I want my country back
He was carrying a passport, a Nigerian passport, neither faked nor forged. He could have been a silent achiever like Jelani Aliyu or become the first northerner to win either the Nobel or the Cane Prize. But he put Nigeria on the terrorism watch list. Now they humiliate me at all airports because I am […]
He was carrying a passport, a Nigerian passport, neither faked nor forged. He could have been a silent achiever like Jelani Aliyu or become the first northerner to win either the Nobel or the Cane Prize. But he put Nigeria on the terrorism watch list. Now they humiliate me at all airports because I am Nigerian.
Faruk is the son of a system; a system that has failed. Forty years ago, growing up in Okeagi, a rustic village six hours drive from Abuja, Faruk would not have contemplated suicide, least of all taking the innocent with him. The houses had mats dangling on the front in the place of doors, and gummed planks to deter goats from straying in. In the hot season, families huddled up in front of their houses. Farmers left their hefty bunch of plantain by the roadside, a hole dug underneath had a few crushed stones signifying the price; a buyer picked the bunch, left the cash in the hole and deftly covered it with a leaf and sand. The rain sometimes washed over the hole, but the money remained. This is no fairytale, I lived it.
Today in Okeagi, new homes are built like prisons – with iron grills on doors and windows, guards have dane guns and guard dogs. Where is the bliss of innocence? Who betrayed the innocence of my country? Not long ago, father would make us carry several baskets of yams home and distribute to aunts, uncles, grandparents and the needy or the aged who are too feeble to cater for themselves. Yes, a lot of that still exists in most parts of the Nigerian countryside, but occasionally a kidnapper would sneak in, pick up an octogenarian and hold him hostage until his demands for millions are met.
Not long ago, my father’s inherited 3-bedroom house would host the first Muslim I knew, an Alhaji whose name was subsumed in his religious title; he did not wait for us to return from the farm but moved up the doormat and made himself at home. The Nupe were not our ancestral friends. They waged wars against the Yagba and from my grandfather’s compound stole 100 children in one day. But in our cottage were these itinerant female Nupe fish traders who hawked their wares and slept in that cottage. How did a Sunday Awoniyi survive as Sardauna’s aide and become a northern elder?
Who poisoned Umar Farouk? The gene of Farouk’s poison might have come from the aftermath of the first coup when armed soldiers rounded up political leaders and slaughtered them like rams. Or in the counter coups that led to the civil war. Could it be in the post-war free flow of ammunition that gave birth to armed robbery and in the cluelessness of successive leadership that elevated common patrimony to the status of a spoil to be taken for personal greed?
The seeds of greed germinated into lawlessness. Leadership vacuum elevated Bakassi Boys who later became a worse menace than the cure. It raised a politically confused Asari Dokubo and his friends who elevated a legitimate peaceful agitation into brigandage and forced the world to pay attention. It metamorphosed into OPC which elevated itself over and above law enforcement. It transformed the police from law enforcers to public tormentors who harass us on the streets and sometimes help armed robbers to terrorise us in our homes. This is not my country, this is not the attributes of the country that gave me birth and nurtured me. This is not the dream that pushed me from Okeagi in pursuance of the Goldeen Fleece – so where is my hope?
The new Plateau is not part of the country I know. The old Plateau was a land for all – embracing the whites and hugging the Hausa, warming up to the Urhobo, admitting the Itsekiri and not ostracising the Tiv or the Yagba. This new one is a Serengeti with prowling lions invading colonies; isolating individuals or groups and mauling them down whilest the rest of the pack watches in transfixed amazement.
The land where places of worship have transformed from sanctuaries into putrid morgues is alien to the country I know. This new land of kamikazes differs from the one that Fela sang about where the people love the easy life and postponed death. The religious passion that rigs vehicles and rams them into crammed offices populated with people of all shades, creed and colour is not my land? Where then is my land?
If I had not lived it to some point before it melted like ice cream in the scorching sun, I would have thought it came from storybooks. In the land that gave me birth, it took a community to raise a child and Achebe anthologised it to global acclaim – a land where deviant kids were promptly whipped into line. Communal living depended on the conformity of all to its norms and ethos. Where is the land that put Kaduna as Nzeogwu’s middle name and baptised Zik’s son as Babatunde? It was not a land where the PDP raises up the ethnic card to one group and the religious card to another in a chameleonic act of electoral manipulation. Who stole our conscience?
In the land of my birth, communities built their roads, their schools, their mosques and churches – they believed in the sweat of their own brow and were too proud to beg or borrow. They covered each other’s back; loved strangers and the strangers in turn respected them. Where is my country? Why is there so much poverty generating hatred in the land that has oil but also 34 other solid minerals? Why is there hunger in a land that is 90% of arable? Why import fish with the flowing rivers of the Niger and Benue, the salty waters of the Atlantic covering the coasts from Bonny Creek to Lagos?
When did God become so weak and feeble with age that He has moved from being omnipotent to needing the help of mortals to fight and kill for him to be feared and respected? Where is the ethno-religious blindness and the binding love that matched a Babangida with a Maryam and an Ajoke to a Murtala Mohammed?
Where were the preachers of good news when Plateau youths were erecting barricades around the mosque where their forefathers have prayed for eons? Where were the Imams when young zealots target churches in Suleja? What were the elders watching when the seeds of Boko Haram was planted and nurtured in Maiduguri? Who gave his or her money so that people of different races, colour and creed could be murdered in Area 1? Did they sleep after watching the news? Did they raise their holy hands to heaven while the relatives of the victims raised theirs to the ceilings of the National Hospital looking for answers? All am saying is – I want my country back!