The #Endbadgovernance protest has been a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the terrible since it commenced after much ado. The protesters are having their say. The looters have managed to have their way and are probably still plotting hard how to do more looting. The government is struggling hard to manage the process while watching television and eating. The sponsors home and abroad are watching, rallying their troops and wondering whether they will achieve their desired results.
Peaceful protest is a lawful way of expressing grievances against governments across the world. It is an inalienable right enshrined in the constitution so long the protesters do it lawfully without impinging on the rights of other citizens. Protest is good and honourable when the protesters are better than the leaders they are protesting against. But where protesters are the same in attitude, behaviour and character or are even worse in character than who they are protesting against, protest becomes a manifestation of idiotic hypocrisy.
It’s true that everything rises and falls with leadership. It is also true that leaders largely reflect the society that produce them. If dirty water is what you draw out everytime you attempt to draw water from your cistern, the problem is not the water, the problem is the source, or something along the pipeline supplying the water.
The leadership pipeline of Nigeria is the Nigerian society, the society reflects an aggregation of the character of the families and individuals in it. The citizens are the people from all the families, communities, societies and ethnic nationalities that make up the nation. Nigeria’s leadership pipeline has been dirty for decades and no one has been genuinely interested in cleaning it in the last 38 years.
Buhari / Idiagbon regime tried to address the pipeline problem 40 years ago, but things returned to normal as soon as Badamasi Babangida overthrew Idiagbon. The people joyfully threw away the things learnt under the Buhari / Idiagbon WAI regime. Since then, the society has become incrementally worse.
The population that supplies leadership in Nigeria is rotten. A bad tree can’t produce good fruits.
This is a deep truth that many people in Nigeria always push aside by continuing to insist that leadership is our problem in the country. As long as we continue to push the truth aside, our situation will remain the same. But the moment we have the sense and the courage to embrace the hard truth, the light of organic change will begin to appear in our dark tunnel of leadership and governance.
What promotes bad governance in Nigeria is not in the government. What promotes bad governance in Nigeria is in the Nigerian people. That demon in us tries hard to behave itself in a society that is orderly, but works in us to promote disorderliness and dysfunctionality in our own country. It continues to deceive us to hold the believe that only the leaders built those societies where it allows us to behave well. We of course joyfully accept the lies and continue to wait for leaders who will recondition us into robots and control us to behave as directed. That is why we have remained the same retrogressive country no matter who the leader is in the past 50 years. If only Nigerians will ponder on this deeply and not continue to argue it away, they may perhaps begin to see why we are stuck in our collectively built prison of poor governance.
I watched Onyeka Owenu’s documentary of 1984 about Nigeria few days ago and it confirmed my believe that the problem of Nigeria is buried within our character as a people. Our collective attitude and character as citizens who love lawlessness and indiscipline prevent good governance from emerging. It renders the good ones amongst us ineffective. “This is not true! This is utter nonsense!” some may argue. Let me bring a statistics that may make you think about this deeper to your attention below.
Since Oyenka Owenu’s 1984 documentary about Nigeria, we have been governed by 8 presidents (Buhari twice), over 250 governors, over 1,000 ministers, over 4000 Senators and Honourables, over 7,000 states law makers, over 10,000 local government chairmen, over 4000 Director – Generals, and over 20,000 special advisers and personal assistants. In all these years, our problems remained the same despite the fact that over 50,000 citizens from all walks of life from amongst us have represented us in governance. It is a fact that God will never send us aliens to lead us. If we want to be honest with ourselves, we will unanimously agree that a population which supplied over 50,000 leaders who can’t deliver good governance in 40 years is sick and requires to be critically analyzed if progress must be ever achieved.
When a country has a problem like ours spanning over 4 to 5 decades despite all the protests we have undertaken, it’s a sign that there are other severe underlining problems that must be looked into.
Every protest in the past has had looting and killings engrained in it. A culture where large scale looting occurs during protests and lives are wasted on both sides of the divide reflect a society that has no value for the lives of others, where virtues is under attack, where honest income isn’t a popular way of live and where cheating isn’t a vice frowned at by the majority. In between these kinds of character lies the reason for our perpetual bad governance problem.
The pipeline supplying leadership in Nigeria – the citizenry – is dirty, corrupt, polluted, infected, and needs cleansing. The easiest way to do the cleansing is either by the way of self-cleansing by the citizens or by the way of surgery by revolutionists. The hard way is through a bloody revolution and it’s not every revolution that produces good leaders or good outcome. Libya is a big testament here.
There has has been a big stop sign staring Nigerians in the eyes as a people in the past four decades. Rather than heed these signs, we have continued in our way of life as a people living dangerously doing the wrong things and doing the right things in wrong ways. Tinubu is our scapegoat today, it will be another person’s turn later. A nation of wise citizens in a precarious situation as ours will pause, turn to the supply chain of leadership and address it as leaders in their individual offices and spheres of influence. A dogmatic people will keep deceiving themselves by sustaining the same dirty source or pipeline, scapegoating their leaders and hoping for a miracle leader to emerge along the line.
As citizens and leaders in our individual space, this bad house is our collective responsibility. Changing ourselves individually and collectively to become truly good citizens is our surest way to save Nigeria from death and destruction. The best time to start was 40 years ago. The next best time to start is now.
Let me close by leaving you with the question I ask myself every day before I sleep. “If every Nigerian behaves like me in secret and in the open every day, what kind of a country would we have?” May the almighty Allah help us to change ourselves individually to change our country collectively.
Peoplesmind
