Us vs them – Part 1

I rented an apartment about a week ago and the compound had a big generator house – that was part of the building plan- where tenants kept their generators. The owner of the compound had already done the generator connections for every flat, so all I had to do was to search the generator house for my wire and plug it to my generator. At first I found this to be a good initiative and thought it to be stress-free. Then about two days into my stay, I realised that we had adapted our lives to not having power. We had recalibrated our lives to seeing not having power in our homes as normal. We had subtly stopped giving the government the stick and as such we do not even care what happens to the billions that will be budgeted, or was budgeted to provide power that we never saw and might never see.

We had become immune, deaf, blind, and dumb to the uselessness of our government. Just like power, we now provide our own security and it is no longer out of place to see communities and private estates having armed vigilantes and guards. If, let us say tomorrow your estate gets robbed, the first question will most likely be “don’t you guys have a security guard?” before questions are asked about the police and the others. I do not want to be alarmist, but at this rate of decline, it is only a matter of time before big estates start including fully functional hospitals in their plans. We must ensure that we do not get to this point because at that point, each individual becomes a government in his own right and legality becomes individualistic. For starters, that is a state of what I call mini-Somalia.

One of my neighbours whom I just met plans to get himself a car, and he has opted for an SUV. I asked him why an SUV and he pointed to the deplorable state of the road leading to our compound and I had to nod in agreement. He never mentioned the government whose job it is to make that road motor-able for all types of cars. He had subconsciously phased them out and they bore no blame in his eyes. I am not even sure he thinks they exist and I feel for him as much as I feel for myself. If the road was any worse than it is now, he would have been thinking of purchasing a tractor, or any of those heavy duty vehicles instead of an SUV.

Just opposite my compound is an elegant building, I do not know who owns it, but he or she must be a man of no small means. As we walked past the house, my friend looked at the building and made a statement: “Look how big this house is and how bad the road leading to it is! Couldn’t he have done this road?” My friend did not blame the government, he blamed a citizen like himself and me, someone without the political means and without the legal or moral responsibility to construct that road. That is what William Ryan referred to as “blaming the victim” and he described it as an ideology. A look at the definition of ideology points to it as a set of conscious and unconscious ideas which make up one’s beliefs, goals, expectations and motivations. In this instance ours will best be termed an unconscious ideology and it is one that stems from neglect that has spanned over five decades.

What do I want you to get from the stories above? First, we are beginning to accept the purposeful cluelessness of the people saddled with the responsibility of making government work for all of us and not just for THEM. Two, we are fine-tuning our existence to accepting absurdities, anomalies and absolute abnormalities as normal if not even natural. Stay with me, I am just getting started.

“Nigerians are very strong people,” “Nigerians are the happiest people on earth,” “Nigerians are the most industrious and hardworking people on earth,” “Nigerians are the most innovative people on earth”. Spare me these absolutely condescending crap clichés. Nigerians are strong at being naïve and silent in the face of even god-numbing oppression and suppression; that is not strength, it is called weakness and cowardice. Nigerians are not the happiest people on earth; we are simply a people who have turned adapting horridly to hopelessness and despair into a national art. How does that even translate to happiness? Nigerians are not the most industrious or hardworking people on earth.

People who prop up this theory always have a huge basket of “Nigerians” to point to, majority if not all of the “Nigerians” in this basket having lived outside the shores of this country for a great part of their lives. Realise that those are not Nigerians, the system that encouraged them to achieve those feats are not Nigerian systems. Let me assume what I have said has permeated your entire being, and as such I will move on to why I wrote this in the first place. Now, why exactly are we not industrious and creative, it is because the system that is being forcefully administered is an extractive kind of system and not an inclusive type. Creativity and innovation hardly or never is a product of an extractive political and economic system like the type we have, only inclusive economic and political systems can birth innovation.

Nigeria, the “Giant of Africa” as you know or thought it, does not exist. Nigeria is at best, a disgrace to mankind and is very close to putting a dent on God’s creations. Now this is me assuming that we have not already become a dent in God’s own creations.

In 1994, Rwanda experienced arguably the worst genocide in human history. A lot of people will love to counter this claim, but try juxtaposing with the human loss in other genocides and their time frame and you will get my point. Rwanda lost approximately 20% of her population in that bitter ethnic cleansing; but this year made it 22 years since it ended, and Rwanda, without the natural or human resources available to Nigeria has succeeded in building a country very many people would be proud of. That, is how you become the “Giant of Africa.” Let us take a look at our very own Nigeria. We fought a bloody civil war that ended 46 years ago, but today, with huge deposits of natural and human resources that no African nation can rival, we are nothing – absolutely nothing.

Now why is this so? I will put it quite simply: because the people that profit from our being nothing yes, people profit immensely from our being dysfunctional, have been at the helms since independence. And even when they do relinquish power, their successors – who are most times those they tutored or even their friends, and relations – end up continuing with the same system or even make slight adjustments so they can profit more at the expense of the vast majority of the poor and deprived citizens. I call these people “THEM” and I call those at the receiving end of the stick – the citizens – “US.”In 2019, it is going to be US vs THEM.

To be continued
Nubari writes from Rivers State. He is also on Twitter @Saatah and can be reached on 08138024985