I sorry sorry o, I sorry for Nigeria
/ I sorry sorry o, I sorry for Africa
Sorry sorry o (trice)/ But with these kind of leaders/Africa no get hope/Africans will suffer/’Til the suffer reach our bone/
Olufela Olufemi Anikulapo Kuti
This was the song playing at the other end of the bar. And then I could see from my seat an altercation a few meters away, voices, and from the gestures you could tell there was a fight in the making and what followed were a couple of hard-hitting slaps. I was a little drunk on two calabashes of ‘tunboliqour’ (palm wine). And I am sure I was between sixes and half a dozen, a dream and several visions as I drifted. In my dream and visions, I wondered at the fact that what a nation laughs at and about tells you how serious or otherwise that nation is. So, the long and short of the story from Awka, Anambra State is that there was an altercation between two women, one being the former First Lady of the state, the other being the widow of a former Biafran warlord and leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Ikemba Nnewi, at the swearing-in of Chukwuma Soludo.
It was in the news: who slapped who first and who started what was inconclusive and inconsequential. The fact is that for the next few days, it was the slap that made the news. Not even the content of Soludo’s promissory notes to Anambra people mattered, and not even the farewell speech of the former governor, Willie Obiano, counted. There was simply a consensus: “Soludo must do well, we expect governance unusual from him. We cared less about his first appointments or actions because we were in the season of slaps.” Nigerians are slap-hardened; in street lingo we say ‘no be today’. A nation that has crude oil in abundance is waiting for 29 shiploads of petroleum and other products or else we remain in a slapped state. As usual, what the fuel problem has exposed is that we don’t even have a reserve that can last the nation a week if we had a real war and yet all sorts of figures are branded as consumption and subsidy.
Who slapped us? No motor spirit, no cooking spirit, no aviation fuel and no diesel? They equally slapped our electricity sector: 14 power plants crippled supply as the national grid collapsed. Amidst all of this, our national consciousness is fixated on the ongoing theatrics of the ruling party and gimmicks of the opposition as they entertain us with the best in Baba Suwe and awada kerikeri while we slap banters away. Our educational institutions are battling the perennial cultural festival called ASUU strike, a festival where our kids stay at home for a while and then go back like nothing happened. Our leaders know us too well, they know when to slap us, they also know when to leave us, and we will certainly slap ourselves with the mundane, the funny, and inconsequential. After all, “we cannot ‘come and kill’ ourselves”, so they provide enough comedy to keep us unconscious of reality.
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Slaps are in many versions. Nigerians have become accustomed to take away slaps: someone gives you a dirty slap and all you can do is hold your face and walk away. Imagine that there has been fuel price increase and all we can say is at least, “let us see the fuel and buy…” We buy and walk away. In Nigeria, any price that goes up never comes down. Our politicians never cease to give us resounding slaps. This is after they have hit us with their actions and inactions. Do you remember when billions were spent feeding school children that were home during the COVID-19 lockdown?
Have you seen Nigerians explaining how the government is trying, or have you seen a governor explaining how he paid salaries? Have you heard that debate about “even though he stole, he worked!” We have been given an explanation slap! Many of us are yet to recover from the fixed deposit slap of the entire Abba Kyari and NDLEA drama, or the Hushpupi Sura the tailor episode. When the stories started coming in, many of us just stood fixated to the spot where we were still watching how all these would end, mouths opened wide. In Nigeria today, we are given all kinds of slaps, the rhetorical slap, the one about which we ask, “who slapped us?” Some slaps are sweet slaps. Here, they are about to slap us, and they are testing us, asking whether it’s painful or not, and we start blushing because the slap was administered by our kinsmen or adherents of our faith. In our clime, nothing makes sense, we don’t know exactly how much fuel we consume, cannot figure how we import matchsticks and yet want to produce pencils. The mathematical slap makes everything gloomy; we all are experts at some form of maths or the other because nothing adds up. Have you seen party faithful discussing or legislators speaking, especially when there is a probe or panel? Everything is hazy, nothing makes sense. There are loads of noise and movement with no direction.
The Nigerian populace forgets that there is a reciprocal slap whereby our leaders can be made to see the consequences of their actions. That we can slap them back immediately they slap us, thus making them respect us and do what is right. Our institutions need to function with alacrity, one that holds leaders responsible and accountable. It will make them confess their sins on the spot. The fear of the citizenry should be the beginning of wisdom.
Dr. Dickson is a researcher.
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