Nigeria at 64: The conviction connection

Nigeria, at 64, appears to have emptied upon some Nigerians like a big surprise. It was almost as if, one day the country was a joyous, hopeful 10-year-old only to awaken the next, a derelict 64.

No, Nigeria was always this tragedy: steadily, irretrievably a vast trash heap being manufactured by Nigerians.

Bola Tinubu is not the cause, but he is perhaps its most prominent beneficiary and the best reflection of our mammoth catastrophe.

Thousands of miles away, as Nigeria confronted and considered its 64th birthday last Tuesday, in a world shrunk to street size by communication technologies, I shared the pain of many of her citizens.
The Punch, itself only just a dozen years older than Nigeria, offered an excellent eulogy, “At 64, Nigeria Has Lost Its Way.”

Excerpts:

“The numbers are bleak. Islamic terrorism, Fulani herdsmen rapine, banditry, and separatist agitation consumed 63,135 citizens in the eight years to May 2023. The number has not improved under Bola Tinubu, the fifth President of the Fourth Republic, which began in 1999…
“After mismanaging its abundant natural resources, Nigeria is currently a hollow repository of abandoned infrastructural projects. About 56,000 uncompleted projects dot the landscape. The World Bank says Nigeria’s infrastructure stock is 30 per cent of GDP…

“The electricity output is dismal, a stark reality of Nigeria’s arrested development. Its continental peers, South Africa and Egypt generate 58,000 megawatts each; Nigeria is barely able to generate 5,000MW. The World Bank says 45 per cent of citizens lack access to grid electricity 64 years after flag independence.

“The economy depends unwisely on oil revenue. Since 2014, oil prices have fluctuated widely, leaving Nigeria hanging by a thread. An economy then the first with a GDP of $510bn after rebasing in 2014 is now the fourth in Africa with a GDP of $252bn.

“After over six decades of independence, the country with the largest population – 233 million – in Africa cannot feed its population…

“In education and the provision of social services, Nigeria is in a pitiful state. With 20.1 million, Nigeria’s out-of-school population is second in the world to India’s…

“With a sizeable number of medical professionals relocating overseas, the health of citizens is in jeopardy. The wealthy fly abroad for medical treatment. Medical tourism sets Nigeria back by $2bn yearly, per the Nigerian Medical Association.

“Fifty-eight years after independence, Nigeria went from bad to worse. That year, it gained global disdain after overtaking India as the global poverty capital with 87 million nationals. Unfortunately, things are much worse. In 2022, the NBS estimated that 133 million Nigerians lived in multidimensional poverty. The situation degenerated in 2023 after Tinubu cancelled the petrol subsidy that had kept transportation prices affordable and floated the currency. The World Bank said the twin policies added seven million Nigerians to the poverty rate…”
How did we get here? Yes, we have bad governance, but most of it is traceable to the mentality of her citizens.

We are constitutionally free to worship, and we certainly do follow our religions. But we also learn early to worship authority and power, no matter how perverse. We tend to enshrine false gods. If the devil shows up at our front door, we are ecstatic.

This is the only explanation for some of the creatures we put—and sustain—in public and high places, sometimes for the value of a loaf of bread. When there is an opportunity to assert right over evil, we are the treat.  After all, didn’t the devil promise us that our “turn” will come?
This is why, even as our children die of hunger and their hopes shrink, we are overjoyed when the devil buries the public purse in the ground next to us in actual billions or in estates and mansions. Our “turn” will come, not so?

When we occasionally get the chance to warm ourselves near the fires of power, we are ready to sell the neighbourhood.

This is why the national landscape is littered with hundreds of thousands of public projects and plans, from the barely-started to the shoddy to the “unfinished.” We do not summon the fight.

It is true, of course, that the Nigerian politician believes that the average man lives for them and at their leisure. But they are also fortified that Mr Average Man is not a threat to them.
This is how, in these six decades, every conceivable Nigerian institution has rotted before our very eyes: the presidency, civil service, the army, the legislature, the police, the judiciary, the electoral commission, schools and public hospitals.

Think about it: even physical structures rot, collapse or are pawned: Nigeria Airways, Independence Building, etc.  We cannot complete a road before needing to refurbish it. In 64 years, we have had more Works Ministers than completed or functioning roads.  Elevators in public buildings work only for months or a few years.

You want one example in the Fourth Republic? Remember that as he prepared to assume office in 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo promised Nigerians: “On my honour, by the end of 2001, Nigerians would begin to enjoy regular, uninterrupted power supply.”

That was a two-year window. And yet, at the end of eight years, in 2007, Obasanjo had famously blown $16bn in the sector, with no electricity delivered.

Similarly, in February 2008, his handpicked successor, late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, promised that by July 2009—in one and a half years—Nigerians would have power.

His successor, Goodluck Jonathan, as Vice-President in November 2009, promised Nigerians they would have full electricity in 2010. In August 2010, he announced a $3.5bn national electricity “super grid,” to be jointly financed with the private sector and development agencies.  It would boost Nigeria’s generating capacity to over 14,000 megawatts by December 2013.

“Without the super grid, the quantum of power lost in transmission will continue to increase,” he said. “Periodic systemic failures will also become more frequent.” When he left power in 2015, there was no super grid, and no power.
Jonathan lost the 2015 election to the biggest political and ethical pretender in African history: Muhammadu Buhari. Among others, that man claimed he would get back the N16bn that Obasanjo squandered in the power sector.

Buhari’s emptiness in the power and other sectors is well-established.  Tinubu is the logical outcome of Buhari, and he confirmed early that he would dig into the same black hole that Buhari began.

But these leaders have not dug Nigeria into infamy on their own. They have merely taken advantage of the shallowness and persistent lack of conviction of Nigerians. The political leaders neither accept that they are elected to serve nor that the ordinary man is entitled to a higher quality of life. By his preparedness to worship, the citizen agrees.

What comes next? I agree that true federalism is the future, as this would arm and compel the federating units to focus on developing themselves, and possibly prevent Nigeria from exploding into fragments.

But will that elevate citizen conviction over the tendency to worship self-made idols, no matter how filthy?

Will it eliminate our embrace of charlatanry and quackery over character and competence?