How Dreams Die So Fast in Nigeria By Dele Momodu – TheNigerialawyer

Fellow Nigerians, except for the recklessly optimistic souls, it
is so easy to give up on our dear beloved country Nigeria. I will
explain why in a jiffy. I do not consider myself a young man at
almost 60. Let me do a bit of flashback before I continue my
epistle. I entered the University of Ife (later renamed Obafemi
Awolowo University) relatively young in 1978, as a pioneer JAMBITE.
We were the first students admitted under the supervision of the
Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board.

I was 18 at the time but I started living on campus two years
earlier under the tutelage of my older Brother, Oladele Ajayi, who
had just returned home from Stanford University where he bagged a
PhD in Materials Science. Life was good in those days and some
lecturers were allotted flats within students’ hostels as a way of
forging interactions between them. This was how I got introduced
very early to students’ activism. I had worked in the University of
Ife Library from 1977-78, prior to gaining admission and this
further exposed me to life on campus.

I witnessed the ALI-MUST-GO riots of 1978, when students were
fighting over the increase in the price they were paying for their
subsidised three square meals. We thought life was becoming
unbearable then. How can Obasanjo’s government increased daily
meals from 50k to N1.50k, we queried. Breakfast was only 10k with
full English or traditional breakfast. Tea was in abundance. You
were even allowed to bring your own flasks to take away tea, milk
and sugar. Sumptuous lunch and dinner were 50k each. Weekends were
very special. We truly had fun. But trouble came when the price was
unilaterally tripled by the military government.

Since then, I have witnessed, or actively, participated in
several demonstrations, especially if they were peaceful. I have
written hundreds of essays and articles on the endless and
intractable problems in Nigeria. I was detained under the Babangida
government, and forced to run into exile under the Abacha
government, all in our quest for good governance and positive
developments in our country. But, like Abiku, the spirit-child who
comes into the world and saunters back at will, Nigeria has not
been able to break the jinx of incompetence, profligacy,
underdevelopment, dictatorship and general maladministration. We
continue to waltz from one crisis to another. And every time we
assumed we were close to our destination, something suddenly goes
wrong.

How could a country as bedevilled by a barrage of debilitating
challenges as Nigeria refuse to change how businesses are conducted
when it is so obvious that we cannot continue along this perfidious
route to perdition and ruination? Yet no one seems to worry, or
care, about making the necessary sacrifice for our liberation and
salvation. The civil war we fought from 1967-70 should have taught
us about the importance of unity and the necessity for civilised
cooperation amongst us instead we continue to misbehave as if
possessed by the worst demons on earth. A civil war that came to a
climax with the open declaration of “no victor, no vanquished” has
virtually produced a master/servant conundrum with everyone
fighting for territories.

We had, and lost, our best chance on June 12, 1993, when
President Ibrahim Babangida organised the best and fairest
Presidential election, which was won by Chief Moshood Abiola. I
harbour no fear that the ethnic strife eating us up today could
have been avoided and permanently banished to the pit of hell.
Those who profit from chaos and conflagration (the Yoruba word for
them is more poignant, “ARIJENIDIMODARU”) totally won the day.
Nigeria is yet to crawl out of that monumental disaster since then,
some 26 years after. Like the ostrich, our leaders and their
followers continue to bury their heads in dusty sands, and living
in denial. Again, we all knew the solution was not as complex and
complicated as it seems, we opted to try the cheaper and
ineffective option. The military decided to install a crawling
Interim Government that took little or no time in dismantling. And
we soon navigated our way from frying pan into a towering inferno
when General Sani Abacha took power, forcefully, about three months
after Chief Degunle Shonekan, a corporate titan, was installed as
supposed compensation for the annulment of June 12, while the clear
winner was subjected to the worst forms of humiliation.

Rather than come together to fight the military and chase Abacha
and his foot-soldiers back to the barracks, our political leaders
chose to be opportunistic by insisting on joining the most
ruthlessly draconian government in the history of Nigeria. Not just
that, some of the leaders decided to even plead with Abacha to stay
on in power perpetually. Let me not bore you with the rest of the
story about the pestilence that ravaged and savaged the country.
Chief Abiola was hurled into detention while life dragged on in his
absence, till he eventually died, suddenly. Members of the
political class, as lily-livered as always, never saw the need to
come together, but merely spluttered a few incoherent condolences
to the Abiola family while many were already jostling for a
placement within the new military government, headed by General
Abdulsalami Abubakar.

One year after, in 1999, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a former
military Head of State, from 1976-79, was repackaged and catapulted
back to power. You would have thought Nigerians would insist on a
compensation and reparation for the injustice meted out to Abiola,
his family and associates but such never materialised. At the very
least, a government of National Unity should have been put in place
to douse the tension in the land but those in power dug deeper and
dumped June 12 in the trash can of history but the irrepressible
watershed refused to go away. The more they tried to bury it, the
stronger it fought back to haunt a country that finds it hard to
honour her authentic heroes.

The main thrust of my thesis this week is that Nigeria is in a
big mess because we have refused to do things differently. We have
continued to repeat the same nonsense while expecting different
results. Worse still, we all know the solutions to our intractable
problems but we have stubbornly refused to do anything meaningful
about it. I will catalogue a few of what we should have done. The
first is war between the ethnic groups. This is fuelled and
amplified by politicians. I have friends across Nigeria and we get
on very well but the politicians prefer to play the ethnic cards to
create an illusory impression that they represent the interest of
their people. But this is a blatant lie. Examples abound that the
areas that have produced Presidents have not fared better than
those that produced none. Tafawa Balewa, from Bauchi. Azikiwe from
Anambra. Gowon from Plateau. Murtala Muhammed from Kano. Obasanjo
from Ogun (twice lucky). Shagari from Sokoto.

Buhari from Katsina (twice lucky). Babangida, from Niger.
Shonekan, from Ogun. Yar’Adua from Katsina. Jonathan, from Bayelsa.
We have not noticed any stupendous development in those States. At
the very best, most of them are in squalid conditions while a few
of their sons and daughters have access to loot and pilfer the
resources of our long-suffering nation. The biggest source of
unrest in Nigeria today is the feeling of deliberate
marginalisation by President Buhari of certain sections of the
country. The nonchalance is so embarrassing and unjustifiable.

Two. We all know that the greatest weapon against poverty today
is education. Yet, while the world is marching forward in
educational achievements, Nigeria has been marching backward.
Nigerians who are naturally brilliant hardly have any opportunities
to acquire latest knowledge and after struggling so hard, they have
no jobs at home. Many are forced to travel dangerous roads and
waterways into exile. Many have perished in the process. One
wonders what it takes to find the right people to upgrade our
education to international standards. We play politics with
everything and this has affected our education, so much so that we
have lost some of our best brains to foreign lands.

Three. We grew up hearing that “health is wealth”, yet excellent
medical facilities are neither available nor affordable for the
average Nigeria. The rich, including top government functionaries
have to fly abroad at the flimsiest excuse. No government has
succeeded in building just one world class hospital in Nigeria. We
waste our scarce resources on flying abroad.

Four. We all know that one of the reasons our manufacturing
collapsed was due to lack of power yet we have not been able to
generate, transmit and distribute sufficient and substantial power
nationwide. And the amount of money which has been pumped into that
sector has achieved no commensurate results. No leader can consider
himself successful if unable to find a lasting solution to these
disgraceful power outages in our country. The state of our
infrastructure is too miserable for our size and status in the
comity of nations. Apart from lack of enough resources we need to
kill the nauseating bureaucracies that tend to slow down too many
things but we still have not done enough to turn this around.

Five. It must worry us to high heavens that majority of our
youths have no jobs. This is what has increased the spate of
violence and general insecurity astronomically. But the jobs will
not come if our youths are not well groomed and ready for the
challenges ahead. A government that has no sense of urgency cannot
achieve these things in eight years. What is obvious to me is that
at the snail-speed we have started again in 2019, we may not get
too far in correcting our anomalies between now and 2019.
It would be a big shame.

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