An Epistle to Fellow Citizens

Dele Momodu

25 June 2011

opinion

I pray this letter meets you in peace and not in pieces. The spate of violence in our country in recent time is the reason for that strange prayer.

Nigeria has stealthily joined the comity of other nations in notoriety for terror. It is so disheartening that at a time we are expected to be marching forward as one of the most blessed nations on planet earth, we are regressing at the speed of light. The intention of this letter is to demonstrate that we are partly to blame for the peculiar mess (apologies to Adekoge Adelabu aka Penkelemes) we have heaped on our nation.

We have often been told that a nation deserves the leaders it gets. There is nowherethis is more true than our country Nigeria. Our first mistake was to allow the military rulers to take over our lives.

The quality of our leaders at independence was far more superior to the ones who came subsequently. They had good education and possessed more solid intellectual capacity. Even our parliamentary system of government was better suited to our situation as a nation of many nationalities.

We had a few regions to manage and each developed at its own pace and according to the imagination and ambition of its iconic leaders and their teams of committed civil servants.

We didn’t have an unwieldy 36 Governors to deal with. We didn’t have thousands of legislators to pay at federal and state levels. There were not so many lawless public servants willing to waste public funds at the local government level. My father worked with Public Works Department (PWD or Pounpoun Wahala Dede, as we called them jocularly).

The roads were maintained by this department. The drains were kept squeaky clean. The sanitary inspectors, otherwise known as wolewole, ensured the impeccability of the environment. Mosquitos were banished from most homes.

I can go on and on with a vivid recollection of those good old days with sweet nostalgia. Truth is those days are gone. Only our communal determination and hard work can bring them back.

We missed the boat once we allowed ethnicity and religion to mislead us into tearing ourselves apart. We fought a most senseless and disastrous civil war which claimed millions of innocent souls. At the end of our moment of madness, we had to come back to the table and agree to continue as one nation. But the scars remain till this day.

One would have expected us to learn big and useful lessons from such a monumental tragedy but it seems we are incapable of learning from our grave mistakes of the past.

Fellow Nigerians, while it is easy to bemoan our paradise lost, we must march forward by undoing those things that we did wrong. We have spent too long groping in poverty and ignorance. Even while the solution to our problems seems to stare us in the face, we have refused to do what needs to be done.

The essence of this letter, like the ones I wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan these past two weeks, is to proffer solutions rather than regurgitate the problems without doing anything about it. You must be wondering when I became a letter writer. I have always been fascinated by letter-writing in the Bible. Letters are easy to read. They appeal directly to the reader because it speaks to you one on one. It breaks down things that are supposed to be complicated.

I read the letters to the Galatians and the Thessalonians as a kid. I loved the former because I saw a lot of similarities between us and the Galatians. The Galatians were a people without a care in the world. Like Nigerians, they didn’t know how to think through complex problems and find simple solutions. Nigerians tend to turn simple problems into impossible solutions because we are so set in our ways. Yet we expect our intractability to be to be corrected by some forces from heaven.

My mission therefore is to express my ideas on why we are where we are and what I think is the way forward. For me, it is also a form of therapy for what has become an acute frustration for most Nigerians. The first thesis is that if we’ve made the same mistakes repeatedly, it should be obvious that the only way to go is to put an end to it. We must turn our back to those things that made us under-developed.

Gone are those days when we used to blame the West for our woes and we had to organise pan-Africanist Congresses to put all the blames on those enemies who hated the colour of our skin. If you attended a good school in our own days, you would have been indoctrinated on Walter Rodney’s compelling book -How Europe Under-developed Africa or Chinweizu’s The West and The Rest of Us. But today America has produced the first Black President while we continue to discriminate against our kith and kin in the name of zoning and federal character. We are ready to sacrifice merit on the altar of what has become share pettiness in many parts of the world.

Our biggest bane as a people is that lack of unity. A most cerebral university professor becomes a stark illiterate once the topic changes to ethnicity. He becomes a rabid dog with automatic alacrity. The same man travels abroad and within a few years he becomes a citizen of that country, with the same benefits accruing to him as those who were originally born in the place. We all go to other countries and enjoy this assimilation process without ever wishing for the same privileges back home. To have a graphic picture of the scenario I’m trying to paint, just imagine the son of a Kenyan immigrant, who was born in Nigeria, waking up one day, with his fresh Kikuyu looks, day-dreaming that he wants to be the governor of Lagos State. He would be promptly sent to a psychiatric home for comprehensive examination. Now imagine if he has the audacity to say he wants to be the President of Nigeria. There is no doubt that he would be promptly deported to the land of his forbears or, even in the extreme reactions that we are well noted for, thrown into the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night.

The problem with us is that we think we are too wise and the Whiteman is stupid to accommodate and tolerate all races, religions and opinions. Unknown to us this is the secret of their greatness today. Our best brains are been lured to far-flung places because those countries understand the efficacy of combining the brains of different human beings from every part of the world while we continue to live in our own forests of a thousand demons. We feel we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and multiply in our queer rascality and still live happily thereafter. We are amongst the most travelled citizens on earth yet we fail to acquire some of the knowledge we garnered in those places. Progress and development will forever elude us until we learn how other peoples of the world achieved greatness.

Many Nigerians still talk of breaking up the country into fragments when in reality our strength as a nation is in our huge population and vast human resources. This asset is greater than all our oil and gas deposits. We are extremely talented. We rule the world everywhere we go.

We are top leaders especially in the private sector. We are well-advertised for our exceptional skills even by our worst critics.

We are proud and loud.

Our confidence is palpable. But our inability to combine our individual talents and unite as a people is a major cause of our backwardness.

Also, our selfishness is amazing. Some Nigerians feel superior to their fellow citizens and they believe they will survive the holocaust whenever it comes while others would perish for certain. It is a debilitating malady that demands a permanent cure. I say to the proponents of a break-up that we stand to gain more as Africa’s biggest black nation.

It would be too late to come back to our senses after our disintegration. The reason is we keep forgetting how many nations the proponents would have to create out of Nigeria. Perhaps a few hundreds would be our starting point. Then we’ll suddenly realise that there is Northern Kaduna and Southern Kaduna.

And most of our big communities have a similar geography. The solution is for us to continue to manage and tolerate our differences. We must co-exist like husbands and wives, till death do us part. It will never be in our common interest to continue this war of attrition. The communities that have produced our leaders have benefitted nothing for that special privilege. And when the leaders stole our commonwealth, we never saw the evidence that they did on behalf of their people. Why then do we encourage our folks to go out there and enrich their personal pockets while the rest of us continue to live in abject squalor?

I need someone to please educate me on this self-inflicted stupidity. It is as if we are just happy being treated as slaves by those who were as poor as ourselves only the other day.

I saw some traditional dancers who were chartered from different parts of Nigeria to praise-sing the arrival of some new political leaders all the way in Abuja. And I asked myself why did you need these people if indeed your function in Abuja was to be a servant of the people? Even governors were imported to witness some of the circus shows. They had to comply lest they were accused of being enemies of the people.

Fellow Nigerians, it should be obvious from the foregoing that we must change our way of life. I seriously recommend what the late Okotp’Bitek, my Ugandan Professor of Literature, called the “cultural revolution”.

There is something inherently wrong in a culture that deliberately promotes mediocrity.

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