Ruminating on renewed forlorn hope

Talks of Nigeria’s growth and development are a peculiar farce. As it increasingly unfurls, it becomes a real display of what a charade it really is. Each dawning day, it becomes even more vividly manifest that growth and development in this country are like – to borrow the legendary Shakespearean metaphor in Macbeth –  a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even when figures are displayed, this concept actually signifies nothing for the masses of the country. There is hardly anything solid to stand on to argue the true growth and development of Nigeria as the figures want us to believe; rather there are many things that translate into a lot for the people who hold the remote control of the country’s real resources.

A lot of times, and in very many ways, our leaders tend to hasten to renew their vows of subservience to some superpowers other than the people through whom they attained the power. For emphasis, they even willingly submit everything at the doorsteps of these masters to show their true allegiance. At the snap of the fingers, we are at their feet. There, we are taught new tricks which we bring home to oppress ourselves and teach those among us who are either stubborn or recalcitrant some hard lessons. These leaders get talked down on at these meetings, and then they are assuaged with promises of white-elephants as investments. These projects often never see the light of day. The ones that run for a few years pack up after some time…

Lucky Dube, that legendary South African reggae bard, sang ‘Mickey Mouse Freedom’. This song tells the tale of Nigeria and Africa. Through ‘Mickey Mouse Freedom’ Dube pulled our ears to create the passageway for this stark reality of African states. Nigeria is about the topmost nation in Africa. A country that could easily have been the real African Giant a la Burna Boy is currently in the throes of economic miasma. In reality, it can competently be argued that our country is tied to the strings of some powerful puppeteers somewhere in the Diaspora. While we celebrate and revel in our ‘Mickey Mouse freedom’, we should also at some point in our fool’s paradise be able to tug at one another’s clothes and examine our reality.

Philosophical Lucky Dube was known for some really piercing homilies. Unfortunately, he was a victim of brutal murder in his native South Africa. He was a victim of the realities he sang about while he thrived in the last of the bastions of colonial imperialism. While his voice still rings loud through his evergreen works, he wails:

Put his coat on his shoulders and slowly he walked away

Behind him

He could hear those innocent voices

Crying out so bitterly

Saying

We did not start the war

But we fighting now

We did not start this fire

But we burning now

They were told many years ago

That their country is free

But they didn’t understand

That it’s not real

They never knew

It was a Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

I tell you it’s a Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

Oh I tell you it’s a Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

It is a Mickey Mouse independence yeah

Becoming a new country

That’s said to be free

Becoming a new country

That is said to be free

Me sight corruption (Corruption)

Me sight starvation (Starvation)

Walking like a millionaire

‘Cause you think your country is free

One thing you don›t know

Your country is being remote controlled

It is a Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

It is a Mickey Mouse independence yeah

Mickey Mouse independence

I tell you it’s a Mickey Mouse freedom

Mickey Mouse freedom yeah

It is a Mickey Mouse independence yeah

Mickey Mouse independence

Listen to me it is a Mickey Mouse freedom yeah.

It is as worrisome as it is disheartening that every now and then, our various leaders and ‘executive’ presidents are summoned to some foreign country for economic ‘summits’. These African leaders› summits wear the usual garb of meetings, but from the results of feelers, they are mostly a kind of exertion of politics and economic power on the controlled states which are distributed across Africa. Just like that, they would be herded into a room where they would receive all kinds of tutoring on how to end poverty and revive their economies. Of course, there are no reprimands for the acts that killed these economies. Their interest is just to keep the African leaders busy while they do their real business of extraction of resources. They come as promissory-note investors and their audio huge investment portfolios will sound so beautiful but would mostly end up as nothing. Fela Anikulapo Kuti had also succinctly explained this in ITT – International Thief-Thief.

If there was nothing beyond the eyes, why should Nigeria not have climbed out of the economic and infrastructural vale by now? Why should the country be held back by corrupt leaders who receive a pat on the back by foreign collaborators? Why should the foreign powers accept stolen meat and hide it in their kitchens? The man who stole palm oil from the attic is not as guilty as the man who helped him to safely bring it down. For instance, Nigerians thought that the coming on stream of Dangote Refinery would ease the pressure on them. But international oil companies and their foreign and local promoters have erected all sorts of hurdles before the young company. Now, with regards to fuel supply in the country, all the hopes are getting dimmed. It is daily transmuting into Mickey Mouse hope. It is now a proper rat race between Dangote and the Nigerian government through the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited. We look forward to renewing our hopes on this, and we hope it comes soon because the people are now weary.

There must be steps … concrete and verifiable steps that are geared towards putting the country back on the track our fathers said were once there. A host of Nigerians are still harping on the need to restructure the country somehow and let us have a new constitution. So, who will bell the cat? Who will rescue the country from the dangerous drift? Where would we even start from? Could there be anything to be hoped for while we have a government that has wrung the masses from the tip to the hilt? The answers to these questions are blowing in the wind. A group made up of many of Nigeria’s senior citizens and notable statesmen took the initiative and went to President Tinubu recently. They called their group The Patriots. They told President Tinubu that he should create an avenue for the country to have a new constitution. The president didn’t really give them a response, but soon after their call, there was an upward review of the pump price of petrol in the country. What that meant was that President Tinubu is more concerned about the economy than the laws which would regulate it.

Meanwhile, the custodians of the extant laws are the same people who would have said let’s make some fundamental changes. They have a different view of the laws and must always maintain the rotten status quo. So we the masses are between the rock and a hard place. We have had national conferences which came up with laudable recommendations. Implementing the recommendations, many believe, would ordinarily shift Nigeria’s gear from this regressive status quo. But, like ex-President Buhari said, the conference recommendations are fit only for his waste paper basket. With his body language President Tinubu has not acted differently in any way from what Buhari said. But we must keep renewing our hope because, like the Arabians say, he who has hope has everything.

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