The actuality has turned out to be more dire than the auguries. The sixty fifth anniversary of Nigeria has now come and gone. As it has been predicted, the national mood was sombre and subdued. As the day approached, the discerning could feel a thick pall of despondency in the air and an atmosphere of generalized desperation. It was as if the dispensing machines had run out of vending hope and optimism after a run on them. This is the staple fare of pain-killing morphine on which an embattled and embittered populace had depended on in sixty five years of trial and tribulation. But addiction to pain-killers, like the pain-killers themselves, often have their expiry date and time.
Given the general state of perturbation and widespread anxiety in the land, one was not unduly surprised when the announcement came cancelling the Independence Day parade, thus stripping the occasion of its pomp and pageantry. Whenever you have this kind of unusual announcement, the airwaves are rife with rumours and unsettling speculations that something nasty was in the offing. In the event, rather than glad-handing and iron-pumping in Abuja, the president chose to remain in his Lagos residence from where he rallied the nation in an Independence speech of rousing bravery and exceptional tough-mindedness. But if the truth must be told, it was of little avail, for it was at this particular point that the PENGASSAN versus Dangote Refinery faceoff snowballed into a full-blown downing of tools by the oil-sector workers. As long queues resurfaced at the petrol station and as commuters and motorists alike began hunting for the rare stuff like primitive hunter-gatherers, the downbeat mood became even more sullied and unappeasable.
Cashing in on the unfortunate situation, some of the leaders who have led the nation up this ruinous path began calling for drastic reform or revolution. The veteran roadrunner among them, without any sense of momentous irony, insisted that the time had come to smash the moribund system. Why he thinks he himself and his vast retinue will escape the fury of the revolutionary mob in the event of an upheaval remains a source of profound mystery. Even more worrisome is the possibility that the nation is being set up for a catastrophic descent into anarchy as a prelude or dress rehearsal for the voting year of 2027 and all its magical possibilities.
But why the year 2025 in its ember phase and the occasion of its sixty fifth anniversary should cast such an ominous pall of magical possibilities on the nation deserve more scrutiny. It may well be that just as humans suffer anxiety neurosis so do nations. In the modern bureaucratic calendar that we have adopted, the age of sixty five is the ultimate and terminal retirement age, the sharp cut-off point of all elongated shenanigans, extensions, multiple additions and covert adjustments. The retiree must go into compulsory retirement to embrace the dark shadows of old age, senescence or senility as the case may be, if they are not recalled by their maker. This is the age in which the patients worry themselves to death about missed deadlines, missed opportunities, vanished timelines and datelines.
There is a time for everything. You cannot be fretting about interview schedules or frantic about fresh job opportunities when you are already at the departure lounge waiting for the final call. The dominance of oral culture in Africa allows us to take a bitter jig at our colonially imposed modern calendar with its mechanical and mechanistic framework which does not allow or permit creative laxity or imaginative evasions. Due to lack of public records, it is only in Africa that the same person could hold on to multiple birthdates on the ground that he was born several moons ago on a market day with birds singing and goats bleating furiously, or where a centenarian can often pass as a sprightly septuagenarian. But that too must end at some point, like the Egungun Festival which must terminate at some point no matter the associated merriments and festivities. Time is the ultimate leveler which must bring together all the contending classes including children of loafers and the scions of loaf-masters.
History is the master of allegory or allegorized reality. History, in its actual lived experience and confounding perplexities, often simplifies reality for us and resolves its own conundrums as it unfolds and expands thrusting its heady contradictions at us as we struggle to make sense of its awesome imponderables. Only last week in this column, we narrated how this columnist was invited in 1985 by the duo of Dele Giwa and Ray Ekpu to contribute to a publication to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of the nation. As it was explained last Sunday, the columnist latched on to the image of a master paradox to explain away the strange combination of magnificent strengths and gargantuan weaknesses which seem to have defined the existence of the nation since amalgamation. For many people the idea of a roiling paradox has since entered the national imagination as a general password for unlocking the Nigerian predicament.
Ten years after this landmark publication, Dele Giwa has been bombed out of existence about a year after on October 19th 1986. But in a strange twist of grueling irony, it was the turn of Kayode Soyinka, Dele Giwa’s golden boy and favourite newshound, to invite this columnist to ruminate on the circumstances of Nigeria on its thirty fifth anniversary commemoration. In the intervening decade, Soyinka, who only miraculously escaped being brutally dispatched like his boss, had transited from being an intrepid reporter to becoming the publisher of the respectable and influential magazine, Africa Today. That October, the nation’s reputation was in tatters having plumbed the depth of disrepute to become a pariah in the comity of nations. General Sani Abacha had bared his steely fangs and the entire nation lay cowering under the hammer of his brutal despotism. The mood of the nation darkened and there was a foul distemper about reminiscent of the goggled tyrant himself. Nobody ever believed that politically speaking, things could turn that foul and nasty.
This time around, this writer fastened on the image of a giant toddler at thirty five trundling about the bare floor unable to get up and go. A toddler at thirty five is a genetic monstrosity; a victim of irreversible retardation and arrested development. It recalls the figure of, Aboliga, the man-child ,Ayi Kwei Armah’s haunting creation in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The one-day wonder grew to manhood and full maturity the same day he was born only to perish that same day. Nothing grows or endures for long in the sultry tropics, certainly not people, nations and institutions, and the equatorial torpor has claimed its own once again.
That was thirty years ago after a presidential election that promised to unite and unify the nation produced a hapless civilian interloper and the most monstrous despot ever seen in the history of the nation. The caustic severity of the framing referent of an earth-hugging adolescent toddler was an accurate reflection of the national trauma as Nigeria cascaded over the cliff to the bottomless pit of self-eradication once again. If any substantial damage has been done to the national fabric, the nation has had the intervening three decades to heal and to repair the damage. First was the heroic struggle against military absolutism which has since entered the universal folklore of the struggle of a people for self-emancipation. The upheaval against military eruption which sent the soldiers back to the barracks can be regarded as the golden moment of Nigeria’s post-independence history.
Unfortunately, and by universal consensus, the post-military civilian restoration has, in the main, been underwhelming in its performance, particularly in the areas of the economy, national cohesion and the scourge of corruption and mismanagement. To be sure, there have been a few bright spots at both the national and subnational levels such as the brilliant demilitarization programme of the Obasanjo regime and the sterling performance at the state levels particularly in Lagos and in emerging stars such as Ekiti, Enugu, Abia and perhaps entrepreneurially driven Akwa Ibo. But all these are too few and far between to make a dent on the fortunes of the nation.
So what is the verdict on Nigeria at sixty five as the nation marked a gloomy anniversary this past week? The answers came in torrents and they could not be gloomier than the mood of the nation itself. This time around and in a startling development which hints at a global revolution in the knowledge industry and a change in demographic reflecting the growing predominance of youth in the power equation, it was Nigerians themselves who supplied the answers. This time around, Nigerians did not need ‘specialists’ to explain away the antics of ‘madmen’; neither do they need their celebrated intellectuals and writers to explain the plight of the nation. They dismissed the nation as akin to a sixty five year old retiree without any further hope of redemption or restitution; a nation with a great future firmly behind it.
Fortunately, the timeline of a nation’s existence is completely different from the lifespan of a human organism. Unlike human life, the nation is an infinite continuum with an oceanic plenitude of time. Nation’s do not succumb to sudden death or peremptory cardiac seizure. Even where breakup is a definite possibility, the warning signals are almost elastic in their sheer permissiveness. This is why Nigeria still has a lot to play for. It is not over until it is over. But a lot still needs to be done to halt the drift to Golgotha. This is a great country. But like all violently heterogeneous entities it is taking quite some time to come together and the human toll, the collateral damages, have been quite prohibitive. The coming decade will be quite critical in our quest for that elusive and authentic national consensus.