Road To Nigeria’s Revolution

Nigeria is bogged on a fork on the road but now fumbles a choice
between peace and justice.
photo
In its 53-year history, not once has that choice been so stark, as the
now blood-soaked country can't move forward without deciding it.
On December 8th last year, the country's former Vice President,
Abubakar Atiku, direly put Nigeria's un-employment figure at 75
million people, comprising mostly youths.
Interpreted in terms, those hard done by in Nigeria without a job and
a means of livelihood therefore exceed the whole population of six (6)
African countries put together, namely, Ghana,Togo, Cameroon, Senegal,
Liberia and Sierra-Leone, whose combined population of 73 million, is
less than the 75 million un-employed people in Nigeria alone.
As the Nigerian State rapidly loses legitimacy for this inability to
consequently plan or care for its denuded populace, Nigeria's laws are
now as defiled as they are defied by the country's growing apathetics.
Indeed, looking in from outside, there'll hardly seem to be any law in
Nigeria anymore. Pistols and revolvers are, for example, publicly sold
at the Lagos beachfront on a cheap to any willing buyer who feels
angry enough to want to kill or maim somebody, despite that the
possession and bearing of arms is criminally prohibited in Nigeria,
where paradoxically, gunshots continue to shatter the silence of each
night on the Lagos mainland, before the corpses of those robbed or
assassinated are later picked up for burial each morning.
"I am afraid - and you know i am an army General, " said ex-President
Olusegun Obasanjo on 27th July last year, "and when a General says he
is afraid, that means the danger ahead is real and potent. The danger
posed by an army of unemployed youth in Nigeria can only be imagined.
There is absence of serious, concrete, realistic, short and long term
solution to youth unemployment. Nigerian youths have been patient
enough. This patience will soon reach its elastic limit. Nigeria will
witness a revolution soon, unless government takes urgent steps to
check growing youth unemployment and poverty," Obasanjo said.
For Nigeria to decide its choice, its government has to firstly forgo
the dalliance of official thefts, such as the ₦1.2 trillion
representing 25% of the national budget stolen from its
federaltreasury last year through counterfeited bills of lading used
for oil subsidy re-imbursement claims. Butso far, the evidence of that
dalliance being forgone in Nigeria is not obvious. On the contrary,
since January last year when mass protests forced the issue and caused
a probe which later un-earthed this ₦1.2 trillion theft,no government
official has been named or arraigned as criminally answerable.
A former Lagos State governor, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, later took a
second look at Nigeria virtually un-ravelling amid such eye-watering
thefts, of which he himself is strongly suspected as linchpin, and
said "The situation our country is in today is bothsad and
unacceptable. We are like a people without a leader, a country with no
trustworthy men at the helm of affairs, and a nation now lost at sea.
Our leaders must commit to a better country, not tomorrow, but
beginning now - today, because time is not on our side and the
continued patience ofthe people may no longer be guaranteed."
As it is, the country's President, Goodluck Jonathan, is the one most
Nigerians expect should resolve Nigeria's sclerosis, but he's rather
swatted that assignment off with alibis. "I am the most criticised
president in the world," he'd recently said, ruefully, before throwing
up his hands and asking if Nigeria ever had good roads, schools or
hospitals beforehe took office on May 29th, 2011, which only got bad
thereafter solely by his personal fault.
But just in case the sceptics were still heard of hearing, President
Jonathan then all but declared Nigeria un-reformable in its present
anomie, even if that meant eating his words forhaving promised the
country's transformation at his 2011 presidential campaign. "The whole
of Nigeria society has failed", President Jonathan,said deadpan last
month June 15th.
"When you look at Nigeria today, we are deceiving ourselves; pastors
are deceiving members, members are deceiving their pastors, husbands
deceiving their wives, and the wives deceiving their husbands. Parents
are deceiving their children and the children in turn deceive their
parents. Soon, we would have a whole nation of people deceiving each
other," President Jonathan further intoned in a declarative tone.
The pioneer Editor of Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper, Muyiwa Adetiba,
would later on put it more pointedly. "The conclusion seems to be
inescapable in Nigeria that what we have as leaders in politics,
business and the civil service are common thieves in high places,"
Muyiwa Adetiba said. "The rot is so deep that stealing is now in the
family system, inthe religious system; even in friendly and social
clubs. Everybody is looking for somebody else to steal from.The day
our leaders decide they don't need James Ibori's kind of wealth or
Cecilia Ibru's kind of property acquisition, that a good name is
better than material acquisition; and that leadership at the end of
the day, is about people and leaving a place better than you met it,
is the day Nigeria will begin a positive walk into sanity and
propriety. Until then, Nigeria is just a nation of common thieves,"
Muyiwa Adetiba added.
How then can a country officially declared at presidential level as
characterised by deceit, implying thievery and frauds, ever start on
the road and succeed at reversing its 75 million un-employment crisis
to become a praline place on earth for its citizens to live in
comfortably?
"Only a bloody revolution can save Nigeria," said Professor Ben
Nwabueze,in January, when he threw away his bemedalled gown as
Nigeria's foremost constitutional lawyer in favour of a physical
revolution as the only solution. Corroborating Nwabueze's renunciation
of law - as the means to resolve a pandemic crisisof official thefts,
if those stealing Nigeria blind are the state officials who can't be
expected to apply the laws of thefts to themselves - Dr. Tunji
Braithwaite, himself a famous lawyer, said "there can never be a
meaningful election for progress until a revolutionary change firstly
resolves Nigeria's theft and corruption crisis."
Both lawyers likely saw the further futility in placing their hopes
for change on the same perpetrators of government-level thefts who
only coyly select their own members and dress him up in false robes as
the messiah, for the duped populace to choose one, but all to the same
effect of a make-believe to look like change but ending up as more of
the same thing.
"We are actually overdue for a revolution!" said Kano ex-federal
legislator, Dr. Junaid Mohammed. "What is wrong with us having a
revolution here in Nigeria? Unless, of course, you belong to those who
are stealing government money or you have something to hide. Then of
course you should be afraid of revolution, because after the
revolution, there is what we call revolutionary justice. They will get
you, corrupt people, and shoot you. In fact, if they shoot just 500
corrupt people, Nigeria will be a much better place and God will
forgive them".
Well, perhaps so, since the capacity of the Nigerian state itself is
putatively seen to be withering away, at least according to the
country's past Chief Justice, Dahiru Musdapher, who said onDecember
20th last year, that, "our capacity to investigate, arrest, prosecute
and convict those found guilty of contravening the laws of Nigeria is
evidently weak and compromised. There is no objectivity in national
discourse anymore.
Our slide into anarchy has assumed dangerous dimensions, beyond the
capacity of our security agencies to deal with the menace effectively.
BokoHaram insurgency, political violence, corruption, nepotism,
tribalism, indiscipline, abductions, and kidnappings, armed robbery,
murder and extortion, bombings of places of worship and of innocent
Nigerians - are all indicators of a failed State," the ex-Chief
Justice of Nigeria had said.
On that point, foreign countries are agreed that the Nigerian state is
withering away.
"The situation in Nigeria remains fluid and unpredictable", said the
U.S State Department on December 20th last year. "In light of the
continuing violence, extremists may expand their operations beyond
northern Nigeria tothe country's middle and southern states.
Crime is a risk throughout Nigeria. Home invasions also remain a
serious threat, with armed robbers accessing even guarded compounds by
scaling perimeter walls, following residents orvisitors, or subduing
guards to gain entry to homes or apartments.
Armed robbers in Lagos have also accessed waterfront compounds by
boat. U.S. citizens, as well as Nigerians and other expatriates, have
been victims of armed robbery at banks and grocery stores and on
airport roads during both daylight and evening hours. Law enforcement
authorities usually respond slowly or not at all andprovide little or
no investigative support to victims," the American government's
statement concluded.
By not thinking, Nigerian governmentsat all levels have slept-walked
into thegrips of revolutionary pressures without any easy means of
escape.
For once official thefts broke the bondsbetween the government and the
people, the genie was let out of the bottle. And because theft spawns
theft,the cycle of vendetta in Nigeria is bound to be un-ending as it
extends tothe wives and daughters of corrupt government officials,
whom the people now target in vengeance for rape and ransom.A blogger
writing on the internet last year on December 30th, Paul Omoruyi,
pithily described the Nigeria's nationalcondition today as follows:
""It is no secret now that Nigerians hate their rulers; but when
Nigerian "prayer warrior" masses now start to curse and pray for the
death of their rulers, then there is a crisis. There is always
euphoria and jubilation whenever a member of the Nigerian
"thiefocratic class" (i.e.; President, Governor, Senator, House of Rep
member, Minister or local government chairman) dies. For example, when
theplane of Governor Danbaba Suntai's of Taraba State crashed, I
placed a call to several friends i considered somewhat"God-fearing"
and decent. The first response i got from each and every one of them
is "make them all die, we are praying for the next one to die".
Many Nigerians in recent times have sobecome accustomed to cursing
their rulers that before you have a five-minute discussion on the
state of Nigeria with them, they would have cursed the ruling class
more than a hundred times. There is now justifiable but unprecedented
hatred for the ruling class like never before in the history of
Nigeria".
Without a doubt, once a society degrades to this low point of
organized hatred that Paul Omoruyi has described, and with guns and
explosives so easy to buy and bear, nothing but revolutionary justice
can push it back from the precipice of the abyss into which Nigeria is
looking at the moment.
Seyi Olu Awofeso is a Legal Practitioner in Abuja