When some of us were young, our country had the promise of greatness. We entertained the vision of a New Jerusalem. Today, ours has become a dream deferred. The flame has died. The signs everywhere foretell a coming age of thunder, fire, iron and blood.
The Financial Times of London recently warned that Nigeria is becoming a failed state. Nigeria has become a vast killing field – a graveyard of shattered dreams. Last year, a Diaspora couple returning from the United States were abducted on the Lokoja road. Their sixteen-year daughter, who had never been to Africa before, was serially raped in the presence of the parents. Stripped of every dollar, they were beaten and humiliated. They have brushed the dust under their feet and have vowed never to set foot in this country ever again.
Before Christmas, 344 pupils from Government Science Secondary School Kankara were kidnapped in General Muhammadu Buhari’s home state of Katsina. They were released after six days of desperate negotiations. Although the government denied it, some of the pupils confessed that the sum of N1 million was the ransom on each of them.
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Churches throughout Christmas have been on their guards as a result of rumours of bombings. The old missionary town of Garkida in Borno State was sacked by the insurgents. Most of the inhabitants have taken refuge in the surrounding hills and caves. The auxiliary Bishop of Owerri, Most Rev. Moses Chikwe, was recently abducted. There is yet no news about his fate. The silence of the lambs.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with borrowing. What is wrong is borrowing for consumption and borrowing to build railways and refineries in a foreign country. It is dangerous to fritter away foreign loans without fastidious expenditure controls in place
A decade ago, I came across the work of Harvard social psychiatrist and writer Robert H. Coles who achieved intellectual fame for his book, The Children of Crisis. He wrote about the impact of racism and structural violence on the collective psyche of Black children in the southern United States. If Coles were to analyse our society today, I am sure he would come up with nightmare conclusions.
Our country has become a vast cesspool of existential evil. We are the land where children are sacrificed and virgins buried alive for money and power. I am a Patron of the Boys’ Brigade. In Barkin Ladi, Plateau State, in Gombe and in Nasarawa State, we have had cases of truck drivers driving straight into some of our boys, killing dozens at a time. I do not believe these to be mere accidents. Several of such trucks, laden with oil, have crashed into crowded streets in Lagos and elsewhere. The carnage is often horrific. There are demented people out there who want to kill innocent children for cultic, religious or other reasons.
Partly as a result of the novel coronavirus and partly due to poor economic management, we are braced for the worst recession since the eighties. The World Bank predicts a contraction of 4 percent by year’s end 2020 before gradually rebounding by a modest 1.1 percent in 2021. The key fundamentals have deteriorated. The naira is exchanging at $1/N500 in the black market. Headline inflation has risen to 14.23 percent according to the official NBS, even though American economist Stephen Hanke places it around 33.5 percent.
Our total national debt is projected to reach N32.51 trillion by December 31, 2020. In principle, there is nothing wrong with borrowing. What is wrong is borrowing for consumption and borrowing to build railways and refineries in a foreign country. It is dangerous to fritter away foreign loans without fastidious expenditure controls in place.
Nigeria also recently overtook India as the world capital of poverty. According to some recent estimates, some 98 million Nigerians, amounting to 45 percent of the population, live under conditions of extreme poverty. The unemployment figures are just as bad. Youth unemployment in Nigeria averages 24 – 60 percent, depending on the region.
On top of this, inequality is reaching unacceptable proportions. The elites live in an embarrassment of affluence while the poor wallow in destitution. The rich send their children abroad. When they graduate, posh jobs are waiting for them while children of the poor with first-class honours degrees are wandering in the streets.
It is no surprise that a Tsunami of youth protests recently swept through our country. The youth of our country have shown extraordinary patience and fortitude in the face of a society that has cruelly mortgaged their future and destroyed their hopes.
Let me conclude with an extract from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:
The year that Okonkwo took eight hundred seed yams from Nwakibie was the worst year in living memory. Nothing happened at its proper time; it was either too early or too late. It seemed as if the world had gone mad. The first rains were late and when they came, lasted only a brief moment …
The drought continued for eight market weeks and the yams were killed. The year had gone mad. When the rains finally returned, they fell as it had never fallen before. Trees were uprooted and deep gorges appeared everywhere.
That year, the harvest was sad, like a funeral and many farmers wept as they dug up the miserable and rotting yams. One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself.
Okonkwo remembered that tragic year with a cold shiver throughout the rest of his life. It always surprised him when he thought about it later that he did not sink under the load of despair. He knew he was a fierce fighter, but that year had been enough to break the heart of a lion.
“Since I survived that year,” he always said, “I shall survive anything.”
Anno Domini 2020 is a year we all gladly want to put behind us. It has been a year of the locusts, canker-worm and caterpillar — an annus horribilis. Let me boldly say that since you, my gentle reader, survived it, nothing will stop you from flourishing in 2021. Happy NewYear to you all!
