By Sunny Awhefeada
The Ghanaian Yao Egblewogbe’s poem “The Coming of Day” speaks to the African predicament with a remarkable sense of irony. The imagery of day signifies hope and relief from the horrors of the night and colonialism was night in the configuration of the African experience. Those who led the anti-colonial struggle promised the people dawn and day.
Egblewogbe’s country’s leading nationalist, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, told Africans to “seek ye first the political kingdom and every other thing will be added onto you”. In the course of seeking that kingdom, Africans looked forward to it with great hope and from the swamps of the Niger Delta to the arid planes of the Sudan, Africans gave their all to survive the long night of horror that colonialism really was, especially in East Africa. In places where colonialism wasn’t bestial, it was benign slavery with a disruptive phenomenon which robbed the colonized their essence of being and dignity. This has been talked about in writings in the last sixty to seventy years. When dawn came in 1960 for most African countries, it didn’t take long for it to metamorphose into dusk and then night. And it has been night since then refusing to rotate to dawn. Africa’s long night should no longer be ascribed to the evils of colonialism. The genie of bad leadership which seems to owe its paternity to the African mind has been the bane of the continent. This is the evil that must be exorcised.
The African night has lasted for too long and we may all die in the lingering nightmares. We have been tantalized by vignettes of dawn only to stir to wakefulness and find ourselves engulfed by stygian darkness. This has been the case with Nigeria, Africa’s showpiece. Since the country took those faltering steps into independence in 1960, it has been traumatized by one nightmare after the other. Each nightmare scenario opens up to horrors which engender new horrors that in turn beget newer horrors that make the people think about the earlier horrors as exemplum of benevolence. From the tragic civil war to bloody coups and civil uprisings, Nigeria has experienced unimaginable turmoil and tumult. The indices of underdevelopment are frightening and there seem to be no end in sight. So, it is not likely that our night would break into dawn and day. Some years ago, Nigerians had thought that doing away with Dr. Goodluck Jonathan and voting in a general that was credited as anti-corruption lord would be the silver bullet that would remedy the Nigerian hopelessness. The general came and luxuriated in corruption and left the nation anemic. He pleaded for time while his cronies bled Nigeria. Under his doleful watch the nation became one of the most unsafe places in the world. As he gazed clueless the nation was thrown into multidimensional poverty. As he dozed off during important state meetings the nation got more “fantastically corrupt”. The years rolled by as the citizens reeled in hunger and agony.
Some tendencies played out in 2022 and early 2023 that gave Nigerians another false hope that dawn was nigh. Those tendencies coalesced in the “obedient movement” which the proponents proclaimed would turn Nigeria around for good. The “obedient” phenomenon fascinated the populace. Whether it was mere showmanship or altruistic posture, the tendencies that characterized it paled into nothingness as the vilified candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu, went on to win the 2023 presidential election. Suffering from heavy credibility crisis during the electioneering campaigns, Tinubu’s handlers framed his vision around the nebulous mantra of “renewed hope” in allusion to the concept “hope” as enunciated by M. K. O. Abiola of the famous June 12 imbroglio. Tinubu’s sidekicks thought that gimmick was going to fly, but the outcome of the election which he won narrowly opened their eyes to how savvy the Nigerian voter was turning out to be. They didn’t give Tinubu any chance of compelling or cajoling a new dawn that the “renewed hope” he mouthed even if feebly and unconvincing ought to depict. Instead of Tinubu’s “renewed hope” presaging the “coming of day” it has come to entrench hopelessness which is emblematized by darkness.
The following lines from Egblewogbe’s “The Coming of Day” captures the reality of the Nigerian ordeal under Tinubu and those who came before him bearing false promises: “They came with gifts and promises/That the day had dawned/And darkness fled/Then higher and higher/The royal sun climbed, while lips cracked/Beneath a dying tree/…Pastures once rich had become barren…/And here and there the bleached skeleton/Of a goat reflects the luminous power”. The excerpted lines foreground gloom and hopelessness entrenched by betrayals and failed promises. The ensuing misery is located in the two lines, “Beneath the blessed silence of a glowing city/Children choked and mothers wept”. This is where Nigeria is at the moment and it is the people’s rejection of that sordid order that led to the eruptions of August. The present administration under President Tinubu has stretched Nigerians to their limits.
In the place of food to assuage hunger, Tinubu offered an old discarded anthem. The triad of insecurity, economic mismanagement and corruption which has menaced the nation has become intractable under President Tinubu. Daily, the nation is inundated by new policy statements which have yielded nothing, but despair. Sound economic theories that worked elsewhere have failed to work here as they are subverted by tinubunomics. It looks as if those in government have come under the influence of voodoo. Nothing can explain our ordeal other than bewitchment. The August uprisings aggregate a rejection of bad governance and hunger. A sensitive government should do an honest appraisal of the remote and immediate causes of the riots and take steps to address and redress the issues. Sadly, the present government doesn’t seem to have the capacity. This is reflected in President Tinubu’s address to the nation during the uprising. It was one address that offered glasses without wine.
The August uprising threw up questions as well as observations. Although, the anger in the land and the mobilization for the protest took on a nationwide consensus, its manifestation appeared sectional taking a toll on the already impoverished and marooned north. With this lopsided demonstration of angst can one still talk about one Nigeria with a singular aspiration? The north was let lose like a tide with children wielding cudgels and threatening to stone a governor to death if he had come out. The palpable anger is traceable to acute poverty and deprivation. One of the protesting children said he hadn’t eaten in two days. The defiance was unmistakable as the youths and underage flew the Russian flag in rejection of Nigeria. But what they actually rejected was bad governance. The call for regime change and military coup by some of the protesters was ill-advised. Military rule can no longer be an option here.
Some security agents once again justified their christening as “mad dogs” by Abiola. Security forces that have not been able to dislodge insurgency, eradicate banditry, stop kidnapping and eliminate armed robbery were caught on camera not only threatening to kill protesters, but actually firing live bullets and killing them. But credit must be given to the humane security officers who understood what was at stake and the essence of the rage and riots and neither shot tire gas nor fired a single bullet at the protesters. These officers just like the protesters deserve medals of courage and patriotism. President Tinubu must jettison the idea of government as owambe party. He must if need be sack his entire cabinet and let those who can fix the nation do so. Nigeria has never been in short supply of such men and women. That might be the beginning of our “coming of day”. Nigerians must stand in solidarity for this darkness to pass.
