By Olukorede Yishau
There are times I miss Maryland Mall where I frequented to see Nigerian movies. There are times I miss the Lagos newsroom and its mad energy. There are times I miss the sights and smell of Ilupeju, my home until some months ago, and there are times I miss shuttling between Agege and Ikorodu to see birth and marriage families. And there are times I remember the madness of football fans in Lagos, the craze of bus conductors in the state of aquatic splendour, and the rowdiness of life in my state of origin.
There are times I miss puff-puff or meat pie and dash to Wazobia African Market or Southwest Farmers Market to satiate my cravings. Abula Spot has helped out a couple of times when I miss amala and gbegiri. I recently even craved ogi and akara, and Wazobia sorted me out.
My memories of home are regularly rekindled by Nigerians who frequent a barbershop close to an office I am a regular face in. These Nigerians talk politics, talk sex, and talk marriage. They talk anything at the top of their voices and force me to feel I am in Lagos and not America. To compound my situation, many a time they speak Yoruba, my first language.
Many of them did not find it easy getting to America. The experiences of some of them are like that of a friend, a dear one, who was refused American visa multiple times in the early 2000s. Like a stubborn goat, he kept returning to the consulate on Walter Carrington Crescent in Victoria Island and like dream killers, the consular officials happily turned him back. One even wondered why he should be the one to break the jinx. At a point, he got a letter of recommendation from Nancy Pelosi, now the Speaker of the American House of Representatives, but it did not work the magic. Time, however, worked things out.
My friend’s ordeal share semblance with some scenes in ‘New York, My Village’, a novel by Uwem Akpan, and how the narrator’s quest to travel to America for career enhancement was almost thwarted by consular officials on bases only they understood. In fact, the consular officer who interviewed him on his second attempt bragged: “Didn’t they tell you I deny visas to folks visiting New York, my village?”
America is a great country, one many a Nigerian will give everything to be part of; it is a nation where so many things work: electricity, infrastructure, social justice and so on and so forth. It is a nation where freedom is stretched to its limit, it is a nation where the rule of law reigns, it is a nation where when people sense any form of threat to their freedom, they protest. Of recent, one matter has been giving many an American cause for concern; it is what they perceive as the attempt of the Supreme Court to curb the right of women to abort unwanted pregnancy in Texas, one of the fifty states that make up this powerful enclave I like referring to as the United Countries of America.
As our nation is set for another critical stage of electioneering, we must remind ourselves that we can be like America, we can have justice, equity, rule of law, freedom and superb infrastructure. But for us to get these things, we must end the situation where (like respected novelist Okey Ndibe argued) our nation remains an open wound whose leaders seem to derive joy from opening up the wound instead of closing it up with the right medication.
Ndibe has lived in America for decades and knows how a country should be run, he knows when those who run a country are opening up its wound, he knows that things should not continue that way and he knows only the people can do it by stopping the bad ones from getting into power.
I have met a couple of Nigerians who live in the U.S. and will gladly return home if only things work, but they are forced to stay abroad and lament day in, day out because we are yet to be fortunate to be led by turnaround experts.
Now that we are on the march again in search of Mr President, we need one who can right the wrongs of the past. We need a president who will make nepotism a thing of the past. We need a president who will ensure no Nigerian feels left out because of which part of the country he or she comes from.
We need a President who will end this era of epileptic supply of electricity. I will be glad that day when our electricity generating sets will only be useful for picnics at beaches and such places where temporary source of power is required.
We need a president who will provide enough direction for members of the National Assembly to truly legislate in the interest of the people and not out of any pecuniary interest.
We need a president who will promote federalism. Our Constitution, whose preamble lies that it was put together by ‘we the people’, recognises the governor as the Chief Security Officer of a state. But, in reality, this is one of the many lies in this strange document that guides our life as a nation. The policemen obey no one but the Inspector-General of Police, who takes orders from the President. So, the president is the CSO of each of the 36 states of the federation. The fact that the government of a state like Lagos spends so much money on the police every year means little or nothing. When the chips are down, the police ‘with due respect’ ignore the governors and align with the centre, where their pay comes from. It is a case of he who pays the piper calling the tunes. Our next president needs to change that.
The pseudo federalism that Nigeria operates borrows nothing from the advanced world where the government at the centre bothers itself only with issues of national security, international diplomacy and such issues of gargantuan proportion. Instead, our own federalism determines how the natural resources in a state are explored, how the Value Added Tax in a state is shared, how a state is policed, how the local government is administered, how other minute details of a state’s life are worked out and how electricity is generated and distributed.
We need a president who will end a situation where, every month, state governments take turns in Abuja to take their share of the national cake. Our governors regularly go cap in hand to beg the Lords in Abuja for porridge.
We need a president who knows we don’t need a strong centre. What we need are strong federating units that contribute to the centre, and not a centre that is so powerful that states have to cower before it. What we have now allows a president to determine who enjoys federal largesse and we are witnesses to instances where favours are dispensed along party lines. The country belongs to all irrespective of party affiliations.
We need a president who will give us a Nigeria where our schools can compete with others in the advanced world. We long for a President who will take Nigeria out of the Third World. What is wrong with being a First World?
We need a president who will deliver a Nigeria where we can reap from medical tourism instead of the current situation where we are the major loser to this trend.
We need a president who will make our economy so robust that we can hold our head high anywhere in the world and our green passport will command respect and not scorn.
We need a president who will make terrorism history, ensure peace in the Southeast and banish kidnappers prowling expressways and forests in the country.
We need a president who will give us a Nigeria where oil takes the back seat and agriculture and tourism take the front seat and contribute more to our foreign exchange earnings and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
We need a president who will develop our tourism sector, permanently solve the power challenge, defeat the terrorists and make the country a no-go-area for bandits.
We need a president who will provide the best medical facilities and not one who will dash to Europe at the slightest approach of headache.
We need a president who realises that looking power in the face helps leaders to be better leaders. We don’t need a president who will see himself as a God with big ego— ego that must be fanned and air-conditioned by sycophancy.
We don’t need a wasteful president who will blow our resources on frivolities. Our leaders have been callous in the management of our resources. Past error is no excuse for not changing our fortunes. We need a president who will come in and rise above the decades of trial and error called leadership in our country.
My final take: If we miss the opportunity to make our country attain its real potential, America, United Kingdom, South Africa, South Arabia and others will continue to harvest many of our best brains. I foresee a situation where the current surge in Nigerians migrating abroad will become a child’s play if the next president turns out a disappointment.
• Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author of’In The Name of Our Father’and’Vaults of Secrets’.