Relationship experts always have one terrifying word for persons whose relationships are about to hit rock bottom. It sounds simple yet the mere thought of it can burn the heart more rapidly than a corrosive liquid – you are advised to let go.
Some people do. Others don’t and stay but get consumed by the trouble that such relationships bring back.
But there are loopholes that relationship experts have failed to provide cogent answers to – the event that such bad relationships always come knocking on your door after you have moved on and you don’t have the exclusive right to ask it to let you go – what do you do? This is the condition that we have found ourselves in Nigeria. It is a very hopeless one.
I have often argued that democracy, just like dictatorship, was not meant for Africa and her people. Events, as they unfold, solidify this belief, not in any way less to the fact that Africans seem to overuse, underuse or abuse these forms of government but for the fact that even the model country of Africa’s democracy is shadowing a secret dictatorial tendency.
Africans should go back to that which worked before or look further for another alternative.
So what have we done in the face of moral provocations as a people? Our leaders keep sabotaging the same people that they are meant to govern, pilfering with reckless abandon and accumulating more debts. Last week, I heard that I presently owe China about 15 000 thousand Naira. What those who borrowed that money did with it, I don’t know.
President Buhari is facing some of the biggest tests to his presidency unlike any faced by his predecessors. The president had promised himself into problems during the campaigns that time has revealed to be a mere farce. He also has the right to run again and we have the right to either vote for him or reject him.
It is not just that Boko Haram looms large and has made significant inroads into places that they were previously barred from – raiding through towns and hoisting flags – or that the country seems more divided than ever with the economy on its knees.
His party, the APC, built on the altar of integrity, has seen its rank swell in the past months; welcoming new signees into their fold, anyone who is ready to dump his garb of impunity and chorus with the saints will be prepared and be readied for the new season. In Nigeria, the big thieves hang the little ones.
The sad part is that despite all the baggage that his administration has acquired – despite all the bad news that is his administration – he seems likely to cruise back to power; not on the strength of his sterling performance that has become elusive and which his image makers are still struggling to find, but on the strength of how much power he wields and how best he will utilize it together with the resources of the country to beat a sleeping opposition at their game. They are chess players in a dark room.
Those of my generation who campaigned and voted for Buhari in 2015 did so from what they heard others say. It was a generational confusion – history had long been deleted from the curriculum – so we ran with that which we heard others say. Others dug deeper in a bid to excavate the truth and cringed at what they found, the ugly past that the country has laboured hard to hide from them. Others hung solely on the pills which the spin doctors sold.
Some have come to regret their decisions, others stuck to their gun but the president will not make the same mistakes he made in 2015 – campaigning on the slogan of integrity and anti-corruption in an election that he should be grateful to lose. Corruption defeated the president, with his poverty of Philosophy.
The dilemma — which the president seems not to fully grasp — is not whether many of the people whom he governs or rules want him for another term. Nigerian politicians do not in the least, care whether you want them or not. The dilemma is in after Buhari, what next?
Are we going to elect someone who would tell us how he would use 5 years to repair the rot that Buhari’s administration did to the economy or are we simply going to ask them to let go while we discover ourselves first?
The Nigerian constitution enables us to exchange one oppressor for another. Those who modelled it towards the American type of constitution but bastardized it to suit their narrow narratives did a great disservice to this country.
Spending billions every four years in elections that will ensure that the country remains the same is the highest form of abuse anyone can go through. That is why anyone who is not sincere about restructuring the country is only playing to the gallery.
To be clear, ours is not the popular route but for Nigeria to make progress, the current constitution needs to be discarded. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not being sincere enough. The Buhari-led administration has continued to treat the call for restructuring with disdain, coupled with the masochistic attitude of the Saraki-led National Assembly.
Nigerian politicians do not believe that their first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of the Federation. So, in the end, we will trade one oppressor for another. But instead of using billions to elect people whom structures will make sure they fail, we can spend the same amount trying to restructure the badly built structure.
