As Nigeria totters, a sobering homily

Later the water is up to his waist and another boat comes by and the guy tells him to get in again. He responds that he has faith in god and god will give him a miracle. With the water at about chest high, another boat comes to rescue him, but he turns down the […]

Later the water is up to his waist and another boat comes by and the guy tells him to get in again. He responds that he has faith in god and god will give him a miracle. With the water at about chest high, another boat comes to rescue him, but he turns down the offer again ‘cause “God will grant him a miracle.”
With the water at chin high, a helicopter throws down a ladder and they tell him to get in, mumbling with the water in his mouth, he again turns down the request for help for the faith of God.
He arrives at the gates of heaven with broken faith and says to Peter,
“I thought God would grand me a miracle and I have been let down.”
St. Peter chuckles and responds, “I don’t know what you’re complaining about, we sent you three boats and a helicopter. The miracle you deserved was to be pulled up here straight!”
I shared this supposed joke on my wall in Facebook thinking only of the fun in it. The discussion that followed was startling.
Friends turned it into a didactic story with a lot of import on Nigeria, visualised as the drowning religious man of faith, foolishly letting chances pass first in 1999, then 2007, then 2011, and that the last hope to get things right would be 2015 for the a choice national leadership comparable to the best example on the globe. We all worried that chances were getting fewer, and time too short for Nigeria.
For a long time, Nigerians have pondered on how the country would truly catch the salvation train given the many times opportunity was squandered until now that the water is neck high. Our poverty index reveals that 3 million Nigerians go hungry as a normal life. Our unemployment figures are double digit if we even imagine that only 4% of secondary school graduates qualify to gain admission into Universities already full to the brim. The National Youth Service Corps Programme enlists two batches due to overflow, and youth even fake enlistment. Programs for empowerment and job creation which look and sound exciting are practically a far cry from their articulation on paper, and seen against the magnitude of the problem we are trying to address, the effort is a mere finger in the dyke. Our general performance index given our resource abundance and potential is despicably below average and clearly, Nigeria deserves radical change for the better.
If we zeroed in on resolving the leadership question, where do we begin? With the process of choice? Or with the persons to choose from? What even are the fundamental national questions? Why do I feel more a Bachama man than a Nigerian? Why do my preferences for leadership of the country automatically point to a geographical location of my origin before I consider other parts of the country, or even people of competent character? How do you make an Igbo man as Nigerian as he is Igbo, giving it the same passion and loyalty as he would his Igbo tribe, and likewise his Hausa, Yoruba or any other compatriots? Our challenge is indeed our diversity and our inability to establish a leadership that thinks out of the box of ethnicity and other primordial inhibitions. Instantly one could see in all strings of discussions, the bane underlined, of the Nigerian condition. Nigerians quickly become emotional about a geographical zone producing the President and for all the wrong reasons, mainly that it is another geographical region’s turn. That we have stagnated and suffered below capacity performance does not seem to matter.
I argue that this diversity was not factored in the adoption of the American type of constitution and system. Operating this has turned hitherto mere gaping holes into floodgates of disunity and revenue pillage. It assumes that there are chances for the best candidate to talk and campaign himself to power like Barak Obama did, but it leaves all regulatory institutions to fail with impunity, both for the institution and the operatives. It assumes that provisions in it that guarantee level playing field for all, would be observed to the letter. This does not happen, and those who undermine it do so with impunity. While people in power use state funds to buy up an electorate kept hungry for that purpose, regulatory institutions are corrupted to play to the gallery. Perpetrators act in unison and with impunity. All our Presidential and over 90% of our Governorship elections were resolved by judicial panels to much dissatisfaction borne with chagrin.
The issue is about an enduring and sustainable democracy, even as Nigeria has retrogressed into a bumpy learning curve, but this is due largely to corruption and political naivety and lack of sincerity. The Nigerian Governors Forum would not have come about if there had been true federalism that clearly prevented the Federal Government from dipping its hands into the revenue accruable to the State. The courts would have had free hand to adjudicate conscientiously on constitutional matters without states feeling having been dealt an uneven hand by the federal might. Genuine internal democracy would have provided for popular candidates to win clean and clear elections, but alas! In our democracy, 16 defeats 19, and 5 voting legislators, oust a Speaker supported by 25. We seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten all.
PDP presently has a crisis that implies a loss of confidence in the President given the low performance index profile of the Government,  as posited by the opposition. Public officers in the Government are quick to defend, but the ground reality is a far cry from the rosy picture on the flip-charts of the “midterm” report. Too high inflation and unemployment can only mean that a high performance in the communications sector is accounting for the so called good performance.
We may have fared better with 2 political parties, that conducted congresses, and credible elections at all levels. We also need to operate a true federalism instead of what obtains – a contraption that will ensure that we continuously miss the boats and even the helicopters, and we may pitifully miss Heaven, diminishing the value of our expected miracle!