• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Men in dark times (2)

Men in dark times (2)

The American diplomat John Campbell observes that Nigeria is always “dancing on the brink”. Constantly tempting fate may be a good plot in a Dostoevskian novel or in a Brechtian drama. But in real life, it can lead to irreversible trauma. Human systems can only take so much.

Today, the drums of war are sounding louder than ever before. And it is being led by those who have never experienced the horrors of war.

As a child, I remember how my father, a churchman, harboured a dozen Igbo families in our modest home a few months before the outbreak of war in July 1967. One woman had given birth on the day they arrived. I had never seen such fear in the eyes of grown men. Igbos were being hunted down like wild game throughout the cities and towns of the North. After several weeks, we were threatened with death. With sorrow and tears, Baba had to let them go. In thick of night, they set out on that long trek into the bowels of the primeval savannah, never to return. I still weep when I think of it.

Someone recently sent me an SMS about the real meaning of war: “War is starvation; war is rape; war is deprivation of movement; war is fear; war is lack of access to health care…war is diseases; war is hopelessness; war is losing children….war is losing loved ones; war is not going to school; war is not going to work; war is creating an entire generation who will be illiterates; war is so much more than just shooting guns and ending lives.”

However sure you are that you can easily win, there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also has a chance

Emeka Nnolim sent me excerpts from his manuscript on his experiences of childhood in Biafra: “We were now all refugees….lack of food introduced a new disease – kwashiorkor. Children, adults walked about with oversized heads and or stomach on spindly legs with owlish eyes. Their hair is dirt brown and all are accompanied by flies. Hovering above were vultures. It was not uncommon to see corpses at the primary school, church, along the road or on the way to the stream. They were quickly buried. No one wailed or mourned anymore. I lost count of bodies quickly wrapped in cloth, mat or palm fronds before burial…. Parents abandoned children who could be seen opening their mouths full of flies without a sound coming out, dropping dead along the road.”

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Wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned that war never follows a straight, unilinear path: “The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated war offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations – all take their seat at the council board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also has a chance.”

Before Nigeria goes up in flames, let us speak and act with the highest sense of responsibility. Albert Einstein famously observed that God does not play dice with the universe. God is engaged in a great thought experiment to see if we Nigerians can forge out of our multifarious ethnoreligious communities a prosperous democracy that can become the beacon of hope for our benighted continent.

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But there are no guarantees. We will survive and flourish if we muster the courage and vision to build a New Nigeria. We will surely perish if we continue on the path of folly.

In the rebuilding of our country, we must place women and the youth at the centre of all our national development efforts. Far from being lazy, Nigerian youth are hardworking, creative and brave. The aura and energy around them are extraordinary. Look at Nollywood, look at Afro-beat. Ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who visited our country and was awed by what our young people are doing in technology. The EndSARS protests were their shiniest hour.

Fanon famously declared that “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it”. The mission of our generation is to salvage our country from the jaws of catastrophe. Political science teaches that nations that flourish are those that continually reinvent themselves while those that fail to reform will atrophy and die.

In the Old Testament, when the Israelite exiles in Babylon heard about the sacking of Jerusalem by foreign conquerors, Nehemiah, an official in the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes, asked that he might be permitted to go back and rebuild his country. The king granted him approval.

Nehemiah was a man with a plan. He created an investment fund. He drew up a bill of quantities; sourcing for building materials of the highest quality. He gathered a team and began the work. They inevitably encountered enemies such as Sanballat of Samaria, Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arab. He marshalled a strategy to defeat them. And Jerusalem was rebuilt.

We are in dire need of heroic nation-builders. We need nothing less than a new covenant of hope. All of us Christians and Muslims are children of Abraham. We are in the deep hole we are in today because of a collective failure of leadership.

The Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, in his magisterial study of the state in renaissance Italy, described the state as a “work of art”. Great states are not products of chance. They are products of imagination, creativity and purpose-driven leadership. Great states are built with the same vision and passion with which Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven composed his great symphonies. It calls for men and women of singular courage – men and women who have conquered fear.

(Being the Concluding Part of 2nd Goke Omisore Voice of Reason Annual Lecture, Delivered on Friday 19 February, 2021)