Many, many years before I ever encountered its English version, my highly illustrious father taught me an Igbo adage that says that, “When you eat a man’s food you are duty bound to sing his praises.” The English version says, “He who pays the piper dictates the tune.” But my father also taught me that just because a man found himself in the middle of the sea shouldn’t make him call the crocodile his relation – which is what virtually everyone currently engaged in a feeding frenzy at the tax payer’s expense seems to be doing.
It is hardly surprising that those fortunate enough to occupy a ringside position at the nation’s financial feeding trough are usually most vociferous in describing critics of any government in power as unpatriotic elements. Majority of those in this category are politicians entrusted with the stewardship of our commonwealth but who turnaround to appropriate public funds for private use either by themselves and/or their relations and/or paramours and cronies.
These are the ones who are wont to see disrespect in every critical comment made about the president, governor, local council chairman, minister or commissioner, no matter how objective it may be. These strictly-for-hire political jobbers are ever prepared and ready to be more catholic than the Pope and weep louder than the bereaved. They doubtlessly seek solace in their own interpretation of quotes by two famous American presidents.
John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address on 20th January, 1961, said: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (There are many observers who believe that a figurative reading of this statement caused the framers of the 1999 constitution to baulk at making the responsibilities of government to the citizenry justiciable). Before that, Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech delivered at Saratoga, New York, averred that, “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country (USA). There is room here for only hundred percent Americanism.”
But those wearing the patriotic seal on their sleeves fail to mention that about three decades from the very day President Roosevelt expressed this point of view, a rather obscure junior Republican Party member of the U.S. Congress called Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy unleashed the most barbaric political witch-hunt ever known in history, ostensibly on the grounds of promoting Americanism!
Today, the term ‘McCarthyism’ is used in reference to demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations as well as orchestrated attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents, much like successive presidential media aides have acquired a patented notoriety for in this country. It was 18th century English essayist and poet who noted that at the end of it all “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Others such as American civil rights activist and orator Malcolm X and renowned writer and humorist Mark Twain had a completely different take. The former posited that “You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” Twain also said, “My kind of loyalty (patriotism) was to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office holders.”
Now, between the high-profile businessman or woman milking this nation dry through phantom petrol and kerosene imports, while hobnobbing with the powers-that-be and parroting patriotic sound-bites, and the toiling average Nigerian worker diligently striving to eke out a living while complaining of financial mismanagement at the highest echelons of power, who really loves this country more? So much so for the use of patriotism as a socio-political tool of intimidation and blackmail. Late American statesman, Adlai Stevenson, expressed it best when he said that, “To strike freedom of the mind with the (coercive) fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety.”
News of people dropping dead like flies in various parts of the country no longer bothers most people. Hordes of young people turn up at recruitment centres for job vacancies that can be counted on the fingers of one hand and several of them end up dead with those directly responsible still sitting tight in their offices while the rest of the populace carries on like zombies. The same thing happens when innocent school kids are butchered in their sleep or when whole families and communities are wiped out from the face of the earth. Every death has become a mere statistic, no matter the toll or circumstances.
In a sense, this consequence is predictable given the regularity of occurrence of these tragic events and the physical and mental fatigue they have inflicted – and continue to inflict on government and the psyche of the people. But beyond the routine vituperations of those who aver that a section of the country is just out to make the country ungovernable and clichéd promises by government officials to bring the “perpetrators and their sponsors to book,” when would this administration finally discover the political will to end the insecurity nightmare?
Lest we forget, the government recently unveiled a rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figure. By that singular action, Nigeria not only leap-frogged South Africa as Africa’s biggest economy, but it also catapulted itself into the exclusive list of the world’s Top-30 economies. Several commentators have wondered why the rebasing should attract any controversy since GDP rebasing is not a measurement of income but of economic output and production. I’d leave the argument over whether the difference between ‘national economic output and production’ and ‘national income’ isn’t similar to that between six and half a dozen to the economists.
Suffice to say that while I agree with the contention that after 24 years the GDP certainly needed to be tinkered with to reflect new areas of economic activity, it is still appropriate to ask the gain to be realised from having a First World GDP and a Third World existence. It certainly makes no sense to have a per capita income that is completely out of reality with the pandemic poverty on the ground. A sage once said that no man can be a patriot on an empty stomach!
Besides, is the GDP rebasing driven by purely altruistic motives or simply because with the 2015 elections just around the corner, it provides some folks a golden opportunity to gloat over the ‘exponential growth’ the economy recorded under their watch! But I suppose the point I’m trying to make would open me up to a charge of ‘unpatriotism’ by those who specialise in such a past-time. Truth be told, in a country where individuals are adulated and public institutions converted to personal property, there are many who are bound to see no wrong and hear no wrong as long as their ill-gotten bread is being buttered. As the old saying goes, “It is seditious to discuss the laws of heat where the sun is worshipped”!
So, while the life of the average Nigerian citizen is becoming less valuable than that of a sacrificial animal and members of a national conference who have forgotten their primary assignment and are engaging in delusions of grandeur by engaging in frivolous debates, the most sought-after job has become a voluble presidential aide on public affairs brandishing a voluminous abusive lexicography – even as politicians continue to make their cunny-cunny arrangements to capture or retain power in 2015 at all costs! Cry, the beloved country!