Mad and Dangerous Times

By Sunny Awhefeada

These are mad and dangerous times for Nigeria and I must concede that we never saw this coming. Not even the famed prophets envisioned the calamities now buffeting us as a people. Nobody foresaw or warned us. Those among us who lay claims to clairvoyance are largely charlatans who think about causes and effects of actions and offer surmises which they call predictions. That is why they always turn around to tell us they were misquoted, quoted out of contest or point at what they claimed they told us, but they never did. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times tells of a time of acute social insecurity and how the people were impoverished and pulverized. Like other narratives by Dickens, the novel mirrors the grim, dark and dreary side of life in a manner considered to be exaggerated. Yet, what Nigerians are going through at the moment far exceeds the intensity of human suffering evoked in Dickens’ novels. Just when one thinks that our experience of oddities and inanities has peaked and that nothing more bizarre could confront us, something more odd, scary and searing pops up to say “oh, you guys haven’t seen anything”.

Our ordeal is the product of choice, a choice that arose from poor judgment. Blinded by ignorance, beguiled by deceit, lured by promises, we allowed ourselves to be railroaded into a rollercoaster that led to nowhere. Our ship of state turned and turned and got marooned. We made that ruinous choice seven and half seasons ago. It was not that the alternative to what we chose was a better deal, but when two things are presented one is often better at the end of the day. Looking back, it has dawned on us that what we considered the better alternative was the worse of bad. So, we went for a choice that has turned us into the living-dead. Our country has become an existential setting, where life and communication are devalued, where hopelessness, disorder, uncertainty and fret have become recurring indices. Nigeria has become like T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” because of the choice we made a little over seven seasons ago. The frightening reality of our situation is that it is not fiction, but it appears stranger than fiction and the geniuses of Dickens and Eliot couldn’t have conjured it in prose or verse. Nigeria has become an ultra-absurd work in the hands of an ultra-absurdist author!

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All over Nigeria are chaos and bedlam, anarchy and confusion, gloom and doom. Nobody is truly happy because we are all trapped in a macabre existential crisis and the answer to the question “for whom all is well?” is a loud NONE! Some days ago a news item, in sequence, trended in print, video and picture. It was the story of a soldier that was beaten up by students of the University of Benin. The video which was the first in the series showed him being kicked and knocked down. He struggled to extricate himself and fled the scene. What followed was a picture of the soldier lying face down with a student putting his foot on the soldier’s back. That was a national sacrilege in view of the roles played by soldiers and the sacrifices they make in securing the territorial integrity of the country. Having said that the act correlates sacrilege, the question that should be asked is how and why did it happen? The ongoing fuel and naira crises have precipitated a high level of anger and disillusionment which in turn yielded a monstrous hybrid of defiance. The story went that a soldier in uniform came to an ATM located within the University to withdraw money and instead of joining the queue decided to shunt and he was challenged by the students. Instead of pleading, he played macho and pounced on a female student. The act angered the students and they also pounced on him and beat him black and blue.

Nightfall came and some “unknown soldiers” came on a revenge mission wearing hood even under the cover of darkness. They inflicted injuries on everybody in sight and destroyed properties and scaled the campus fence and returned from whence they came. The soldiers’ act amounted to a gross professional misconduct national embarrassment and it has been a recurring act. Uniformed men feel a sense of being “untouchable” simply because they carry weapons of violence and the system does not inflict the full weight of the law on them in Nigeria. Olusegun Obasanjo in My Command did narrate how unruly soldiers were in the 1960s and how they dealt brashly with civilians. He had to enact tough measures to make sure the civilian-military relationship was cordial. Military highhandedness persists till this day. Our uniformed personnel enjoy self-conferred immunity and they get away with too many wrongs. However, they must take into cognizance that society will not always remain the same and that a new generation that is anything but pliant is emerging and that a soldier’s ass can be kicked if he misbehaves. The emerging generation is not yet definitive in character, but in full bloom, it will holler and fight back. So, soldiers must look inwards, put mechanism in place especially the training and discipline of their officers and men. They must desist from provoking the people.

The incident in UNIBEN rekindled memories of the 1990s and how students of that institution battled the ogre of military dictatorship in admirable and courageous manner. The 1990s were the years of brutal military dictatorship and Nigerian students, unlike now, rose in defence of nation. At the University of Benin, the students were motivated and inspired by a sense of history and a compelling call to duty for fatherland. They joined forces with the suffering masses and embarked on civil disobedience to force the hands of unyielding military dictators. There were multiple protests annually and it always involved clashes with soldiers and the mobile police. Some of the protests ended up being bloody and tragic, but UNIBEN students were egged on by such thoughts like “no army in the world can stop an idea whose time has come”, “the pen is mightier than the sword” and a student union leader once thrilled his audience saying “Nigerian soldiers were ambushing and gallant UNIBEN students were advancing”. That was a generation of Nigerian students that epitomized derring-do. When the University was to confer an honorary doctorate on Augustus Aikhomu who was then Nigeria’s number two citizen, the students opposed it and when it was the time fixed formally for the ceremony they seized the venue, got a goat on whom they wore an academic gown, conferred the honorary doctorate on it and named it Aikhomumu. The University quietly delayed the ceremony till afternoon and repeated the rite for Aikhomu.

A lot is going on in Nigeria that we have become numb and we no longer care. A policeman shot and killed a woman in Lagos on Christmas day of all days. Another policeman opened fire on a medical doctor in Delta State barely a month after the Lagos tragedy. Gunmen shot and killed a sitting judge in Imo State. Despite the ENDSARS crisis of 2020, our policemen have gone back to their old murderous ways. They are all over town extorting the youths at gun point. It is happening daily and nobody seems to be showing concern. University teachers went on strike and our universities were closed for ten months and government did nothing. The people are angry and they shouldn’t be pushed beyond what they can bear. The anger in the land is playing out in a number of bizarre ways. The men and women who stripped themselves naked in banking halls did so to show their anger and disillusionment. Nothing could be more shameful than what they did, but who cares? They are ready to take anything, even death. And there are many Nigerians like that. People are fighting and breaking their heads in banking halls and in petrol stations.

The sad thing is that government appears powerless in all of these. Government would always come out to deny the situation, then grudgingly accept that something was wrong and then promise to fix it. That would be the end of it. Right now, there is no cash, there is also no fuel. The nation is experiencing excruciating hurt. People now use naira to buy naira. The citizens are daily alienated and their place in the scheme of things has been badly eroded. As we live under this grueling condition, we are still smiling and laughing with the hope that “e go better”. We will survive because we survived perilous times in the past. These mad and dangerous times too shall pass away.