The Good Old Days

By Sunny Awhefeada

Nostalgia remains an integral feature of human experience. No matter what defined our memory of the past, there has always been the tendency to look back wistfully and wish that the old days were back. Memory enables reminiscences which in turn engender nostalgia. The narrative of the Nigerian nay African sojourn is that of a sad recall of the occasional bright moments that dot our bleak and dreary terrain. Our story has always been that of hope and anticipation. And hope has kept us alive. Without hope dementia and eventual death would have consumed the majority of our people. We have always been powered with “when there is life there is hope”. So we plod on hoping that tomorrow will be better. Our grandmothers in the 1980s would always look back and say “oke awharen” which in Urhobo means “the olden times” auld long syne. Baffled by the disturbing complexities which ruptured their existence from the 1960s to the 1980s, our grandmothers could only express their consternation comparing the past with those trying decades. The past our grandmothers looked back to spanned the 1930s to the early 1960s. To them, and even as recorded in our annals, the Nigerian Civil War, it was that shattered the ideal that constituted that past. They held onto the thinking that Nigeria was never the same again after the civil war. They even remarked that the children born after the war had a stubborn streak that was hitherto unknown.

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Our grandmothers are no more, but a new generation of grandmothers, the grandmothers to the children of my age mates have emerged with their idea of “the good old days”. Shockingly, “the good old days” today’s grandmothers conceptualized refer to the phenomenally horrible years of the 1980s and 1990s which their parents, our grandmothers deplored. The 1980s and 1990s were locust years. They were years of poverty, hunger, deprivation and lack. They were years of military rule during which the citizenry quivered under the inhuman jackboots of soldiers. Those were the years of human rights abuse, arrest, detention and summary execution. Nevertheless, compared to today’s scenario, those now looked like golden years. Today, we are confronted by a plethora of problems that daily become inscrutable and overwhelming. What afflicted us in the 1980s and 1990s look like child’s play compared to the monstrosities that confront us now. The order of things now is that every new era or epoch has become worse than the preceding one. While other places record progress in quantum leap, ours has become an experience of receding into darkness and chaos.

Part of the attempt to explicate our problems and may be find solutions to them was the publication of Chinua Achebe’s pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria published in 1983 the year of the coup that truncated the second republic. That pamphlet is a seminal reincarnation of Achebe’s earlier work of fiction, A Man of the People which presaged the 1966 coup. Both works highlighted “the trouble with Nigeria” in a manner that perceptive readers could easily deduce the way out of the miasma into which we have been plunged. The problems are essentially leadership induced. Sadly, nearly sixty years after A Man of the People and forty years after The Trouble with Nigeria, the problems have become even more inveterate and intractable. No lessons have been learnt. If leadership was the big problem in time of old, followership has also become a problem at the moment. Without sounding trite, much of what constitute leadership emerged from followership, a mass that has also become desperate and just ready to imbibe and perpetuate the very ills the leadership foisted on us.

What is more the disturbing and which is also a pointer to how dire our condition is, is the ugly reality that my generation has also started referring to the 1990s as “the good old days”. Yes, “the good old days” when our parents took us on night journeys hundreds of kilometers from Kaduna to Okitipupa and we would arrive at dawn happy and excited. Today, a journey of ten kilometers is fraught with dangers as terrorists, bandits and kidnappers prowl even our backyards. Yes, “the good old days” when a trip from Warri to Benin was less than one hour. Today the same trip could last for a full day with travellers passing the night in the precarious swamp of Ologbo. We refer to “the good old days” when we went to the farm without fear and our labour yielded abundant harvest. Today, going to the farm is perilous and the harvest has become lean because of insecurity. We think of “the good old days” when one naira could buy so much and ten naira could enable you travel from Ughelli to Lagos. Today, there is absolutely nothing ten naira can buy. The same trip from Ughelli to Lagos now costs many thousands of naira. We remind ourselves of Lagos to London return ticket that cost four hundred naira in 1984! Today, that same ticket is more than one million naira and a less than one kilometer bike ride is four hundred naira!

So much has been said about how bad leadership crippled us. We are now afflicted on all fronts. Politically, we have become like a failed nation. Economically, we have become bankrupt and extremely poor. Psychologically, we are tortured. Emotionally, we are sapped. Physically, we are drained. Disillusionment is heavy in the air. Fortunately, hope abounds and it is what now keeps us going despite the painful reality that it has been violated again and again. How much longer can hope sustain us? We cannot tell. So, we hang on and continue to hope believing that change is around the corner and how distant that corner is, we don’t know. So, we continue to talk about “the good old days” and enjoy therapy no matter how temporary.

A moral chaos is ravaging our beloved country. This has been compounded by political limbo. As I have always maintained, only the people can redeem themselves and it seems as if Nigerians are not ready for any such redemptive act. So, our federal lawmakers would offer themselves “tokens” to enjoy their holidays, while over one hundred million Nigerians languish in extreme poverty. The Nigerian genius which is manifested in the brilliance, innate ability, creative tendency and enduring spirit of the average Nigerian has been hampered by acute lack of enabling environment again owing to bad leadership. An environment with stable electricity supply, good and safe roads, secured farmlands and functional industries would unleash the productive gusto of Nigerians and transform the nation into an economically viable polity with a happy and contented citizenry.

Those who imposed themselves on the nation will never serve the people. That is why the people should evolve measures that would lead to good governance. A Nigerian version of a social contract has become expedient and this must be radical in its entirety. I have made the point before and it is deserving of reiteration again. Nigerians must insist on how they want to be governed and set a code of conduct for those who claim to be leaders henceforth. Those who rule us and their families should be compelled to patronize government run hospitals. They should be banned from patronizing private hospitals and even foreign ones. The same measure should apply to the education of their children and wards. They should also be banned from travelling by air within Nigeria. They should be stripped of the security men around them. The use of generators in their homes should be prohibited. Enforcing these measures and more will make them work for Nigeria and not themselves. Time is running out.