When disorder becomes art, the world remains its spectators……..
As unassuming as she seemed, she’s an iconoclast. Hers was a radical stand point quite unusual for someone who lives in the diaspora. Several people had suggested the same petrifying message with different words and with different understanding of the implication of their avowed words. Hers wasn’t so different. However, she pushed her agenda with such a pulsating and vehement tone that seems to suggest a well thought out panacea for a seeming conundrum.
Her rendition and expression were as startling as her words as she doled out reasons for her views. She believed Nigeria was better off disintegrated. We were never a country in the first place. We were just a geographic expression of people with no similar culture or value bounded together by a knackered conjecture of the imperial colonialists. Nigeria was just another dissection off the Wild Wild Africa that needed to be conquered to the personal advancement of White Man and the rueful detriment of the black man’s existence.
To put it mildly, she wanted to be a South Nigerian!!! A South Nigeria consisting of the present South West and South East. She believes the Yoruba’s would rather go with the Igbo’s than associate with the North in the event of an outbreak of a looming war. History would suggest contrary to this however. What with the present spate of Boko Haram bombings that seems to threaten our already endangered unity as a country and nation, the disintegration could be faster approaching than may be agreeable.
I was shocked by her pronouncement. So was my friend, who introduced us, as we all continued to exhume over the state of the Nigerian affairs in faraway South Africa. We had just finished a midday tour of the Nelson Mandela Apartheid Museum in down town Johannesburg. What other objectionable discourse could find its way into gathering of three upwardly mobile Nigerian youths?
It had all started with a rightly directed or misdirected anger, depending on who’s reading, to the White Man. Truth is apartheid still lies in South Africa with a cold and uneasy cloud hovering around like a hazy harmattan. It seems like every one has learnt not to talk about an existent and unavoidable problem. The segregation is as apparent to a tourist as a gold fish. The Gold Fish, James Hardley Chase retorted, has no hiding place. Even at the conference I was later to attend in Durban, the segregation of the white and blacks was apparent. However, this blog is not centered on segregation in South Africa.
The uncomforting truth is that Nigeria is on a precipice. Let us continue in the fallible path and we’d surely become disintegrated just as another security alert from the US suggested yet again.
As I had opined in an older blog, “Thoughts on reclaiming the Nigerian Dream”, I do not believe nor subscribe to the fact that Nigeria would be better off disintegrated. You can examine my views by searching for that particular blog in older posts. However, these days, my fears seem to be getting more to me. Would Nigeria ever make it out of the vortex it seems enmeshed in, I questioned vacillatingly. Time and time again, how does one continue to believe in the entity called Nigeria with the train of bad leadership and poor vision trailing our not so nascent democracy since inception?
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you would notice that my tone of writing today suggests a mind tirelessly trying not to be tired of the Nigerian matter. It gets bothersome when nothing happens after so much is said.
#OccupyNigeria has come and gone and we have all reverted back to the status quo. Not one of the so called palliatives that GEJ suggested has manifested. GEJ would later say “that they are not realizable anymore”. Not one accountability measure was put in place. The only noticeable action by the Government is the recent arrest of Dr. Fashina and others while in a non-violent procession. Dr. Fashina and others were mindful enough to remember to commemorate the 40th day of the death of various victims of the #OccupyNigeria protest.
The probe of the oil sector is a shambolic demonstration of monumental fraud. At least through all this happenstance, Nuhu Ribadu finds a job. No need to argue his motivation for taking the job, time will tell. It always does.
Boko Haram keeps blowing up the Northern polity with incessant bomb blasts. They held up the northern city of Kano to ransom for several days having gotten more systematic, organized and dazzling. However, the State Security Service and the Police seem or pretend to be catching up with their ring leaders and sponsors. Did they just suddenly wake up from their slumber with the advent of the new IG of Police? Do they just know the sponsors and ring leaders? Or that’s what we are made to believe.
Truth is, it’s absolutely perplexing that no matter how much we try, we never get anything right in Nigeria. Wole Soyinka posits that “I’m afraid that in the case of Nigeria, once you find a solution, you very often have triggered off new complications”. One can only hope that the eventual resolution of the Boko Haram menace would not follow this fallible trend as Wole Soyinka suggested. One hopes we all keep sleeping and waking up each day to a still united Nigeria. That itself sounds like a pipe dream.
Foye.