The lamentations of a Nigerian citizen

“As long as I have any choice, I will stay only in a country where political liberty, toleration, and equality of all citizens before the law are the rule.”   - Albert Einstein

I don’t know how you might feel, but I think it is important to voice out my worries and publicly lament the deplorable condition in my dear country, Nigeria. Though, it is said to be untraditional for an African man to cry out, I will rather cry out than allow a few of my fellow country men and women, whom we had erroneously entrusted into their kleptocratic hands, the affairs of our country, to kill me in silence.

As such, I see it as an obligation to myself, my nation and importantly to God, to openly lament on their woeful performances over the years.

I am highly piqued by the insecurity in our dear nation and the dehumanized face of poverty as it has boldly taken over most homes. The insincerity of our leaders and their wasteful years on the seats of power is nothing that gladdens the heart. I am crying out against the injustice going on in our judiciary, where petty thieves, who might have hungrily stolen a loaf of bread, are not spared by the long hands of the law. Ironically, the hands of the law become shortened when those in the corridors of power and in our various government establishments siphon billions of public money. Discussing the oil subsidy thieves is subject for another day.

I have an objection to a government that weekly inaugurates and constitutes ineffective committees on important and urgent issues that affect the country. Painfully, their reports are thrown into the dustbins, not giving ‘a damn’ about the taxpayers’ money that go into these sittings.  I am lamenting today over our expensive politicians across the various states and the federal capital. Their self-centeredness, quest for materialism and visionless steering of the wheels of our rich nation leaves much to worry about.

Please pardon me, if I have gone against the African myth of keeping quite amidst pains and suffering. I definitely cannot keep mute about the daily killings, kidnappings, and armed robbery going on across my country. I think I should grieve over the continuous extra-judicial killings of innocent citizens, the daily ethno-tribal and religious exterminations going on in some states, notably in the Plateau, Borno, Yobe, Kaduna, Bauchi and Kano states. It is even more lamentations when the failure of government to have a clear cut solution to these man-made wahala is pondered upon.

It is indeed lamentable the unambiguous mask of fear daily hanging on the faces of many of my fellow citizens, a frightening new look hitherto unknown since the end of the Nigerian senseless civil war. Our women and children, including our youth and elderly now live in fear; they walk around with fear, work with fear, trade with fear, worship amidst fear and even go to school and study in the classroom with fear of the mysterious ‘unknown’ gunmen, a lexicon our security operatives should be ashamed of in this 21^st Century.

Why should I not lament on the public thieves that have, over the years, been shamelessly stealing our old citizen’s pension funds? It is, to say the least, disgusting, the unpatriotic attitude of government to the slow prosecution of this ungodly cabal that have caused the death of our various patriotic retirees who gave their all to the sustenance of this nation.

I do not know if there is any wisdom in my lamentation, especially on the various imported foreign policies that, over the decades, have failed to work in our system and the illusive, overinflated yearly budgets annually presented by the various states across the country. I won’t lament but cry over the poor state of our roads, our outdated public schools, our hospitals, better regarded as eyesores and our famous epileptic power supply, including the disgraceful and alarming number of the unemployed in our land.

These are parts of my lamentation, a worrisome anguish I am certain many Nigerians share with me. While countless have decided to keep suffering in silence, I have thought it appropriate to openly cry out, cry my voice to hoarse or perhaps until I am heard. This is in the hope that many frustrated voices across the country would sooner or later join me in these lamentations as citizens of this great neglected nation.

The paradox of Nigerian ‘rich few’

 “A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men” - Thomas Carlyle

There have been various suggestions by different thoughtful minds on the need to do away with a few living human species among us here in Nigeria, where a few group of men and women  have over the decades turned us into modern slaves in our own country. These segregated few have greedily before and after independence forcefully inherited our collective national treasure. They cut across all the political zones and have been enjoying the vast rich wealth of this nation to the detriment of the majority of the population.

To be honest, it takes an animalistic feeling for someone to wish his fellow human being death, but the current situation in my dear country is quite frustrating and pathetic which could instigate a rational thinker to wish for the demise of some of his country leaders.  The Nigerian ‘rich few’ to be candid, are extremely greedy and sometime inhuman to their fellow citizens.

I sometimes conjecture silently, wondering if the inventors of some of the man-made devices that has helped alleviate and revolutionized our lives today, like the computer, the telephone, electricity, cars, airplanes, penicillin, the iPod, TV, radio, newspapers and the rest, were actually  these ‘few Nigerians’ . I shuddered on what would have been the fate of the rest of us. Definitely the computer would not have been affordable to an average Nigerian like in America; neither would cars have been built cheap, like Henry Ford did. I am sure majorities of Nigerians would still be sweating it out to communicate with their loves ones, as the price of owning a phone would be compare with the price of going on a holy pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerusalem. Again, I wonder how many Nigerian children would have died for lack of subsidy to buy a dose of penicillin, if the discoverer of the universal life safer was a Nigerian.

Ironically most of our present rich few are beneficiaries of the abundant legacies built and left behind by our past patriotic leaders. I am sure most of them would not have tested the four walls of western education; neither would they be in their present monopolized position and the wealth they are greedily holding on to, if the past nationalistic leaders were greedy like them.  Today, in the same country, education is monopolized by these few. Our hitherto vibrant public schools are now pathetic sites to behold. Only this cabal of greedy few could now afford to send their children to expensive private schools at home and abroad, while those public schools that nurtured them and gave them a ray of life are left to crumble under their uncaring watchful eyes.

It is sad that some of our present leaders are so blind to the realities on ground.  They are sightless to the fact that while they globetrot across the world, their own country is a public shame to see. They proudly traveled to various well organized countries and come back home to gawk shamelessly at the bad roads, hunger and insecurity in their communities.

The Nigerian rich few are part of the secret oil thieves that control the price of petrol and made it impossible for the average Nigerian housewives and mothers to buy kerosene at subsidized rate across the country. They see nothing shameful on the plight of our old citizens. Their self-centeredness and lack of patriotic vision has hampered their foresight to critically study how their counterparts in other developed nations have been able to hold on to that noble law as philosophically stated by Giovanni Cellini to his son in the classic: The Autobiography of Benvenito Cellini “it is a duty incumbent on us, and the command of God Himself, that he who has property should share it with him who had none”

The few self imposed rich men among us, don’t ever see it as a duty to share with us; they don’t see it as a duty to help facilitates the availabilities of good roads or hospitals in their communities without having a hidden agenda. While the world is getting global and breaking down cultural, religious and political barriers, my dear country Nigeria is still enmeshed in regional and ethno-religious segregation.

Well, any way the fortune of life deals the rest of us its blow, one thing that is certain is that our virtue can never be stolen, and the law of nature that has always given strength to those who are oppressed shall someday, sooner or later, prevail against these greedy few men and women, who over the decades have subjected the rest of us to suffering and smiling; as they continue to ride and surge towards illusive vanities.