May Day derived from the French maydez is the universal distress call of stricken ships calling for help from nearby ships or aircraft equipped with recognition signals. On board the doomed ship, all hands are on deck to jettison all extra items that could put their survival at risk. Sometimes they are rescued by passing or nearby ships fulfilling the international convention and sometimes they perish. Nigeria is a stricken ship destined for dissolution if the political elites fail to get their acts together and restructuring of the total architecture of the nation. But the omens are not cheering going by the buccaneering antics of the present chambers. It seems as if Gauer’s dire prophecy in 1991 in a book titled ‘This House Has Fallen’ is destined to come true.
The story was told of a Nigerian delegation to Europe on a borrowing mission during the First Republic (well it seems as if the nation had been borrowing since inception). This flamboyantly dressed retinue lived it up to high heavens. They lodged at the best hotel and behaved not as borrowers; they swaggered as if they were doing the lenders a favor. The lenders reduced their request because there was enough seriousness as to the gravity of the situation back home in their mien. They came back home and frittered what was given on frivolities and inanities.
The problem with the nation is acute leadership deficiency and a criminal lack of vision. The docility of the followership is equally making the impunity of the ruling class very easy. I stumbled on a live-in programme on an Ibadan-based popular radio station some weeks ago—the spokesman of the present Senate in the person of MR. Yemi Adaramodu was being interviewed by Isaac Brown as to the humongous sum to be spent by the Senate in refurbishing their offices and the larger-than-life members. I knew Yemi during his days at the Tribune as a mediocre and dry cartoonist. I processed his papers when he wangled the construction of a statue from the Ekiti South West local government which was a sweetheart deal and shoddily done to boot. He emerged as Kayode Fayemi’s chief of staff in his first stint as governor of Ekiti state. The personal failings of the governor notwithstanding, his chief of staff was fingered as partially responsible for his principal’s loss to the rascally Fayose in the polls due to his insufferable arrogance and abysmal lack of finesse.
Mr. Adaramodu asked his interviewer rhetorically if he wanted senators to sleep under the bridge at Abuja. He defended the perennial refurbishing of their offices at huge costs. Most grating on the nerves of listeners was the arrogance and insufferable insensitivity of the present situation in the country. Isaac Brown appealed to exercise patience for the ‘honourable’ senator to finish his diatribe. When the calls started coming in, the language was livid. Are the senators Nigerians? Callers wanted to know the moral justification for belt-tightening being demanded of hapless citizens.
A female caller said that her husband did not want to listen to the continuation of the live interview because of the total disconnect from the dire situation in the country. Evidently, the spokesman was airing the viewpoints of his colleagues. Nigerians can go to hell Few weeks later a viral video on the internet featured a serving senator mouthing the same blind and deaf inanities of the spokesman. Nigerians ought to know that senators had to ride in SUV vehicles to absorb tt absorb shocks on bad roads in the arduous tasks of their duties.
And what are these tasks? Inspecting self-awarded constituency projects which are in the main shoddily done or not done at. Did their constituents ask for these projects in the first instance? They were going on an undeserved recess and were awarded a ‘pittance’ of 2 million Naira each. Their predecessors padded federal budgets and demanded gratifications from the various ministries for budgetary approval. A tasking oversight duty indeed!
But Nigerians have not seen anything. The new president who knew the gravity of the mess he inherited voted a fleet of vehicles for his wife whose role as a First Lady is not recognized by the laws of the land. Despite denials, a Presidential yacht was acquired and the nation is to embark on a borrowing binge again to satisfy the relentless rape of the nation by the elites. Twenty-four years of democracy, not a single oil refinery is operational. Nigeria imports fuel; sometimes adulterated and queues at petrol station is commonplace.
All these trials and tribulations were visited on the nation by an uncaring and thieving elite abetted by an incredibly docile citizenry who did not expect much from the political class. Connected elites turned the importation of fuel into a scam. Army chiefs were harangued by enlisted men for supplying them antiquated arms to fight rampaging terrorists of all hues who are bent on a day of reckoning. A large swathe of the national space is ungovernable. Nigeria is not at war with an external foe yet there are internally displaced persons camps which those saddled with providing succor steal what should go to the victims of elite despoliation. The list of elite perfidy is disheartening in a season of national anomie. Is it any wonder that the power struggle is a ‘do or die’ affair a la the man who is now pontificating about the failure of democracy? Nigerians are no longer talking about the ‘dividends’ of democracy but enduring democracy as practiced by their so-called leaders.
History teaches an immutable fact: if you make peaceful change impossible, the flow of blood of the tormentors and sadly the tormented becomes inevitable. At a perilous time when the ship of state is inexorably heading towards a hune iceberg, it is business as usual for those profiting from the anomalous state of things. The psychiatric patients are totally in charge of the psychiatric hospital!
