Social critics such as I am sure that many may take “yours truly” to be, must be careful to let everybody who would care to know it, that they are not doing so because, in the sight of God or whomsoever else they worship, they believe that they are better than anybody else! I believe that such social critics, whosoever qualifies to be so-called, should not only say this to people but be sure enough in themselves that such is indeed the case.
The only difference between genuine social critics and the rest of the society must be that they have a burning desire for peace and progress for everybody in the polity – a passion for the common good, evenly!
Anybody dwelling in Nigeria at the present time and who had been born in the late 1940s or early 1950s and so to have seen what may be referred to as a reasonable Nigeria, and then the decay that roosted from about July 1966 and continued to date, will surely know that we have been taken for a ride for far too long, by our generations of thence coming politicians. These politicians – military, civil, and their civil-military hybrids thereof – have not only been busy stealing our wealth unto themselves, stowing them abroad, training their children and getting their health care abroad, but undermining the local leftover economy to the impoverishment of everyone else of us.
They will neither know-how nor employ the rich wealth of such honest and capable human resources in Nigeria, to do so. On the contrary, very often, half-baked, quota-based and incompetent people are easily fronted to take up vital positions of leadership in the country; and so we are deteriorating daily on these accounts. It is not only these events happening, but the very often clearly fraudulently placed persons impoverishing us will be bold to be telling us, with all arrogance, that we can do nothing about their impoverishment of us!
Some of the most daring exercises in this regard is our so-called 1999 constitution, crafted by some military politicians with no real civil citizen’s participation as such, starting with the statement like “We the people of Nigeria…”! What an affront, what arrogant nonsense? How can people who took over (any) government by the illegal force of arms go ahead and write a constitution without a proper assemblage of the people, the polity and the nationalities in such a federating nation, and call it the people’s constitution? Even if the people were unable to refuse such a fake constitution immediately because the enacting military is still there with their guns, how did they continue 20+ something years thereafter with the so-called constitution still? How will they continue with any tinkering of the same fake document in anyways and still be calling it a constitution?
Why would they continue to do so, despite all the other monstrous corruptions and undermining of the common good evidenced and promoted by that same very fake constitution: 1. the abusive undermining of the common good by the only one religion written into the constitution of a multi-religious country; 2. the humongous amounts of monies carted away by the politicians under different personal emoluments while the very federating units and peoples are wallowing in poverty; 3. the institutionalization of seizure of the wealth of the federating units by the Federal Government only to use it to corrupt the rest of the system; 4. the use of the seized and compromised economic and military might of the entire country to breed and to terrorize every progressive mind, hand or corporate entities in the place? The list of undermining of the entire country by the present system of government that we are running is of course so very many that it will take innumerable articles to address them all. So, we must stop that listing for now!
However, what all these tell us is that there must be a time when all the people in a given country such as present Nigeria must rise up and say to the handful of their impoverishers, that their time is up. We have seen small bits of these responses in the past in the NADECO exercises, as well as the End SARS one. The current absolute undermining of the education sector, the health sector and the civil security sectors by government officials who train their children abroad and obtain health services abroad are enough to call a stop to the abuses. This is to say nothing of the compromise of all the security apparatuses of the country by putting them in the hands of their cronies while terrorism is everywhere unabated.
It also says nothing of their passion of consistently borrowing international monies from all sorts of places and sinking the country into unimaginable poverty for the future children of this country! As should be known to any agent of progress, without peace there will be no progress.
Without (social) justice there cannot be peace. Wars, warmongering and illicit overtake of governments belong to uneducated and selfish people. But civil methods of telling a corrupt political system that enough is enough has been known around the world for quite a while. India used it to get the impoverishing UK colonialism out of the place. Martin Luther King Jnr used it to get America rid of racism. Nelson Mandela used it to get South Africa rid of Apartheid. Nigeria has enough large organizations – NANS, ASUU, NLC, TUC, NBA, NMA, NiNAS – across this entire country to peacefully, solidly and most charitably seek audience with the people holding the country at ransom, to let the people go from their murderous political stranglehold. These leaders are at the presidency/Aso Rock, at the Senate and the House of Representatives; and a few more minor places.
As for the present political outfit, some of their key leaders warned us that unless they were elected or allowed to lead us, they would make the country ungovernable; and indeed did do so, including the massacre of National Youth Corps folks who were innocently and creditably involved in an election that they did not win. Now, they have been allowed to rule us; and behold this is the utter misery that they have brought upon us.
Two wrongs do not make a right; so, nobody should try to make the country ungovernable as they promised and did. On the contrary, we should agree across the nation, that it is now time to recover our country from these people in order to develop a true nation, and equally for every one of its citizens, evenly. In doing so, we will develop affirmative action programmes to assist any naturally or ordinarily disadvantaged persons; but surely, not ones of corruptly rewarding failures and people who would rather not develop themselves or the nation.
In concluding this reflection, we can only advise all who have a reasonable education and who would like to claim that they are interested in the common good of all Nigerians equally, that this is the time to prove it! The national frameworks for this already exist. May God help them, and all Nigerians, in this only true agenda for this time! Amen.
Asuzu is a retired professor of public health and community medicine, currently at the University of Medical Sciences, Ondo.
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