What do the Nigerian people want? (4)

I have good reason to believe that PMB already understands that insecurity has to be one of the pressing agendas in his in-tray. He has already met world leaders and has reached out to our neighbours in seeking to build a consensus for bold action in tackling the insurgency.

As destiny would have it, as a policy analyst in my early twenties – while a Fellow of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) – General Buhari implemented wholesale a research report that I drafted on the Maitatsine problem in the 1980s. I was proud as well as humbled that at such a young age the Head of State found my views worthy enough to be adopted as national policy. And astonishingly, it worked! I know Buhari to be a just man and a patriot. He will do what he has to do to tame this evil monster which has sucked the life-blood of our people for more than a decade and brought penury and ruination to the whole of the North.

I have already written profusely about the insurgency in this column and elsewhere. I have won some accolades and made some enemies in equal measure. Someone sent me a vituperative email accusing me of “hating Muslims”. Another said that I am suffering from “inferiority complex” that allegedly afflicts Middle Belt peoples “and other minorities”. At a seminar in a Belgian university, when I declared that “Boko Haram must be crushed”, I was dismissed as a bigot.

I am happy to be called all sorts of names for my views and my stand as a public intellectual on various issues. There may have been a word or phrase that caused some bad feeling in some quarters. I apologise for that. But I insist on my right to stand by moral and intellectual convictions. That one will never change. I have always believed that the flight of reason begets monsters. If you believe in your mind and heart and soul that what you say is the truth, stick to it, come rain come shine. You must even be prepared to welcome the buffetings of fate and the arrows of prejudice and hate. Galileo was hated and persecuted because he was the only one who taught that the earth revolved round the sun and not the other way around. The fact that he was attacked and vilified did not change the universal scientific truth that he had discovered about our universe and the cosmos.

As a student of political economy trained in France’s most elite school of public administration (no arrogance intended here), I have this innate conviction about the primacy of maintaining “l’ordre publique” as the sine qua non of civilisation itself. Public order has been the foundation of civil government since the days of Imhotep, Asoka, Ibn Khaldun and Sultan Mohammed Bello. From Louis XIV to Cardinal Richelieu and François Mitterrand, the French have always accorded prime importance to civil peace at the local level as the foundation of a stable and prosperous society. The kind of chaos and nihilistic violence the Nigerian people have endured for decades is simply intolerable.

The toll on the collective psyche is simply unspeakable. The violence still goes on in the Middle Belt. Daily killings of defenceless peasants are still going on. Entire villages are being occupied by foreign “Fulanis” who have no Nigerian citizenship, aided by sophisticated weaponry supplied by local and foreign principals. They have taken over entire villages and rendered their occupants homeless internally displaced persons. Such armed dispossession cannot stand.

The accusation that hurt me the most was that of being labelled a “hate-monger”. Yes, I hate evil and the shedding of innocent blood, but I hate absolutely no human either as individual or as a collectivity. And least of all my Muslim brothers and sisters some of whom are members of my own family. In this glorious season of Ramadan, let Allah, God, be a witness to every man and his conscience.

Back to the question we started off with: What do the Nigerian people want? Well, from the foregoing it is evident that the Nigerian people are not asking for too much. Nigerians are among the most patient and most long-suffering people in the world. They are not asking to be pampered. They are not even expecting handouts, in spite of the APC’s commitment to a woolly-minded “welfarism”. Nigerians want to live in peace and dignity in their own country. They want jobs and a decent roof over their heads. They want good education and a future for their children in a safe and peaceful country. They want electricity, basic physical infrastructures, medical care and equal opportunities for everyone. They want to live in a stable and well-governed country where all citizens are treated fairly and equally – where no one is short-changed or treated like a second-class citizen or discriminated against on the basis of origin, ethnicity, gender or creed.

When I travel round our country and look at the faces of young men and women across the streets, I often ask myself: What is his or her life like? Do they have a job? Did they go to school? Do they have skills? Are they orphans? Were they severely abused by their guardians as children like I was? Are they happy? Do they have a future? Do they believe in the New Nigeria of our dreams? Do they yearn for virtue and enlightenment like I do?

Nigerians were once voted the happiest people on earth. This glorious and blessed land of our forefathers has immense potentials on which we can build a new beacon to the Temple of Humanity under God. The great Nigerian people yearn for nothing less than what the classical Greek philosophers termed “eudaimonia” – human flourishing. The duty and responsibility of government for our generation is to provide that environment where citizens can flourish – where everyone can pursue his or her dream of happiness and the good life, however defined, in conformity with their God-given talents and gifts. That collective yearning of our people must be the basis of statecraft and leadership in the coming years.

Obadiah Mailafia