I know we still have a few great stories to tell.
However, in my personal opinion, after the devastating effects of slave trade and colonisation comes the fall of Nigeria from grace as the most traumatising story out of Africa.
We are the eighth wonder of the world.
Young people must help to bring young people to power and they must discard this USELESS unitary (military) system of government ASAP!
Nigeria: The Tragic Legacies Of The Tyrants
By Adeola Aderounmu
Nigeria is not suffering from some kind of undiagnosed kwashiorkor. Not at all. Our major problem is that we are running a useless form of government called the unitary system. The major symptoms are massive and uncontrollable corruption everywhere in the country, stunted growth and impaired development since 1966 or thereabout.
Yet, in 2019 several millions of Nigeria will head to the polls in what has turned out to be a quadrennial ritual characterised by total waste of time, energy and resources for the once prosperous country and former giant of Africa. In 1999 the country boasted of a return to democracy but as it had turned out to be an outright scam. It was an army arrangement, a continuum for the tragic legacies of the tyrants that percolade the country till today.
Nigerian politics and the shame that the military juntas and the politicians have brought to Nigeria is one of the most tragic events of modern era. In my personal opinion, after the devastating effects of slave trade and colonisation comes the fall of Nigeria from grace as the most traumatising story out of Africa.
If you want to have a 5 minute course to understanding how bad the fall of Nigeria is, go and listen to the adress made by Akufo-Addo the president of Ghana at Oxford. Don’t look yet for the strides that Ethiopian airlines just made or how beautiful Kigali is becoming.
It is not all of Nigeria that fell, the citizens of Nigeria are still amongst the best scholars in the world. We are frontliners in any field of endeavour or profession. Nigerians remain creative and are among the greatest problem-solvers on the global scene.
What is the not adding up at home in the country itself is how the control of the economic resources and the political space ended up in the hands of political criminals and people with amazingly zero understanding of the meaning of public service and zero percent willingness to replace a non-functional system with a vibrant and functional one.
The problems in Nigeria are now complicated and most certainly hydra-headed as substantial parts of the country are now controlled by terrorists, herdsmen, bandits and militants. We invent new geographically suited terms everyday to suit our ineptitudes.
To make these anomalies worse we now have dominancy of mixed generations of old and young people who don’t know that the world has moved on and whose orientations about the meaning and value of life are extremely worrisome.
The roles of the tyrants who presided over Nigeria at different times in creating some or all of these troubles with Nigeria cannot be overemphasized. It is heartbreaking that those who contributed immensely to the problems of Nigeria are still taking up the spaces in real life and on the web especially the social media.
For example, the constitution of Nigeria is based on military rule and does not support regional growth and development. The tyrants who supervised the introduction of the unitary governments did so for their personal gains and invariably when Nigerians thought that they left in 1999, they found a way back through the emergence of one of their own Olusegun Obasanjo.
General Obasanjo, a former tyrant and dictator, had earlier opposed the entronement of a democratically elected president-in-waiting, MKO Abiola. The military juntas supervised the murder of Abiola and his wife Kudirat. If Nigerians had a collective sense of responsibility, they should have revolted to ensure that the June 12 1993 mandate was not wasted. But Nigerians are divided.
The fact is that Nigeria is existing since 1966 as a creation of the military. They brought the idea of immunity clause in the constitution because they do not want to be probed as they steal and loot the Nigerian treasury. They also knew beforehand that they would be in power whichever way. It was a soft landing of sort. Head or tail, they won/are still winning. The immunity clause was a perfect umbrella for criminals. It works even till today.
Above all, the military had no plan to leave power and despite that fact that Obasanjo transferred power to a civilian in 1979, at least three spatial events showed the greed in his camp. One was the shambolic elections he oversaw. It was a disgrace to call that a democratic process. Two was the manner in which one of his men Mohammadu Buhari easily came to power in december 1983 and thirdly was his support for military government in the aftermath of the 1993 elections.
The tyrants imposed very unpleasant and bad legacies on Nigeria. Sadly too, under the pseudo-democratic arrangement in Nigeria since 1999, Nigeria remains directly or indirectly under the spell of the military.
For instance General Abdulsalami facilitated the emergence of Obasanjo in 1999. It was supposed to appease the SW but at that time the people were just fed up with the juntas and any Dick or Jane could have suffix. Then Obasanjo facilitated the victory of Umaru Yar Adua in 2007. He was part of the facilitating group for Jonathan in 2011. In 2015 Tinubu worked closely with Obasanjo to facilitate the return of a former tyrant Mohammadu Buhari.
Today Nigeria remains in ruins partly because of all these nonsense which the late Afro king Fela popularly called army arrangements. Stunted growth, unemployment, lack of electricity, a shameful parade of public education, lack of health care amplified by the regular, disgraceful trip of Mohammadu Buhari to London for treatment, insecurity and a complete lack of sense of common belonging are all elements of the failed unitary system.
The military created states for the useless unitary system of government that they formulated even with the knowledge that the states are going to become parasites for the oil-producing states and the economy capital Lagos.
In the 1980s, it was Babangida who blew up the mechanism of corruption in Nigeria even if it had been promoted since the 1970s when Gowon mismanaged the oil boom and refused to plan for the future. He can boast of Festac but Nigeria could afford 10 000 times more of Festac. Former Lagos governor, Mr. Jakande showed the world what Nigeria could have been with the little time he had and all the housing estates and schools he built in 4 years!
For all the monies that disappeared under the tyrants and their civilian accomplices, no prosecutions were made. In the past when the population of Nigeria was far less than 100 million, these bad rulers made zero plan for the future. There were no infrastructure development and no maintenance for the existing ones.
The saddest part was that the military had no will to return to the regional government that promoted healthy competition that led to growth and development in various parts of Nigeria prior to the 1966 coups. Today the Nigerian politicians are acting foolish. Since 1979, no one of them had been sensible enough to speak out or even lay down his/her life for a good cause. There are young people today willing to pay such prices and only time will tell.
The reason the quadrinneal elections are useless is because Nigerian politicians have lost their senses. They have turned electoral posts to money making mechanisms. They are happy dancing to the tunes of the military through the nonsense constitution they are following. It puts money in their pockets and it sends their children to school abroad. It makes me a wailer and it builds and buy them houses around the world. The only problem is that it does not give them everlasting life, yet they don’t get it.
Listen to them, hear them and you will see that their mentalities are poor and deformed! The only way to bring back their senses is to close down Abuja and keep only the prime minister/president there. The other possibility is for the judiciary to set itself free and send all of them to prisons to reduce crimes connected to politics especially assasinations because the winner still takes it all.
It is imperative for ordinary Nigerians to get this message so they can understand why Nigeria is not working and why it will never work. It is only working for the handful that seize power and control the resources including monetary earnings of politicians arguably the highest in the world for doing nothing!
Then some politicians spread some of the monies to their hangers-on. Then some new people get the contracts and connections here and there. But that is not the definition of a country and these pockets of opportunists do not define success but criminalities. We must create a system that promotes equal rights for all. We must find a constitution that gives us a level playing field no matter who you are.
The civilian politicians since 1999 have become comfortable with the army arrangements. You will never find a higher level of selfishness anywhere else in the world.
Those who understand this cycle of idiocy are few and almost voiceless making our tasks of educating Nigerians huge. After more than 50 years of misrule, several millions of Nigerians have become disorientated, lacking the ability of independent thinking.
Some Intelligent people have become part of this social irresponsibility and are participating in this politics of chop and quence. Some good people have been kept quiet and many have been killed. We don’t know who amongst us will be next. The level of insecurity in Nigeria today is the worst since the end of the civil war. Many are afraid of death and are passive.
Nigeria has fallen from grace and the world is laughing at us. Common electricity we cannot produce and distribute. Many of us have lost our dignities because of the abnormalities that have become norms.
Young people and even the old have been set up against one another in real life and on the social media. This is where the army arrangement has taken us. We are not thiking straight. In Nigeria, we cannot even count the votes we cast. They never tally! We are the lowest we could ever imagine and we are not ashamed!
We have become the eighth wonder of the world.
The tyrants of Nigeria that include a long list including but not limited to Gowon, Babangida, Abdulsalami, Obasanjo and Buhari together with civilian accomplices that include our fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters have left devastating legacies in Nigeria.
That is why even in their old ages, at 80-something, they do not realise that they needed to take a bow and let the young people take care of their (own) future. They have mis-spent the time that passed and don’t know how to call it a day.
Both Buhari and Obasanjo truncated Nigeria’s democratic processes at different times thereby not allowing our democracy (albeit imperfect) to develop or correct itself. They totally destroyed the judiciary and it never recovered! Both men don’t deserve our attentions.
They think Nigeria cannot do without them. This is exactly what they wanted and they got us where they want us. They succeeded big time because even under a so called democratic dispensation, they are still the ones calling the shots. Think again! They never left!
This is what we must break away from in the future if a true election (ever) comes. It is left for the young people of Nigeria to wake one another up from their deep slumber and smell the coffee. The world left Nigeria behind a long time ago.
Young people, brace yourself up and talk about the type of country you want to live and die in/for. Talk about how you want your children and children’s children to have it. It is time to bring young people to power and your second struggle is to discard the useless unitary system of government.
My name is Adeola and l’ve been running this blog since 2006.
A View From The Scandinavian 