Beyond the drums of war

One needs the wicked calmness of Nigeria’s current rulers to sleep when one’s roof is on fire. Even if you are thousands of kilometers away from the chaos that now characterises our once lovely country. In Aso Rock, everything is okay and that’s all that matters. If anyone lives elsewhere, it is expected that they […]

One needs the wicked calmness of Nigeria’s current rulers to sleep when one’s roof is on fire. Even if you are thousands of kilometers away from the chaos that now characterises our once lovely country. In Aso Rock, everything is okay and that’s all that matters. If anyone lives elsewhere, it is expected that they would find a way to solve their own problems without asking for state intervention. Welcome to the nation that elects leaders, pays them well but prays for miracles to solve its problems.

It becomes a different thing, however, if any group attempts to demonstrate even peacefully against a government policy, no matter how misanthropic. Give it to Buhari, like his counterparts in Myanmar, this regime is not afraid to heavily clamp down on peaceful protests or freeze the accounts of their suspected sponsors and supporters while advocating for herdsmen to carry guns, unleash violence and mayhem and threaten the sanctity of the nation.

The tragedy is when people like Wole Soyinka thinks that being an ordinary Nobel Laureate makes them special advisers on the preservation of unity. If Buhari addressed the nation every time someone shouted Igboho, we’d be so rich China would cancel our debts. There’ll be no need to steal from dying pensioners or ruing the increase of the pump price of petroleum products to finance the national budget. An NGO, BudgIT discovered several budgetary line items it believes escaped the scrutiny of the Irrational Assembly. Remember BudgIT was not part of the budgeting process.

The beauty of the new world order in Nigeria is the rise of ethnic champions and the resurgence of anthropological magic. You would think that years of ingesting Christian and Islamic texts have killed black magic, but insurrectional greed has resuscitated and elevated the position of the babalawo, boka and the dibia above the Imam and the Bishop. Social media feeds us with audio threats by ethnic warlords learning from Abubakar Shekau and video clips showing they are baying for blood.

These clowns hate dialogue as they hate hell. To be respected in today’s society, you need the social nuisance of Sunday Igboho, the sabre rattling of Nnamdi Kanu and the uncouth language of Shekau. Anything outside that and you’re a worthless coward.

From the relative safety of their exile abroad, today’s ethnic warlords send incendiary projectiles to their homeland. They circulate the good news of amulets that make people disappear; charms that render guns (usually dane guns) useless on its target and phylacteries that could make its wearer disappear.

Don’t pinch yourself; it’s 2021 and these things are incredibly attractive to PhD holders in a manner that reveals why Dangote employs them as truck drivers. Imagine being able to cross the line at airports with your stash of gbana, securing a seat on a plane undetected with your pile of kwaya and arriving at Heathrow or Ottawa without customs clearance. Not even JK Rowling could have made these things up.

A brand new form of ancient science is resuscitated here and soon, the world would celebrate us for our witchcraft as they now excoriate us for 419 or faking COVID-19 free test results.

From their hiding places outside Nigeria, ethnic warlords are unraveling everywhere. They’d stake their last line of credit on their pet ethnic project – a land where only those who speak like them, worship like them and look like them would live and thrive. In their phantom republic, there’s no room for any other. Anywhere else, they’d flash the racism card. They went to school but academics did not permeate their ossified brain. They have earned the citizenship or permanent residency of other countries but crave one for their region or religion only.

They could be lawyers, but have never heard of war crimes tribunals and the extent to which justice fishes out genocidiers decades after their violent crimes have become a footnote of history. They have heard of the Nuremberg Trials and the tribunals that tried criminals of the Serbo-Croat war but think they are immune to it. Their hatred for the Fulani is gradually extending to other ethnic groups peacefully integrated in their homestead. In Ibadan, they have wreaked havoc on the Hausa in Shasha.

They have mammoth followers on social media spewing the bile of hatred from the comfort of their legal residences abroad. They hold court, analysing events in Nigeria and reassuring fellow irredentists how they’ll give their last drop for the actualisation of their projected states.

As a marked traitor to their plans, let me put them on notice that I would cooperate with any enquiry at home or abroad fishing for those who want to destroy this shaky Lugard house. It is not because I have lost the valour for which my forebears earned their titles and status, it is because the thought of seeing a balkanised Nigeria scares the daylight out of me. It is because the sight of fleeing mothers dropping their children as deadweights inhibiting their escape would keep me awake all nights. It is because the sight burning homestead and loss of the fruits of years of labour horrifies me as much as the carnage left by herdsmen who have taken over my homeland.

It is because I know that while a Hausa/Fulani General runs the show in Abuja, since 1979 elected and selected citizens of individual states have run states elsewhere. There’s a level to which I blame Buhari for the joblessness in Kogi or Kano. If Yahaya Bello and Ganduje could not make Dubai of these states in spite of huge allocation and wringed internal revenue, any clown is building a pie in the sky.

Every parent who has ever had a loud conversation with an obstinate teenager seeking independence from purported tyranny knows that they often return with gladness or posthumous writings praising their efforts. The grass is not greener elsewhere because someone waved a magic wand, nation-building takes joint effort, time and perseverance – ask America!

I am not a friend of the regime in Abuja or the idiocy in my natural and adopted home state, I am sane enough not to throw away the baby and the bathwater. Nigeria is not perfect, but in the hands of a good person at any level, the tide could be turned. We could ride the waves and reach the harbour. This is the ideal that raised me, the model that schooled me and the project I dream of. If it does not actualise in my lifetime, I hope that someone reads this when in the future, raises a clenched fist to my foresight.

Let the ethnic puritans put their money where their mouth is – in reforms at all levels. Let them mobilise their citizens to ignore stomach infrastructure, and vote in people who would go to their state capitals and make the schools run, provide drugs in hospitals, an enabling environment for job creation and peace and tranquility all over the nation. That way, we may be bullied abroad, kicked, spat at, insulted, work at jobs below our pay grade and education but return to the only home that cherishes and values us; the only one that won’t reject us; the only one we could bring our foreign friends to winter out in.

May our nation survive the wickedness of its silent leaders and the opportunists arrayed against her.