People & Money

For Young Nigerians, It’s Time to Forge Intra-National Alliances

Wresting power from an incumbent is a monumental undertaking, an all uphill battle pictorial of a Sisyphean endeavour. But it does happen all the time that the incumbent gets worsted and a fresh broom vrooms through the Augean stable.

In this power contest, at least in the Nigerian context, it is typically one lackluster political party against another, or the starched uniforms against the flowing robes or suits. It’s never really been a generational contest despite the noise to that effect from quarters old and new.  But it’s time it was.  Not anymore should things be waged along the lines of a ‘learning experience’ where the mentors are foxy otherwise spent forces but who still have enough wiles to keep holding the reins.

The young people of Nigeria must determine to work together in ways different from their fathers’, who, truth be told, have been a colossal disappointment to themselves as well as to today’s and tomorrow’s generations. Let’s face it: the immediate post-independence generation really didn’t’ achieve much. It can be argued that they coasted for a while on the crest of the colonial blueprint for development, and thereafter settled down to supervising Nigeria’s regression. Under their watch, the ethnic rifts became wider and more combustible, and hitherto non apparent divides became manifest, the country becoming the global corruption hub and a perennial top end fixture on the Transparency Index (TI).

To do a familiar recount of our ills, the same one Major Nzeogwu did and which Generals Abacha and Dogonyaro, not to forget Major Orkar, also echoed, the corruption that began at 10% as standard has since metastasized into one that’s seen our schools utterly degraded, as have our hospitals and other critical infrastructure; and now would seem at all an time high where our kids, the ones  in the North particularly, are having to stay home, not on account of Covid-19 or Ebola or even yellow fever, but because bandits have determined that they are just the exact sort of soft targets that help boost their profile and bottom-line under a feckless government unable to protect its own people.

Also Read: https://arbiterz.com/why-the-state-not-nigeria-could-fail/

Bottom-line, Nigeria isn’t working. And this is without prejudice to what the inventive trio of Lai Mohammed, Femi Adeshina and Garba Shehu can be counted on to regale us with in their riposte. More and more Nigerians are taking off, including oldsters who have lived and toughed it out here all their lives believing that a change was gonna come. A change did come, for the worse, and so now they are among the millions of Nigerians heltering and skeltering to just about any place that has some space for us.

And so this piece is to those young Nigerians who believe not in a fragmented Nigeria speckled with places now being dubbed Biafra, Oduduwa, Arewa, or whatever.  Despite what the politicians and intellectuals would have us believe, there is a resilient crop of Nigerians from everywhere who believe in and idealise the very idea of Nigeria, and who would do anything for the country not to atomise. They prefer the life they have in other parts of the country and would feel like fish out of water were there to be a situation where, God forbid, they have to relocate to the lands of their ancestors, the places they claim or have been compelled to claim as their places of origin.

For this ‘mere geographical expression’ to transcend the ethnic biases of our forefathers, today’s young people of Nigeria must do the hard work of forging structured relationships across boundaries real and imagined. Religious, ethnic, social, these boundaries have been our eternal drawbacks. Even where at the micro individual level Nigerians were able to integrate, the politicians, or misleaders always find a way to bring back the wedge so that we are continually at war with one another. No country survives with its component parts forever at war, having no centre that holds.

With the currency of ‘leadership’ in Nigeria being ethnicity and money, otherwise brilliant young people have shown themselves easily induced. In their hasty bid to escape their sorry state, and mentored by old school politicians who have travelled same route and want that route preserved by all means, the young see no option than to plunge headlong into the appalling politics that speaks immediate gratification and the beatification of evil.

It is the gross pervasive poverty that ought to serve as mindset prop for Nigeria’s younger citizens. Their country is the poverty capital of the world, and seems fated to hold on to this dubious trophy in perpetuity unless….

Now, just check our regress: Nigeria has oil that its elite contrive to not know how to refine. The same oil that Nigeria refined, beginning in 1965 with the Alasa Eleme (Port Harcourt) refinery and then later Warri and Kaduna refineries that ensured fuel for Nigeria in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.The most painful side to this is that the people enjoy none of the benefit of the oil. If prices go up, government makes more money but the people pay more for fuel and sometimes have to stand on queues for God-knows-how-long as government does the see saw of subsidy removal and re-imposition that impoverishes and further impoverishes the people.

We deal in crude and buy refined. Check that, we deal in crude and buy refined. It’s that way for just about everything we do. We proudly do crude. And we produce and proudly export as crude, to buy back as refined. Of course it means we make crude earnings while paying refined prices; something we do gladly and shamelessly looking for who to blame for the bogus subsidy regime that keeps a few fat cats mewing to the banks.

The state can demonise ENDSARS all it wants. What is clear is that the heightened consciousness about the worthlessness of life in Nigeria as is is now no longer a murmur in the back streets, it’s the wail that’s heard from a thousand miles and that ricochets down the insulated halls of Aso Villa. And just so that this angst does not peter out like a bullet that misses its target by a wide margin, young Nigerians must forge the cooperation North, South, East and West and  ignore the beckon from ‘made’ colleagues whose wealth comes from being tied to the apron strings of elders that want Nigeria forever in the dark.

The bridges must be built, by stealth if possible. But built they must. Across ethnic and social divides so that the emergent leadership amongst our young people helps wean them of entrenched tendencies like advanced fee fraud and cultism, brings back ‘conscious’ music that wins more Grammies and Headies, encourages and builds more Flutterwaves and Paystacks, and ensures that our refined content, especially intellectual, is what we sell as against the crude and crudity that today defines us.

This is not a call for a forceful takeover by the young but an insistence by the young people of this country that Nigeria be run in a way that allays their fears about their future. And so they must become once again like the force that flickered all too briefly in the 1970s and 80s when, united all across the vibrant campuses of our universities and the streets nationwide, they held the country’s leadership accountable and careful. We lost that battle because it was not sustained. We lost our sense of vigilance as a lot of the student activists, driven then by their Marxist fervor, eventually capitulated to the most odious form of capitalism, the one that thinks only of self and not the common good. Others simply decided government was not for them and they left it to those who have led us to where we now find ourselves.

The fight for how Nigeria is run is an existential fight. It goes beyond the ballot box. It goes beyond the voter’s card. We must first say no to the crude self-flagellating old ways of our fathers: tribalism, nepotism, religious fundamentalism and the nauseating corruption that we collectively wink at. Those are the ways taking us down the drain but which are being better paved by the system for the new generation to travel on. Do forbid it. Do all in your power to aggregate the critical mass to construct the new paths.

(Onuwa Lucky Joseph is a veteran marketing communications professional and development journalist whose consultancy helps organisations and individuals looking to positively impact their communities. Can be reached on onuwa.joseph@gmail.com; 08023314782)

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