You have put Christmas 2018 behind you, abi? Perhaps it was merry; perhaps it was dry. If it was the former, then things well with you in 2018. The miracles you prayed for happened and the Naira in huge bundles, rolled into your bank account and the bank manager could not but faithfully execute every financial decision you made. He licked your fingers too. Ha ha.
If the latter, it is easy to guess why. Your plans did not go well. The economy came down hard on you and your plan to slaughter a fat goat for your family to feast on, just went poof, like the smoke.It forced your family to accommodate a luckless chicken in the pot of soup on Christmas day.Not a Christmas to remember, abi?
Never mind. Human history is an endless long walk with twists and turns, pains and pleasure. You may find your thoughts drifting back to the old year, smiling or grimacing or even snarling. But what is past is past. A cruel reminder that as human beings, our destiny is not in our hands. Destiny is a consequence of chance or mistake or stupiditiesor that ineffable thing we call luck or a combination of all three.
As you read this, count yourself lucky thatyou are on the new threshold of history, a series of human stories that will shape and define the new year, 2019 for individuals and nations, big and small. You too will spin those stories because rich or poor, strong or weak, nature denies none of us the right to be part of the human drama that unfolds daily, providing history buffs with the raw materials with which to judge these times in our permanent absence from the scene.
We welcome every new year with new year resolutions. But as I will show in this narrative, there is an uncanny resemblance between new year resolutions and government resolve to be a better government in a given new year. To begin with, a new year resolution consists of two important parts. The first part deals with bad habits thatno longer serve us with the same degree of pleasure or satisfaction. We resolve to kick them out. Some give up smoking; some give up alcohol and some give upas women wrapper. Familiar faces of bad habits.
The second part of the new year resolutions deal with the good habits that we believe will renew us and set us on a new path of self-discovery and self-actualisation beginningwith the new year. They are not just replacements for the disusedbad habits.They are new paths to a renewed life.Some resolve to be kinder to their fellow men and women; some resolve to be more responsible as family men and women; some resolve to regularly attend places of worship and wear the halo of godliness round their heads.And some resolvetoresist all the temptations thrown their way, as innot to steal or cheat or kill orhug corruption like along lost brother.
The problem is that new year resolutions have a short shelf life. Most of them do not survive the first few days or weeks of the new year. Why do we bother to make them?
Let me tell you why new year resolutions make sense. They are about hope for better men and women in a better tomorrow. It is for the same reason that nations, ours not excepted, make new year resolutions. Towards the end of every year, the federal and the state governments make new year resolutions captured in their annual budgets. The budgets areresolutionsby political leaders to do well by the people in a given new year. They contain oodles of failures and broken promises. And they contain oodles of recommitments to the public good. Look beyondthe recurrent expenditures and capital development projections.Focus instead on the president and the governors’ resolve to make us feel better about our country, to make our dreamstrue as individuals and as groups.
They resolve to build new roads; repair the existingroads that cannot even now remember the last time they had the good grace to call themselves roads; to build us more schools and lift our education from the morass as mere certificate mills to centres of mind and mental development;to give us modern health facilities and end our endless trips in search of herbal medicine men;to give us potable water to end our forced dependence on streams infested with water borne diseases and to make the economy so good that we do not need to forage in the refuse dumps to sustain our mere existence. They resolve too to make us safe and secure in our homes, offices, roads and farms.
Do you get that? Towards the end of 2017, we were shown government resolutions for 2018. President Buhari unveiled his 2019 resolutions for the country last week. If you listened to his budget speech before the national assembly, then you have a pretty good idea of what he has resolved to do with the money earned by the Nigerian state in the interest of Nigerians next year. Resolutions are about huge ambitions.
But resolutions by individuals and governments have an unsettling knack for leading us this far but not far enough. You get the drift of this if, as the new is rolling in, you ask: How many new roads were promised and how many were built in 2018? How good did we expect our education to be this year and how good is it now? A dead give away here: if the resolution on education had succeeded, the university teachers would not be on strike. Which communities did the government promise potable water and how many of them are enjoying it now? How good would the economy become and how good is it now? How safe and secure are we?
Life is full of resolutions because they have morphed into sign posts of human development. Here is another case. About two weeks ago as of this writing, the presidential candidates signed a peace accord dealing with five items. They pledged to run issue-based campaigns, for one. The accord qualifies as a collective new year resolution by the presidential candidates, their parties and supporters. It makes us feelgood that the politicians would be of good sport next year, the first three months of which would be most trying for the country. We should expectfrom this resolution high-minded electioneering campaigns centred on the issues that agitate and confront us rather than the usual fare of crass mundane issues of bread and butter, right?
This too is an ambitious resolution. I have an uneasy feeling that it isheading for the trash cans. So far, I see no evidence that the politicians intend to observe the peace accord. Bitterness and threats of violencefoul the air. An Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, preaching politics without bitterness, is yet to emergeamong them. I do not hear of issue-based campaigns. None has taken up some of those issues that bother us and elevated them to a national discourse. I hear them promise magic. If nationswere built by magicians Professor Peller should have been our president long ago.
I am not the only one seeing the deepening negativismin our national politics. Agreed: politics is necessarily negative. The negative makes good head newspaper headlines and television sound bites. But by its nature, it is destructive. Issue-based campaignscould offer us fresh thoughts on the resolution of our mind-boggling national problems. Issue-based campaigns would enliven public discourse. The campaigns are shallow and uninspiring.
It seems to me that the fate of the peace accord was decided before it was signed, not as a commitment but as part of the political game. So, if you are in the habit of breaking your new year resolutions, take consolation from this: governments break new year resolutions and political leaders break peace accords. In the end we have pieces of paper dancing in the wind. If you want to appreciate resolution in the life of a developing country, look up the word resolve in the dictionary.
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