Nigerians and their Nigeria

By Emeka Alex Duru

A particular report that has not stopped amusing me, is that which claimed that Nigerians were the happiest people on earth. The disclosure which was reportedly contained in a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) publication of Thursday, October 2, 2003, was said to be a product of research from 65 countries.

Of course, considering the litany of challenges confronting the country which ranged from poverty, corruption, violence among some constituting units, leadership failure at all levels and infrastructure collapse around the country, not many bought into the report.

I belonged to this group that instantly dismissed the report as sheer intellectual fraud.

Curiously, the government of the day, hijacked the utterly ridiculous report and advertised it as an indication of its strides in re-engineering the country.

As if that was not enough, the citizenry, who were the very object of humour that the publication represented, joined in the unrestrained celebration.

That was the irony of a system that did not know what its problems were. The trend, incidentally, has not changed, 15 years after the disgusting report.

If anything, we have sunk deeper in trivializing otherwise, very important matters and in the process, unwittingly becoming the most subservient people on earth.

The daily experience with the country’s public power providers – whether the hitherto National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) or the present Power Holding Company (PHC), says it all. With back-breaking monthly bills that add to the burden of the already impoverished consumers, power supply has not improved a bit in most of the communities. Some even stay for weeks and months without light.

But the moment power is restored, no matter how momentary, the entire neighbourhood erupts into wild jubilation as if undeserved favour has been done to them.

Somehow, the leadership class, has exploited this near servile disposition and has applied it gravely in manipulating them.

In a curious version of Josef Stalinist Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), Nigerian leaders have exploited this debilitating lethargy on the part of the people and have used it to make nonsense of them.

Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953.

Ordinarily lacking in charisma, he was proficient in intrigues and deceit with which he factored himself into the inner circle of the Bolshevik hierarchy, in the years following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, and rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union.

65 years after his death, there is still a running story on Stalin’s strategy in manipulating his country men and women. He was in one instance, said to have gathered members of his politburo (ruling council), where he presented before them, a fowl that he had removed its entire feathers.

Thus incapacitated, the chicken could not fend for itself. But in a ridiculous manner, Stalin, began to throw some corns before it and naturally, the poor chicken fell for the snare.

After the gory display, Stalin was said to have told his audience that the lesson in the whole thing was that to get the people by their side and commandeer their loyalty, they needed, first of all, to be disempowered.

That was his bizarre theory of leadership. Successive Nigerian leaders seem to have keyed into that absurd practice. And the people have fallen in, perhaps, unwittingly.

Last Thursday, March 15, 2018, some residents of Lagos, were in frenzy of sort, over an announcement that the State government, had reduced the rates of its Land Use Charge, that it had hiked astronomically, earlier in the year.

Going by the new arrangement, the rates payable on commercial properties have been reduced by 50 per cent.

Charges for Owner-occupier properties with third party including industries and manufacturing concerns, were also reduced by 25 per cent.

Other incentives that were advertised by the government included extension of tax credits for land use charges already paid in addition to introduction of instalment payment system.

Coming against the backdrop of an earlier regime in which, for instance, property valued at N20 million was billed N91,200 but will now pay N45,600, the excitement trailing the announcement, could be understood.

The earlier hike, undoubtedly, may have been informed by government’s efforts at raising necessary fund for what it explained as its desire to build world class infrastructure and improve the well-being of its citizens.

In a proper and functional system, the action by the state government should be encouraged, all things being equal. But the process of imposition and eventual reduction – for whatever it may achieve – remains part of the inadequacies of our governance architecture.

It is part of a system that detaches government from its traditional role of serving the people and in its stead, hoists it as a super phenomenon that relates with the led on benevolent basis. That was why the hapless Lagos property owners were celebrating over an issue that government should have carried them along ab initio. They, of course, have no choice.

But the paternalism exhibited by the Lagos administration, pales to nothing when compared with the haughty posture regularly manifested by President Muhammadu Buhari towards victims of the Fulani herdsmen attacks.

In the last three months, the group has visited Benue, Plateau, Adamawa and Ebonyi States with orgy of violence that had resulted to loss of hundreds of Nigerians and destruction of properties. But rather than tackling the menace for what it is, the President’s conducts have been quite appalling.

In a particular attack in Benue that saw over 70 Nigerians massacred in one fell swoop, in January, it took clearly two months for Buhari to visit the State.

And rather than barring his fangs against the murderous pastoralists that have constituted themselves to serious nuisance, he feigned ignorance on the enormity of the criminality by his kinsmen.

He even tried to exonerate himself of lethargy by blaming the obviously compromised Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, for disobeying his directive on dealing with the situation in the state adequately.

For a Commander – In – Chief that has at his disposal the full complements of security and intelligence reports across the country, such explanation beggars the question. It is in a nutshell, an admission of failure.

But if the Benue episode appeared outlandish, the casual explanation of the government’s efforts over the kidnapped 110 girls from Dapchi School in Yobe State, was more outrageous.

Against expectations of the President, telling Nigerians the efforts of his administration in rescuing the girls, he made it an issue of unnecessary politicking, claiming that the response of his government when the abduction took place was more prompt than what his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan did when over 270 students of Chibok Girls College, Borno State, were kidnapped in 2014.

In a country that has regards for its citizenry, both incidents of abduction, are shameful. But for the President to rationalize whatever tepid action of his administration over an action that clearly caught it napping, and has constituted a huge slur on the country’s reputation abroad, shows the level Nigeria has degenerated in managing matters of national emergency.

The fault, of course, is not in Buhari or those before him, who had treated issues concerning the citizens with levity. The blame is with Nigerians, who, even in the event of being treated with disdain by their leaders, do not ask questions. That is where, really, the problems lie.