On the 60th anniversary of Nigeria's Independence Day, I wrote and posted this poem titled "Nigeria at 60":
A 60-year old daydream, too bad…
Every year like a minute spent in anguish —
Too long for patience, too short for peace;
Nigeria's 60 years is one hour of bone-felt pains…
One of the people who read it did not take kindly to the poem. To them, I was rather too direct and critical of my country. I insisted, however, and to this day I still hold the view that the duty that I have as a writer speaking to power is not about the comfort of euphemism, not when human lives—my life and theirs inclusive—are at stake. At the time, I was a university student at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and was bedevilled by two things. There was the COVID-19 pandemic, subsiding as of October 1, and there was the prolonged ASUU strike.
The inspiration for the poem had come from a reflection on the state of the country which, looking back now, was much better for ordinary Nigerians than it is at the moment. I thought about Nigeria's history, what I knew, looked at the present, and attempted to look at what was possibly going to happen in the future. It was not the case that I was the best of students of history or that I was a seer, but even in my short existence as a Nigerian, I had seen enough. The Nigerianness of my childhood, which was only less than 20 years hitherto, seemed too luxurious at the moment.
The luxury of being a Nigerian is not only in the standard of living but in the want of security and peace. Some time before that day, a preteen had been found dead in my area. In my childhood, I played into the night. My mother did not have to worry about my safety, save the troubles that I would cause in the neighborhood like other regular kids. And not long after Independence Day, the #EndSARS protests erupted. The institutional failure of the country finally provoked a people-led confrontation both online and offline. The peak of the movement was the Lekki Tollgate Shooting of October 20. Neither the shooting nor the extremes around it were new.
Truth telling in Nigeria is a dangerous art, growing unpopular by the day. Whether you tell it individually or in a group, there will be repercussions. The attack on Nigerian youths in 2020 was more than a suppression of the truth. It was axiomatic of a country not accustomed to dissent, designed for perseverance. That is why too many things go to prayers and little things go to actions. When we gather, we gather to ideate, and then dispersed like all that is to do is to talk and lament. It has a certain religiosity to it: when you go to church or mosque, you pray to God and leave.
For me, Nigeria's challenges, its 666, go back to the six subsets of two major issues: corruption and bigotry. Corruption in Nigeria comes in pairs: it is at once individual as it is institutional; it is moral and financial. Bigotry in Nigeria is both ethnic and religious. The political harlotry in the country is mostly used to aggravate a form of corruption or bigotry. Politically, Nigeria today is as much the Nigeria of the 1960s. The marked difference between then and now is the nationalist struggle that was widespread, yet the national problems we have can be traced back to them.
In January 1966, when Nigeria first experienced a coup, it was informed by allegations of marginalisation and misrepresentation of a section of the country. In July of the same year, there was a counter-coup. In other words, in about six years of its independence, Nigeria had already splintered politically into a country where ethnic (and, although less pronounced, religious) commonness became more important than national service. Words are barely needed to describe how much of a bestseller this orientation is in the current Nigerian political landscape.
Another thing that sells in Nigerian politics is religious bigotry. At about this time last year, the President of the United States of America was sold the single story of Christian genocide in Nigeria. For weeks, Nigerians fought over the veracity of the claim, myself included. What occurred to me at the time was this: it is easier to find a Muslim or a Christian than to find a Nigerian. The same level of bigotry has, of course, been shown by Muslims—case in point: the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) making a release about former Governor Nasir El-Rufai's legal battle, which astounded me because I had not seen a release like that before when others were embattled.
Perhaps the reason why it is difficult to find a true Nigerian is because it is hard to define the Nigerian Dream. In OAU, when studying American Literature, I had to read and research the American Dream. But what is the Nigerian Dream? This question troubles me as much as it excites me. On the one hand, I see the allure of being able to interface a country with a thread of ideas. With Nigeria, things are not quite easy. The overarching idea is a game of them vs us. It reminds me of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story. In Nigeria, sad stories, ugly stories are okay to some people as long as they are not the victims. It happens to them, only happens to them, not us, never us.
What disturbs me about this divide among us Nigerians is that it allows us to live in a state of contradictions. We know injustice, but we have a different name for it when it crosses our ethnic or religious interests. We know favoritism, but we call it grace when it 'favors' us. It is off-putting and I have found it less surprising that it has rendered us pessimists and discouraged those who will us to be more daring like Mr Macaroni, who recently ebbed his activism for similar reasons.
Like the dilemma of which comes first in the creation riddle of the egg and the fowl, I am conflicted about whether or not it is Nigerians who corrupt their leaders or it is the leaders who corrupt Nigerians. Yes, I just admitted that there are corrupt Nigerians. It is a hard pill to swallow, but outside politics, in business, in life, either through one or all of the points of poverty, maladministration, greed, many Nigerians have found corruption normative. It is the philosophy in that popular prayer: may the reign of (insert a leader's name) favor my family.
I do not know the odds of praying our way out of the mess we perpetually recreate but I know that, for a country at 66, we can do better than prayers garnished with dispirited nationalism. It is that, or the Nigerian Dream may never be defined or taken to mean the abandonment of the country in the form of japa and the more terrible this-country-must-not-be-the-end-of-me routes to Libya that the leading journalist Fisayo Soyombo recently risked his life to investigate, which is a terrible way for a country to lose its promising youth.
In my undergraduate aluta days at OAU, there was a chant signifying the disenchantment of the youth with the older generation: lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ l'Awó fún wọn, lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ l'Awó fún wọn, education tí a ń sanwó fún, lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ lọ́fẹ̀ẹ́ l'Awó fún wọn (it was free that Awo[lowo] gave them, it was free that Awo[lowo] gave them, the education that we pay for, the education that we pay for). For the Nigerian youth, the country is a box to escape, because those who witnessed its good times are the creators of its hard times. There is often a need to reinvent yourself, with little to no resources, even when the country may just take it away from you with bad policies. It is like confronting a form of one's biblical 666 or Islamic Dajjal.
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