Last year has just died and at its death a new year is born. Every year carries a combination of pain and pleasure for most people in varying proportions. If the last year was particularly good for you, you may wish that it goes on indefinitely but it won’t. if your last year was filled with misfortune you may be happy that the year has taken its exit in the hope that it has taken that misfortune with it. Different folks have different stories to tell about the year that has just gone into history.
As people met at various venues in the night of December 31, Churches, restaurants, bars, night clubs, homes, they asked the floodgates to open and let the torment of 2018 go away. They believe that 2019 will be better. That is hope and human existence has hope as its fulcrum, the hope that this year will be better than last year. This is their wish, earnest wish, which may or may not be fulfilled because fulfillment depends on many things, tangible and intangible, foreseeable and unforeseeable, some local, some foreign, some predictable, some unpredictable. As we flip through our memory file, we wish our brains can comb out the pains of the past year and replace them with the happy expectations of the new year. But that won’t happen because unhappy happenings have a longer period of longevity. They dig deep into our marrows and stay there and even when pleasant happenings come, the unhappy ones are not really uprooted. They stay there and serve as painful reminders that once upon a time we did have a bad patch, an unforgettable encounter, with life. Life is full of hope because hope is what gives life meaning. Every minute of the day our minds are filled with remembering, good and bad happenings, that have dogged our lives.
What is the difference between the last day of last year and the first day of this year? None. Each of them is just a day. It is we, who invest each one of them with some symbolism, some meaning, that is different from what each of them is: a day. We celebrate the mother and the baby that was born first on the first day of the first month of the year. We offer them gifts; our first ladies carry them daintily in their arms for the benefit of the paparazzi that they towed along with them. But really the end of one year and the beginning of another is just a line we draw in our heads, in our hearts, on our calendar, in our budgets and in our diaries. Such rituals enrich human existence and invest them with history.
No one is ever ready to cross over to a new year with pain because we always prefer to leave pain, whatever pain it may be, behind. Every new year always looks to us like an invitation to expected happiness especially if the dead year was full of unhappiness.
In many respects last year was filled with many unhappy moments for Nigeria which makes us to approach the new year with remembered pain. The diary of disaster goes beyond Borno which has remained a theatre of conflict on account of Boko Haram insurgency to Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Yobe, Zamfara, Edo, Delta and several other places around the country. In these places, blood flowed ceaselessly, bringing about mass funerals, mass graves and massive weeping by persons orphaned or widowed by these multiple, fratricidal, senseless attacks of innocent persons by terrorists, arsonists, rascals, ruffians and riffraff of all assortments. We scratched our heads, threw up our hands and found no worthwhile solution to this enemy action. And then came the kidnappers who preyed on our children in schools, our men and women at work or at home or on the highways. It was the high point of lawlessness and no one could say he did not know someone who knew someone that was kidnapped, someone that had given ransom or someone that had buried a loved one for whom ransom was paid but still got killed. It was a scary scenario and mercifully the security agencies were able, after a period of bafflement to rise to the challenge with considerable success.
Then the economy skidded out of control and wafted into recession zone because our mono product, crude oil, had had its price plummeting like a comet. Mercifully we gradually came out of it but unemployment remained high while poverty, extreme poverty, got higher, putting Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world. This poverty manifested itself in several suicide episodes and the auctioning of their dear children by beleaguered parents who could not afford to feed them or feed themselves.
On the political front the politicians just as they did before the 2015 elections changed camps and set the country on edge with not only their actions but more importantly their incendiary rhetoric. They carried their bad behaviour into the conduct of their primaries and caused provocation and panic in several places. The full impact of their shenanigans will be reaped this year during the elections. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned amendments to the Electoral Act which could have given a boost to the possibility of free and fair elections were rubbished by President Muhammadu Buhari who has withheld his assent. It is most unlikely that anything can be done now because the National Assembly cannot muster enough numbers to override the President’s veto. It is left only for INEC to use its best devices within the freedom available to it to conduct the best election that is possible within the circumstance.
But the elections are threatened by the possibility of a strike by the labour unions who are asking for the gift of assurance that a new minimum wage is on the calendar for 2019. On the other hand, the Governors’ Forum has stated as it had done before, that its members cannot afford to pay the new minimum wage. This is a setting for a heluva confrontation which if allowed to materialize will affect not only the elections but even more importantly the economy. The economy, at the moment, is in a serious crisis as admitted by President Buhari recently. Crude oil is selling at $12 lower than envisaged by the budget drafters who put it at $60 per barrel. There is the huge burden of debt servicing and the controversial and unverified huge subsidy. All these conflict situations will make us short of easy laugh but conflict is a natural state of affairs. We expect the parties in conflict to work on resolving them amicably so that Nigeria can position itself properly for the race ahead.
Happily, the President has been promising to deliver free, fair and credible elections. In his New Year speech he has said, truthfully, those elections should not be a do-or-die affair. He is a contestant in the election and he is the commander in Chief of the security agencies. These agencies are crucial for the success of the elections. Their conduct can make or mar the elections and it is President Buhari’s duty to ensure that they behave professionally and restrict themselves to providing security for the voters, election officials and the public generally. The Peace Committee headed by General Abdulsalami Abubakar has got the presidential candidates to sign an agreement to ensure violence-free elections. It is the responsibility of the candidates to call their over zealous supporters to order in order that peace can reign. But having peace must be everybody’s responsibility before, during and after the elections. Some youths in some states are waving the peace reed. Let this good example go round. Let youths irrespective of political affiliation jump onto this peace wagon, and become peace ambassadors. If we have peace everyone will benefit. Without peace we will all lose.
This year makes our democratic experiment two decades old. It has been a tortuous journey full of lows and highs but all things considered it is a worthwhile journey. It could have been better, much better, if all the political actors had been playing by the rules. That is the ideal and ideals are goals to work towards. We must continue to show optimism about the future of our democracy by strengthening our institutions so that they can work better. Democracy anywhere in the world is a work in progress. We have not made as much progress as we deserved to make but a new year brings fresh hope that if we continue to grind we will have the satisfaction that the grains we gather are the product of our 20 years labour.
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