Nigeria is gradually descending into the hobbesian state where only the strong survive. Life is becoming hard and brutish. From the East to the West, the North to the South, stories of killings and destruction daily assail our sensibilities. We hear on a regular basis how people are murdered in cold blood daily, slaughtered like lambs led to the slaughter without anything being done to bring respite to the populace.
NOWHERE is safe anymore. You travel the roads, you are kidnapped, and God help you if you are not able to pay the ransom. If you go to your farm, bandits will not allow you to till the land. Schools, where our children are supposed to get a n e d u c a t i o n , a r e t a r g e t e d.
Homes—even those of highly placed individuals (with their retinue of security)—are not safe either. No one is spared. Nowhere is safe. Not a single day passes by without stories being told of one form of molestation or another being meted on the hapless people of Nigeria. And the government seems to be helpless. It appears Nigerians are being left to their whims. It seems the dictum everyone for himself and God for all of us’ is fast becoming a reality. If you are not strong, you are likely to be exposed to all manner of despicable treatment. If you do not resort to self- help, then the country cannot accommodate you. There is no room for the weak, and the essence of government is, therefore, lost.
Agitations have become the order of the day, and if you cannot tag along, you are left to be consumed by the beast. Where are we headed? Regional militias have become the norm. Amotekun, the Western Security Network floated by some governments of the South West.
Ebubeagu, formed by the South East governors. And a whole lot of more. Yet security is an intractable issue. Our security agencies seem to have been inundated. They are overwhelmed. They
cannot protect us, as what we hear on daily basis are not pleasing to the ears at all. Qasi armies have taken over the ungoverned spaces in our country, and we run the risk of becoming a failed state if nothing drastic is done, and quick.
Sadly, we have not been able to manage our diversity to our advantage. Nepotism, ethnicity, regionalism, and religiosity have become our poster signs that are gradually singing the dirge for
our union. Fairness has taken flight in all that we do as a nation. We pander to these very destructive tendencies and allow merit to suffer. We cannot develop in a situation like this. When people feel unfairly treated, they find means of ventilating their grievances, and when nothing is done to rebuild confidence, then there is a gradual slide into something else.
America, the country after which we have modeled our democracy, is more culturally diverse than Nigeria. It is bigger in size than Nigeria, yet it has been able to harness its diversity to its advantage. It has been able to rein in those extremes that our leaders have been grappling with since independence. Indeed, it is the most culturally diverse nation on the face of the earth, yet the most developed. And because of its development, Nigeria would and should have been able to navigate some of the landmines planted by diversity, but the country has scarcely and practically learned nothing, and we seem to be on our way to perdition.
We cannot continue to travel down this winding and slippery slope. We must find means of changing the narrative and toe the path of peace and development. But these cannot be achieved if we continue to look for strong men instead of building strong institutions. Our leaders from times past have only struggled to become strong men. None, I dare posit, tried to build enduring institutions that would outlast them.
We have very good institutions and laws which, if allowed to flourish, would have ensured justice and growth, yet they have been dwarfed because of the deliberate actions of those who are
supposed to have molded them. Each and every leader, with the exception of a few, saw themselves as representatives of their region and worked to give advantage to their ‘people’ instead of
working for the general good. Religion has also been an albatross weighing the country down. Everything is done within the prism of religion. Muslims and Christians only see through the narrow
lenses of their religion.
To grow, we must jettison some of these baggage that have tended to slow us down and serve as a drag on us. The primary essence of government is the provision of security for the enjoyment of
its citizens. If it cannot provide this, then it has not achieved its basic goal. We want to travel on our roads again. We want to go to our farms. We want to live in peace again. We want to develop our decayed infrastructures and return to our good old ways.