Cry, the beloved country

Many of my gentle readers will remember Alan Paton’s haunting novel about race and destiny in the Old South Africa. Alan Paton was a well-meaning white liberal writer who was deeply wounded by the human suffering imposed by the evil theology of Apartheid and the mountain of fear and mutual recrimination that it fostered. He was a man with a conscience and a sense of charity and love of humanity. The pathos is heartbreaking.

 

Although South Africa today is a non-racial democracy, it seems clear that the wounds of the past will take more than a generation to heal. Those who have visited that wonderful country are unlikely to forget its scenic beauties – a land of magical enchantment, from the breathtaking coastlines of Durban to the glorious elegance of Table Mountain in the Cape and the timeless serenity of Bloemfontein.

 

But South Africa is also a land of immense sadness. The ghosts of its past continue to haunt this beautiful country. And they are manifesting in such evils as nihilistic criminality, suppressed anger and rabid xenophobia.

 

Come to think of it, ours is a far sadder country than even South Africa. At its bleakest, Apartheid South Africa could not have resulted in the direct killing of more than a 100,000 people over the half-century of its existence as a racist political ideology. Some of the worst killings were done in Sharpeville in 1960, where some 600 African people were killed. Then we had the killings of the defenceless school children of Soweto in the 1970s. About 300 children were slaughtered in broad daylight as they were protesting against the inferior so-called ‘Bantustan’ education they were receiving. Tsietsi Mashanini, the student’s leader of the Soweto uprising, fled to West Africa. I met our hero when I was a teenage first year undergraduate at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria.

 

Prior to the restoration of democracy in South Africa in the mid-nineties there was another spate of killings, mainly masterminded by the Inkatha Freedom Party financially underwritten by the ruling National Party and the extreme Far-Right. Hundreds of people died.

 

Our country, in my view, has had a more harrowing tragedy as a nation. Prior to the civil war, there were insurrections against Ndigbo in Kano and Jos in the early sixties, in which thousands died. The pogrom that came after the 1966 military coup led to the death of more than a hundred thousand people. And when the Ndigbo began to flee back to their homeland, they were chased out with machetes, bows and arrows. It was a horrendous crime against a defenceless people.

 

And then there was the terrible civil war. It is estimated that about 2 million souls may have perished in that disastrous age of ‘blood and iron’, if I may echo the immortal poet, Christopher Okigbo. At the barest minimum, the casualties were in equal proportions, although the sheer actuarial realities of the youths conscripted by General Yakubu Gowon would mean that probably more northern and middle belt soldiers perished than did the ‘Biafrans’. The former had absolutely no familiarity with the primeval forest. Most were mowed down like grass in the meadowlands of the beloved savannah of my birth.

 

The story of Nigeria’s sanguinary destiny did not end there. Even after the ending of formal hostilities in January 1970, there were sporadic killings here and there. From Maitatsine riots to the Sharia crisis, the Danish cartoons and the controversy over the beauty pageantry sponsored by ThisDay newspapers, much of northern Nigeria has been a killing field against innocent and defenceless people. What Soyinka terms “the recurrent cycle of human stupidity” has never abated.

 

Then we have Boko Haram and the murderous herdsmen of the apocalypse. The story has been the same. This is in addition to surreptitious killings that have been going on throughout the Middle Belt for the better of a decade. Most are never reported. The toll may have reached the order of magnitude of 200,000. And we are yet to see the end of it.

 

This land has shed too much blood to be a normal country. The blood of the holy martyrs cries to heavensgate day and night. The greatest victims, if truth be told, have been my adopted Ndigbo people, who are well spread throughout the length and breadth of our country as businesspeople and traders. At a time when the war drums of Biafra are being resurrected, we may never agree with the political objectives being spearheaded by the youths, but we can perfectly understand where they are coming.

 

One thing the observation of political life in this country has taught me is that Nigerians fear the truth and hate it viscerally. Anyone who says it exactly as it is is likely to be laughed out of court as a jester or worse. But, as the Old Book tells us, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”.

 

The simple truth is that Nigeria has never been a free country. When the British left, they handed over the country to ruling elites whose progenies profoundly believe in their heart of hearts that Nigeria is their heritage and patrimony as of rights. Whether as soldiers or as civilians, these elites have never had a true vision of Nigeria’s greatness and destiny.

 

In addition, for the better part6 of forty years, we have drunk ourselves silly with oil, much of it as rent from questionable multinational oil companies. These companies have raped this country with such savagery and rapine as has never been witnessed in the history of human criminality. The indigenous comprador oil cartels have also done their worst. Thus they would bring one oil tanker ostensibly to deliver refined oil, only for it to be signed off and returned to the high seas and brought back again as a new consignment. This fraud could be repeated four or more times before the consignment is finally delivered. Meanwhile the ruling elites and their bureaucratic collaborators in NNPC would have taken their cut and left.

 

Today, our country is virtually bankrupt. Nothing seems to be working anymore. The decay stinks to the high heavens. For the very first time, many of our compatriots are ‘thinking the unthinkable’. It is worse than the nightmare scenario that emerged even in the darkest days of the benighted General Sani Abacha. Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, has solemnly declared that the division and distrust among the Nigerian people has reached unprecedented proportions. I just returned from the Niger Delta and I can confirm that the youth there would no doubt celebrate if this country broke up tomorrow. They are profoundly fed up being part of Nigeria; a country that offers them no hope and no future – a country programmed to gridlock and immobility – a land of blood and iron, poverty, sorrow and tears.

 

Many sections of the Nigerian populace are angry because of the deceitful cover-ups and the chicanery and cant. Who have been the sponsors and masterminds of Boko Haram? Who orchestrated it and who provided the weapons for them to commit such havoc on a staggering scale? And are we saying that nobody has been able to draw up a pattern of the insurgency by interrogating those captured? And what about the rampaging herdsmen of the apocalypse? Who is behind these murderers, most of whom are bona fide foreigners? Why is government treating them with kid gloves while spitting fire and brimstone against the Niger Delta Avengers? And who says cattle are more precious than human lives and why must the government appease foreign murderers who have killed so many defenceless peasants throughout the Middle Belt, the South East and other parts of our country? Who are these people and why do they have a right to occupy and colonise other people’s land in the name of so-called ‘grazing reserves’?

 

 

We live in difficult times. The future of our country is in mortal peril. The times call for vision, wisdom and grace – above all, supreme courage. But when I look around me, I do not see any men worthy enough. I see only darkness. This is why I weep.

 

From the way I see things, the greatest challenge facing us a country is the failure of leadership. And I use the word ‘leadership’ advisedly. Leadership is not the same as rulership. Anybody can be a ruler – a sultan ministering as overlord over the state and the spoils that fall from it. But true leadership is about the combination of courage, high intellect, charisma and ability to lead people to higher national goals and purposes.

 

In our twenty-first century digital industrial civilisation, such leadership calls for mastery of the science and art of statecraft. In most of the successful nations of today, the lineaments of statecraft are shaped by the dictates of national interest and positive science. In our own case, however, statecraft is determined by the sentiments of tribe and religion. Science has no place in it, and neither does the national interest, however understood.

 

Lest we forget, the leading statesmen that made Europe the centre of the universe until the middle of the twentieth century were people imbued of a scientific temper. Christopher Wren, Sir Isaac Newton and men such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel were geniuses who put their talents to the service of Great Britain. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt were universal geniuses who put their skills at the service of the German nation and people. Pierre de Fermat was a French jurist who served his nation with distinction while doubling as one of the greatest mathematicians the world has known. And among the ancient Chinese, the advisers to the king were drawn invariably from the ranks of the most talented youths from all the four corners of the Middle Kingdom. In much of Europe, America and Asia, those who aspire to leadership are increasingly required to be superior men and women in terms of knowledge and ability.

 

Of course, you do not have to be a genius to be a leader. All you need is a minimum level of education and ability to identify your nation’s key development challenges and courage to mobilise the nation around higher national goals and purposes. You also must be able to bring together a brains trust of the most talented people you can find to help you run the country. And you must not be squeamish about giving orders. The art of command is part of the necessary equipment of any leader, whether civilian or military, or indeed, corporate.

 

As a leader, your role is to mobilise, motivate and inspire your team to achieve what lesser minds might otherwise have considered impossible. The nearest to that ideal of leadership was the great sage Obafemi Awolowo of late memory. I pray daily for God to give us such men.

 

Obadiah Mailafia