By Reuben Abati
There is nothing more exasperating, living in Nigeria, studying Nigeria, and analysing Nigeria, and being Nigerian, than the realization that our lives have become one long piece of monotonous repetition of failures and uncertainties.
We celebrate our capacity to manage the crisis in our lives, the optimism that is derived from our religiousity and our capacity like tragic heroes, to suffer and endure, but for a nation that seeks to make progress, the biggest challenge remains the development challenge. We seem rooted in one spot, gyrating on our axis, and nothing, absolutely nothing appears to work.
Even that which works, even that which appears to move eventually careers towards a dead end, and we greet the closure of our dreams, the abbreviation of our enthusiasm with a little spittle, some intra-class name-calling, the media makes the usual noises and soon, very soon, we all move on and adjust to the reality of our circumstances. Next year and the year after, almost interminably, we repeat the same patterns.
And in the midst of it all, we hold the usual weekend parties, we fill pepper soup joints every evening with crowds, we dance and wriggle our waists; in the midst of the filth we manage to force out some excitement, with men and women disappearing behind closed doors, assisted by vain promises and the influence of alcohol, and we wake up to reassure ourselves that life is not bad at all. But it is.
Companies manage to survive, crawling from year to year, even if the banks declare absurd balance sheets in a country where no real productivity is taking place. Tokens, mere tokens make us happy, and so we get called the happiest people on earth and we celebrate even that as if it were the badge of valour. A new year has started and there is still little to celebrate. Those of us who spend our time on public affairs would soon discover that last year is no different from this year, and that thematically, the year to come may not be different because, our nation is trapped in the vortex of half-measures, and tokenisms and sheer monotony..
Is it in our stars? Or is this an existential condition played out in our circumstance as a fact of being human? The evidence is already before us, the narrowness of the themes of our lives. It is so easy to reduce public affairs in Nigeria to a number of predictable outcomes because every year is a veritable photocopy of the other one. Check the newspaper editorials, every year they comment on essentially the same themes. Check the commentaries: the subject matter is the same. Check electronic media content, the broadcasters continue to drone about more or less the same things.
And these are not happy stories at all, but necrophilous accounts of the lack of progress in national life. For eight years, we talked and wrote about the crisis in the energy sector, about the poor supply of electricity and how our cities are almost permanently in darkness and the power generator mafia that is smiling to the banks while electricity regulators try to increase tariffs for services they do not provide. We are starting a new year and the subject is the same because we have not moved an inch nearer the satisfaction of public expectations in this regard. For eight years, Nigerians complained about, and the Labour Congress opposed increment in the prices of petroleum products, and even organized strikes, but here we are on the other side of the experiment with democracy and in a new year, and we are hear no more than the depressing news that because local refineries are not working (and nobody wants to buy them off government) and because we are import-dependent, and although the price of oil is rising in the spot market, Nigerians may have to pay more for petroleum products to enable petroleum products marketers, the cabal of importers feeding off Nigeria like parasites of fortune, make more money.
In the course of the year, we may have to pass through the same old routine. Government will announce a sharp increase in the prices of petroleum products, knowing that there will be protests, it will offer a high benchmark and then when Labour mobilises its squad of protesters, government will pretend to be holding dialogue with the aggrieved and then one morning, the new prices will be adjusted downwards by some percentages, the original figures as it were, and Nigerians would be expected to be grateful and thank government for being responsive to public outcry. Thus, our national life is a predictable ritual, and because it is predictable, there is little room for quality thinking. Tragically, the Federal Government has promised that fuel prices will be increased not in January, but in June 2008. Nobody is talking about getting the refineries to work or alternative sources of energy.
For eight years, we lamented the rot in the education sector, the collapse of such a strategic part of the national development plan. Schools are under-funded, standards are so poor, rich parents are either sending their children to private schools or abroad. Today, employers of labour prefer to travel abroad to recruit Nigerians in diaspora who are supposedly skilled because they have been exposed to a different education system.
They are compelled to do so because of a terrible skills shortage in the Nigerian environment, many of our local university graduates have skills no doubt but certainly the wrong kind of skills: the girls are adept at luring men to bed in order to secure advantages, many of the young men are graduates of cults and 419 groups. And there is the latest phenomenon of crime on campuses: the menace of "the Yahoo boys" who are simply internet fraudsters. All this while the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the umbrella association of university teachers has been asking government to pay more attention to the education sector. In 2008, it is the same crisis of funding and empowerment of the education sector that we are still talking about. Not even one step has been taken at any level to address the identified problems.
While serious countries are expanding their transportation networks to make life easier for the citizen, we are still talking about the failed maintenance of roads and the chaos in our urban communities. There is probably no place like Oshodi market and bus stop in the whole world. Or the place called Owode Onirin. But for eight years Oshodi has remained a market of chaos and filth. It is congested from dusk to dawn, you would be tempted to assume that human beings actually come to the market from the bowels of the earth. Other Nigerian neighbourhoods are not necessarily better. Trading takes place right on the roads, as human beings, machines and wares compete for right of passage resulting often in avoidable and costly accidents.
For eight years, we lamented the insecurity of life and properties, and the reign of violence in our lives. Rather than abate, the culture of violence in the Niger Delta and elsewhere has remained a problem. Armed robbers, bandits, and terrorists are so bold they even challenge the state openly. And so we continue this year again to write about unresolved murders, about armed robbery, about national insecurity. The list of the stasis in our lives, the predictable uncertainties in our lives is so long, and never short.
Government is unable to make a difference because governance in Nigeria is yet another veritable ritual. Public officials are more interested in the perks of office rather than the difference they are expected to make in the lives of the people. They want official cars, they want to live in government quarters and buy those houses later for their personal use; they want to collect fat salaries and allowances, they all want government land in choice areas for themselves and their spouses. They all want to use, abuse and advertise power and travel around in siren-bearing vehicles which enable them to chase other Nigerians off the streets.
As it was in 1999, so it was in 2003 and so it is now, and so it seems it shall be for the rest of the year and beyond. I lament. We are a terribly short-changed people, holding the wrong end of the stick. Civil servants work with every government that comes along, one after the other, but the Nigerian civil service at all levels has the largest collection of saboteurs within the national boundary. Civil servants are the ones helping the politicians to run Nigeria aground. And they are privileged and powerful, these are entrenched forces helping to sustain a tradition of national failure.
The media is the fourth estate of the realm, we probably will never get tired of documenting the rot in our lives, out of patriotism, out of a sense of obligation and out of a feeling of commitment. Nigerians can talk and there is clearly no shortage of pundits; in Nigeria, opinion is cheap, every certificate holder is an intellectual claiming to understand the issues better than the other man. But it looks like we can only do that much, charting the paths and identifying the issues for leaders who do not even read newspapers or do not listen to local news, and who are quick to boast about this. Not knowing what to do they find it convenient to shift the expected date of national redemption. First it was the year 2000, then 2015, now all they talk about is 2020. Soon, they shall move the destination to 2025 and later. Our nation continues to buy time and yet it remains rooted in the past.
Nigeria needs nothing short of transformation at all levels. The catalyst for that must still come from the leadership, a leadership that is willing to dispense with the boring routine that the civil servants, and political contractors have imposed, a leadership that is prepared to take the problems one after the other, day after day and slaughter the dragons that have kept us at the shore of progress. The cock is crowing in other lands; in Nigeria it is silent. Shall we prod this cock to crow or slaughter it for dinner, and damn the consequences?
France And Sarkozy's Love Life
Comforting news of sorts: it is not only in Nigeria or Africa that leaders behave badly. French President, Nicolas Sarkozy is behaving rather funny, turning his love trysts into a main item on the national agenda. France is confronted with the problems of labour strikes, riots, job losses and a shaky economy, but what seems to grab the headlines is the love life of Sarkozy. The French President is so distracted, the French should be carrying a placard to get him out of office. But Sarkozy says he doesn't care.
His wife Cecilia had left around October 2007, but her perfume had not yet dried up on the Presidential bedsheets at Elysee Palace before Sarkozy linked up with super model, Carla Bruni, who parades a to-die-for statistics. and a list of bedroom conquests which includes this and that, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton. Former wife, Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz is hurting. She says she doesn't think Carla Bruni will make Nicolas Sarkozy forget her in a hurry. She has just done a tell-all book titled Rupture, and there is yet another book titled Cecilia: The Hidden Side of the ex-First Lady.
Nicolas Sarkozy and his new catch cannot be bothered. They have exchanged engagement rings and spent about 80, 000 pounds loving each other. Around Carla Bruni, President Sarkozy behaves like a love-struck teenager; he even held a press conference to announce that he is planning to marry the new woman in his life. "In Carla Bruni, I've found the headquarters of love" says Sarkozy. Both lovers have been shown taking a swim in Egyptian waters, with the President in swimming trunks, and Carla swinging as if she was on the catwalk even as the waves washed off her tender-looking laps.
The French should be outraged. The President is entitled to a private life, but he should not allow it to stand in the way of his duties to the people. Francois Mitterand had a mistress whom he maintained with public funds. Jacques Chirac also kept many women as President of France. Men of power generally tend to treat beautiful women like the perks of office. But Sarkozy's predecessors were discreet about it. Sarkozy's conduct raises a question of decorum. He is behaving like a movie star cast in a romantic comedy.
The Saudi Arabian authorities may have already helped to apply the needed brakes by reminding Mr Sarkozy that during his proposed visit to Saudi Arabia, he cannot be accompanied by Miss Bruni because the Saudis do not allow unmarried men and women, who are not relations, to stay alone together. Mr Sarkozy says when he decides to marry Ms Bruni, it will be done quickly and secretly, we would all learn about it after the event. "There's a strong chance you will learn about it after it's already been done." Fair enough. So, can he get it done with and return to the more important work of managing France?
Dr. Reuben Abati wrote this piece forThe Guardian Newspaper.
