Watching the foibles of man: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
By Pat Utomi
If I tell you I do not feel weak and challenged in spirit, I lie.
My life’s journey has been an open book, access to the full story is of easy access to all. There is hardly any week, in the last fifty years, that I have not made public my ideas, thoughts and feelings. One of the good things about this professional affliction is that a record of my disposition is ever documented.
I have been invited to do a Ted talk later this month and thought it of value to revisit one I did nearly 16 years ago in London.
In that talk I finished with offering three scenarios Nigeria could travel. I voted for what was the road to China but hindsight suggests narcissism led the political class to unwittingly choose what had been called the road to Somalia.
As I stand at the Mogadishu bus stop I wonder if I should read from the Book of Lamentations or should we return from our place of iniquity.
The politics of Nigeria has sadly stopped being about the people in the Abraham Lincoln classic sense and has become a government of politicians by politicians for politicians.
How can we save this narcissism fueled disorder and rescue the people from the altars of nattering nabobs of indignity and infantilism who peddle hate speech and dance naked in the market place but find no shame because the lust for power and the public purse has this strange soporific effect?
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If June 12 is remembered, it should be on how it competed with football as a unifier. Market women in Ogbete market forgot ethnicity and voted for MKO Abiola even though Tofa had a prominent Igbo man as his running mate. Today the ethnic and religious divisions are so rife you could touch it. Ironically those who claim to be heirs of June 12 have been quick to manipulate cleavages with ethnicity and religion.
If the spirit of June 12 could bring back our National spirit it will do us much good.
How do we deliver ourselves and a country that was once a sovereign of promise from the prostrate place state capture has left it?
Where do we begin to heal a country so divided that state legitimacy is at its lowest ebb and its place on the failed states index is as saddening as it is in the misery index which points to Nigeria as one of the worst places to be human on earth?
How can we purge the system of political actors who imagine that once they can be okay with abuse of public resources all is well?
More questions than answers. But I know that I can call on the spirit of MKO Abiola who understood that to have privilege is to have a duty to those less favoured.
Noblesse oblige could have been the motto of MKO as evident in his philanthropy, national network and genuine concern for the downtrodden.
When we called out professionals to rally for democracy some of us knew not ethnic prisms for looking at the world. Today we have been divided in all kinds of directions by politicians who pretend to have been of his stock but truly knew him not.
I raise today the spirit of MKO Abiola and urge it to bind us together as one as we seek to return Nigeria to that nation of promise we have dropped from.
Let his spirit cause us to have empathy for the millions of children out of school, courage to confront and crush the insecurity closing in on all, and care for many who go to sleep hungry and angry because politicians have failed them. Let this spirit help us awaken the complicit middle from slumber and cause one and all to register to vote, vote and stand to defend their vote.
Without credible elections our wish for progress will be in vain.
Nigeria must rise up again. Nigeria will rise up again.
