By Olukorede Yishau
Forty-eight years after his second novel, ‘Season of Anomie’, Wole Soyinka released another novel, ‘Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth’. The land in the novel is you, dear Nigeria.
A Gallup poll some years ago had claimed that the happiest people in the world reside in you, the land amalgamated by Lord Lugard and christened by his woman, Flora.
This claim is debatable and is still being debated years after the result of the happiness index was published.
Soyinka’s book is a continuation of that debate about you, dear Nigeria. And what he reports is that you are a land where charlatans masquerade as Christians, where skilled professionals are lured home and blackmailed into nefarious acts, and where citizens have to undergo a rebirth to fit into the shenanigans called politics.
I choose to write to you today because of the fact that we are in that season again when we have to determine how happy your people will be between 2023 and 2027, the next political dispensation.
As I write, in mansions, palaces and elsewhere posh, men and women are discussing who should get what part of you come 2023. The meetings are not taking place just inside you. Your fate is also being tabled abroad by men and women who want to be president, governors, senators, House of Representatives members, and so on.
Those who simply want political appointments are also not left out of the permutations; this set is not interested in the rigour of campaigning to hold offices, they simply want those who will go through this hassle to make them commissioners, ministers or special advisers, even director-general or managing director of government-owned agencies are enough for them. They want to enjoy the soft life without experiencing the fire.
In all of these permutations, the people do not take the centre stage. If any, the permutations include how to buy them and then dump them after the polls.
The need to make you one of the best nations of the world is also not seriously being considered in most of these permutations. The insecurity that plagues you, your economy that is in shambles, and your general bad state feature less in these 2023 permutations.
In next year’s budget, the government plans to spend N2.51 trillion to secure you when infrastructure has only N1.21 trillion and social development and poverty reduction programme has N896.8 billion. Education, that all-important sector, has a paltry N888.8 billion and health trails behind with N821.4 billion.
When these germane issues come up at these meetings, it is about how to use them against the political foes, it is about how to promise change and not fulfill them, and it is all about strategies to deceitful use them against those to be dislodged. It is never for your benefit and it will not be in a long while.
Already the former ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), is putting its house in order to send away the All Progressives Congress (APC), the party that promised us change that we are still waiting to see. The PDP, like a cruel Lagos landlord, has served quit notice on the APC, which it sees as a tenant in government houses in some states and the Presidential Villa. The game for your soul, spirit and body is on and it will get hotter in the New Year.
These men and women discussing how to share your booty are less concerned by the fact that you ranked very high in the world index of the most fragile countries. Your constitutional crisis; regional autonomy agitation, ethnic conflicts, religious tensions, insurgency in many parts of the Northeast, the reign of kidnappers and bandits across the country, and the dilapidated public infrastructure mean next to nothing to them.
Do they care about the ridiculous value of your currency? Are they worried about soaring inflation? Do they care that several Nigerians are dying of diseases that should not ordinarily kill them? Have they any concrete plan for the millions without a means of livelihood? How to address the issues that threw up the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), and hordes of pro-secessionist movements aren’t considered important to be examined at these meetings. It is all about grabbing and sharing the booty of office.
How many citizens do you have, dear Nigeria? This is a question that is central to your development, but these men and women holding secret meetings are not interested in answering this question. And without an answer to this, dear Nigeria, you cannot get to where you should be. Development is data-driven.
They say you have more than 220 million, but we all know it is just guesswork. No census has been done recently and we have no plan to do it any time soon and, even when we do, ethnic sentiments have always been a cog and from my prism, it will still be a cog.
Dear Nigeria, your population, your beautiful sceneries and your people’s resilience should be advantageous. But are they? Businessmen should be reaping the benefits of the huge population, but the stress of doing business is crazy. The ease of doing business is but a mirage.
For years, the ports have been getting worse. Congestion is a problem we have no answer to. It costs more to ship in goods into you than elsewhere. The banks operating in you are not helping entrepreneurs; they charge a 15 per cent interest rate when their counterparts in India charge 4 per cent and the ones in the United States charge 3.9 per cent. Don’t let us talk about China where banks charge 0.25 per cent and Japan where they charge 0.1 per cent. These are the issues that men and women seeking political offices should discuss, but it is the least of their worries.
What occupies their time is how to keep amazing wealth and how to have properties in Lagos, Abuja, Dubai, Miami, New York, London, Singapore, Paris and Chicago. They learn no lesson from the many mansions that used to host the best of parties but are now homes to rodents and reptiles. They never learn and will never learn. Unfortunately, you are the worst for it as you keep lagging behind in the comity of nations.
In the 60s when you just started out as a nation, the rest of the world looked up to you as the one that will show the rest of Africa the way. You held a lot of promise, your currency was strong and it was expected you were going to be the next big thing. $1 was 71 kobo and even in 1979, N1,000 was exchanged for $1,200. Then your citizens could just pack their baggage, buy tickets and fly to England and other western countries visa-free as though they were flying to Abuja or Port Harcourt.
Only citizens of countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and Canada enjoy such privilege now. They can travel to over 100 countries with just their passports. You were ahead of Singapore, Malaysia and several European countries in terms of development.
You had the largest airline in Africa and over thirty ships in your fleet. Nigeria Airways was king of the air, and working there was a dream job comparable to eking out a livelihood in the oil industry. And time was when a return ticket to America was N1,200. But as the years went by, things got worse instead of getting better.
My final take: Dear Nigeria needs a generation of leaders who are not irresponsible, who are not driven by the lure of easy money, who will end a situation where materialism continues to appeal to the majority, and who will ensure that the people come first in every decision they make. Without this kind of leadership, we are heading nowhere.
• Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author of ‘In The Name of Our Father’ and’ Vaults of Secrets’.