By Sunny Awhefeada
I must begin by confessing that the title of the present discourse is not my invention. It was what I thought was an innocent question from Isio, my eight years old daughter. The day was Monday, the eve of this year’s Independence Day anniversary and the time was morning just before seven o’clock. As has been the norm since 2008, I already had the key to the car in my hands waiting as my wife dressed Isio up for school so I could take her on school runs when she shot the question, “mummy, what is the meaning of independence?”. Thinking it was an innocuous question from a child who wanted to know what independence was or is all about, my wife began to explain to her. Isio retorted saying “I know what independence is” and gave a brief overview of the subject matter before going on to do an expose on what provoked the question. She took on a rhetoric note saying “I am asking the question because what is the meaning of independence when people are not happy. People are suffering. People are hungry. People are afraid because of insecurity. People are dying. There are no good roads. There is no regular electricity. Fuel is very costly. That is why I asked, what is the meaning of independence?” Obviously she has been reading newspapers and watching the news like her older siblings. I usually compel them to read newspapers during weekends and make them watch the news. My wife and I exchanged uneasy glances and heaved when our daughter was done talking. We were both disturbed. I glanced at her again and again through the rear mirror imagining what was going on in her mind that morning as I drove her on the seven and half kilometer journey to school.
My fear that morning, and even till now as I write, derives from my concern for Isio and her generation and also for Nigeria our beloved country that is being laid waste as a result of bad leadership and complicity of the led. If a child that is less than ten years old and in primary school could be so intensely aware of the sordid and sorry condition of our country then things must have gone bad if not “worse and worst” for too long. My recall of my earliest critical engagement with Nigeria should be around 1986 when I had attained teenage. That was the decade of the nation’s economic downturn when families had to starve or invent strategies that earned them survival. It was around that period that the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was foisted on the nation to sap the citizens. Our childhood consciousness was assailed by hunger and we knew that something was giving way. The other indices that presently buffet us were then unknown or incipient and of unfelt consequences. Therefore, at that level of teenage awareness my critical engagement with Nigeria was not as intense, deeply conscious and heavily indicting as that of my eight years old daughter in the present era.
The question, “what is the meaning of independence?” is not really Isio’s question alone, it is the question of the children of her generation and Nigeria owes them answers. Nigeria is the space in which that generation, just like mine, found itself so whatever contradictions that have made life unlivable and unbearable for them must be tackled and resolved by Nigeria, and by Nigeria I mean those of us who sired the generation. But are we ready to address and redress the situation? I doubt and strongly so. The “trouble with Nigeria”, apologies to Chinua Achebe, has become infectious and almost incurable. When Achebe did a diagnosis of the country’s ailing condition in 1983 in his insightful and refreshing monograph The Trouble with Nigeria some people naively thought that the views expressed in that treatise will limn the nation’s path and lead it to some redemptive destination. For so all-encompassing and thorough was that analysis that readers thought an understanding of the thoughts shared in that pamphlet would constitute the silver bullet for the eradication of our woes. Unfortunately, the problems multiplied and became inveterate phenomena.
Looking back one is wistful to the point of tears in remembrance of what inspired my generation. The stories our parents, especially our mothers and grandmothers, told us about independence and the hope it held and the untold joy its realization brought to them on that day in 1960 when the green white green flag displaced the Union Jack thrilled us. Our social studies, government and history textbooks contained the inspiring stories of the independence movement and its eventual attainment. Our teachers, great teachers that they were, also zestfully taught us about the ideals and beauty of the activities that culminated in independence. It was a frenzied moment that held the thrill arising from the infinite possibilities of freedom. Ghana’s founding President, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, gave thought to the feeling generated by independence when he told his countrymen to seek first the political kingdom and every other thing would be added onto them.
Critical observers of the Nigerian and African condition should now reach the conclusion that the euphoria that greeted the anticipation and attainment of independence was misplaced. While the struggle for independence was ongoing there were Africans whose interests were largely selfish and they wasted no time in subverting the ideals of nationhood in new nations that they liberated from colonial bondage. If historians and social scientists didn’t see that cankerworm that gnawed at the body politick of the newly independent nations, African writers from Nigeria, to Ghana, Kenya, Somalia among others saw the pernicious trait and they aptly depicted it in their writings. Wole Soyinka’s pessimism in A Dance of the Forest, Chinua Achebe’s corrosive A Man of the People, Ayi Kwei Armah’s bleak The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s indicting A Grain of Wheat, all point to the African writer’s capacity to see beyond the frenzy and revelry that greeted independence. The crises that have held us down have always been there incipient and unnoticed for a long time except for the clairvoyant.
Nigeria didn’t and couldn’t celebrate her 64th independence anniversary because the phenomenon no longer has meaning. It lost its significance many years ago. Rather than celebrate and memorialize the day, Nigerians held their breadth and were tensed up in anticipation of the unknown. The nation was militarized as security forces poured onto the streets to preempt protests calling for an end to bad governance and clamouring for good governance. The new wave of protest which began in August was intended to end bad governance and all its attendant ills. It was not about regime change, but a call for responsive and responsible leadership. The protest organizers, patriots them all, insist on continuing the protest on 1st October, the day of the nation’s freedom in 1960. Afraid of freedom and uncomfortable with good governance, those holding the levers of power rolled out military tanks to put unarmed civilians clamouring for good governance in check while bandits and terrorists are enjoying a field day in many parts of the country. Independence has truly lost its meaning to the extent that those ruling Nigeria have become afraid of freedom from bad governance. Nigeria has been dubbed a failed state. It has been named among the most unsafe places to live in the world. It has been awarded the unflattering medal of the most corrupt country in the world. It has also been described as enmeshed in multi-dimensional poverty. These are real, scary and biting reality to the point that a child could question the essence of our independence. May be we should bring back the colonial masters. After all, did government not give us the old national anthem when we asked to be governed right? Let the old colonial masters return in the same token!
