Nigeria we fail thee

THIS week, Nigeria’s political class again did what it knows how to do best: ride roughshod over the people. The National Assembly, apparently at presidential prompting, repealed the national anthem Nigerians had known for 46 years and reintroduced a dead anthem, a fitting metaphor for a dying country. To cap off the buffoonery, Senate President Godswill Akpabio declared that this marked the beginning of the revolution Nigerians had been yearning for! Akabio’s drivel: “Of all the significant things you (Tinubu) have done, this is one of the most profound things and that is to take us back to our genealogy. The genealogy of our birth that though we belong to different tribes (sic), though we may have different tongues, henceforth, we will not refer to ourselves as just compatriots, we will refer to ourselves as brothers.” It is certain that if someone had pushed for the adoption of Tinubu’s campaign song, “On Your mandate we shall stand”, as the new national anthem, the Akpabio-led Senate would have given it the warmest endorsement. Its revolution is musical, not infrastructural.

I knew Nigerian politicians were bad, but I didn’t expect this level of depravity. At a time Nigerians are yearning for a living wage, state police and restructuring of the polity, President Tinubu and his courtiers introduced a new anthem. But hear a member of his Economic Coordination Council, Bismark Rewane, lamenting the economic ruination of Nigerians in a broadcast this week: “A bag of rice cost N35,000 last year; today, it’s N80,000, an increase of 129 percent. Gari was N28,000 last year; it’s now N50,000. Beans were 30,000 last year; now, it’s N95,000, up by 217 percent. A loaf of bread was N900; now it’s N1,600. A tuber of yam was N2,000…The big problem is tomatoes: last year, N40,000 per bag; now it’s N150,000. A night bus from Lagos to Abuja was N20,000 last year; now it’s N33,000.”

Just how do you spring an anthem on a hungry, weary populace in this vile, despicable manner? To compound the idiocy, supporters of this regime splashed videos of innocent primary school children singing the new anthem on social media as if that proves or justifies anything. What do the children know about the anthem? In their blind lust, our leaders are not thinking of bringing back the old cost of food items, fuel, electricity tariff and the exchange rates, or of dumping the unproductive 1999 Constitution. They are fixated on a song while the people literally perish.

The first line of the resurrected anthem is, for me, the biggest provocation, not just because it represents (at least until now) a rebuke but because it presents a false compliment. The victims of governmental brutality are supposed to hail Nigeria, one of the most extensively terrorized countries of the world; the global capital of poverty, open defecation, out of school children,  and worst electricity access. The logic isn’t just odd; it is demonic.  Under blind leaders, an anthem calling on the God of creation to direct Nigeria’s noble cause has been jettisoned for one that reminds Nigerians of their ethnically and linguistically divided house (“though tribe and tongue may differ”), and suggests a colonial distance between the anthem and those singing it: “Nigerians all, and proud to serve Our sovereign Motherland.”  If you pay attention, you will notice elements of spatial displacement here: the clowns that this anthem calls upon are somewhere else in this world pledging to serve their sovereign Motherland, just like the British did in Nigeria and elsewhere. The colonialist mental frame couldn’t be more evident.

Our leaders have smoked semolina and a mixture of Kwale and Osogbo weed and are dwelling in another world different from ours. The “we” in “Nigeria we hail thee” and those in the 1999 Constitution are one and the same: impostors and impersonators perpetrating legal fraud using the name of a jettisoned, uninvited populace. If I rode to State House on the back of lies, of course I would hail Nigeria; the dutiful, unquestioning donkey. Imagine being a billionaire after being in bed with the ruinous political elite, and then failing to hail Nigeria. That would be pure treason! Ladies and gentlemen, you will notice that every last defender of the anthem reversal has had breakfast. Well, the problem is that most Nigerians haven’t.

In magical speed that suggests conspiracy, the National Assembly, comprising individuals that got N160m cars each while Nigerians literally scrounged and starved, gave us a new anthem. But it has kept the real issues that concern Nigerians, including a living wage, in detention. Because of political blindness, billions will now be sunk into printing new documents in national institutions to accommodate an anthem that the next government is most likely to abrogate. Arise O compatriots aimed to solve a problem, but no one has told us the problem Nigeria we hail thee is meant to solve. Its proponents have only referenced nostalgia, as if it was an anthem rather than good leaders that enabled the past achievements they are hung on.

Usually when Nigerian leaders act this way, they are diverting attention away from their failures. But even this step will be a dismal failure. You can compel me to sing your anthem–you have guns–but you cannot force me to shift my mental frame about Nigeria. You cannot compel me to ignore the brutal murder of my people by nomadic terrorists because you have just decided to spite your perpetual superior, Olusegun Obasanjo, with a self-deprecating song, wasting scarce national resources on mere fancy. It is profoundly sad that a government facing widespread insecurity, worsening unemployment rates and chronic hunger among the populace is flinging a dead anthem in the people’s face while preserving the iniquitous system that enables criminals to grab power and wreck the country with it. Just how an anthem will change the corrupt mindset of politicians and their thugs, including the agberos that shed blood to keep them in power, remains a mystery.

In Why Buhari does no good with power (April 9, 2022), I propounded the following thesis: “Those who spend a lifetime searching for power become execrably impotent and de-juiced when they get it. Because of the sheer venom of their vaulting ambition, they encounter mental exhaustion at the sight of glory and become rooted to a spot intellectually, unable to go any further in terms of humanitarian engagements.” I then surmised: “This is the reason Buhari has expended more energy going after perceived opponents than going after the country’s problems. It’s all about his mental script. Hitler sought power all his life and got it, but look what he did with it. Men without mental moisture can only plunge this land into the sea.”

I desperately hope this isn’t prophetic of Tinubu.

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