modern day role player whose supporters are just as inconsistent as himself. Well, you could make allowance for the obvious deficit in the charisma of the current progenies. So, in the main, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) reincarnated as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Action Group (AG) as the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) as the Labour Party (LP). Coincidentally, the unfortunate re-appearance of three leading candidates from the dominant three groups ensured that the dramaturgy of political perfidy took almost exact shape as it did then. The two phases of electoral farce this year were only too evocative of the violent and raw ethnic campaigns of the country’s early years of pseudo-independence, and more tragic. If any evidence was required to buttress the fact that Nigeria has not moved beyond 1960 in political development, the shameful elections of February 25 and March 18 were just enough.
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