Nigeria is a mess at the moment. We tell ourselves that we have no one to blame but us. We forget that we are sometimes just puppets being pulled by the strings of Western Interests.
When we were a young nation just out of colonialism, we had the best leaders who had the best interests of their subjects or the ppl they serve at heart. Yes I am talking about Tafawa Balewa, Sardauna, Zik, Ironsi Awolowo etc. They were set to make Nigeria a great and wealthy nation. But what happened? They were cut down in their tracks!! Out of the five I mentioned, three were murdered in cold blood and when all is said and done the dastardly deeds happened so that a wealthy, well educated and resource rich Nigeria did not become a threat to future Western interests. Whenever an African country gets nationalist leaders, they are mown down in their prime. What happened to Kwame Nkruma or Patrice Lumumba or Gamel AbdunNasir or others like them whom I dont know about?
Why was the Gowon regime allowed to stay for nine yrs without interference? It was because Gowon was a very ineffective leader where development was concerned. His reign was peaceful because nothing profound or fundamental was achieved in total. Nigeria was relatively wealthy, we still had our groundnut pyramids then, the OPEC cartel had been instituted and the Nigerian currency was stronger than the dollar and just as potent as the pound sterling. Corruption was of course occurring just as it did today, but more assiduously and many ppl didnt really notice because the average Nigerian of the time can afford to live relatively comfortably being that food and other exports were cheap. I remember being very sick when I was about 8 yrs old in the 70s, and I was taken to Nassarawa hospital and treated for Malaria. To restore my appetite, my dad went and bought a whole carton of canned peak milk and soaked up pieces of bread and fed me on that. The can of peak milk then couldnt have been more than 1.5 to 2 pence (or their Kobo equivalent now). So you can see that the most average of average Nigerians was able to afford basic food commodities and other things (not now!!)
Gowon was not a visionary leader (he was once reported to have said that Nigeria had so much money that it didnt know what to do with it!! meaning
he didnt know how to utilize it to the best advantage of the ppl!!! Gowon allegedly went around giving money gratis to other nations. I even heard that HK was a beneficiary of such largesse once upon a time. But look at where HK is now! We can hardly hope to compete with that small island at present!!). As a result of Gowon's inertia, he was allowed to stay by the invisible powers in control.
When Murtala took over from him and decided to be anti western, he was assassinated by no less than the CIA, which was in the habit of ridding itself of any leader that didn't tow its line or whose feet got bigger than the boots he was allowed to wear). It is reported that Murtala was one of the last presidents to be assassinated by the CIA. President Ford was going to sign an Act that will prohibit the CIA from assassinating foreign presidents. Ford was requested to wait until the CIA did one last job. He acquiesced and General Murtala was taken out of the equation together with God Knows who else. Afterwards, the bill or act was passed through.
We got OBJ in the stead of Murtala. What was interesting about the choice of OBJ was that he was reported to be on very good terms with the CIA at the time. Whether he had a hand in getting rid of Murtala is debatable, but he was certainly very much in company and at home with the folks at Langley, Virginia.
Of course we got "democracy" the national treasure of the CIA and the bedrock of the American way of life. In 1979, our first elected president was sworn into office. His term lasted just long enough for some honest anti nonsense Nigerians like Buhari to realize that we were going down the wrong drain both economically and corruption wise. There is a minister of that second republic(?) who was alleged to have commented that until Nigerians started eating/ scavenging from street trash, he would never agree that Nigerians were hungry or poor! (Well 30 yrs down the line, it has come to that!!) There was also a minister who commented on TV that cars were not for the Nigerian masses, (meaning that they were a luxury item –huh- ) at the time when Nigerians could no longer afford to buy brand new vehicles.
Well anyway, when Buhari and Co assumed power, they had the good intention of turning the country round for the better. Their campaigns of War Against Indiscipline actually worked. One could feel the country was shaping up. There was a certain feel in the atmosphere. Ppl went to work on time to avoid being disgraced. Hoarded commodities which created artificial scarcity and inflation were forced out of ware houses and silos and the perpetrators were jailed. No favoritism was shown; all were treated equally before the law.
But what happened? Buhari's govt was toppled. Why? Well not so much for anything than the fact that if Nigerians continued along that path of enforced discipline, there was every reason to believe that they would actually imbibe that discipline and become a potent resource to be eventually reckoned with on the world stage. That was something that must not be allowed to happen. So Buhari's govt had to go! According to the puppet masters, better a bad military leadership than a good military leadership.
I honestly cannot remember that the West ever went berserk when IBB came to the fore. That was because he kowtowed to the West and adopted all of IMF's policies hook line and sinker when the proverbial carrot of an IMF loan was dangled before his dollar dazzled gaze! He made a total mess of everything including miscalculating the phenomenal popularity of the late Abiola, by allowing him to contest when he (IBB) was loath to hand the mantle of power to him as the successor to the presidency. Then he annulled the June 12th election when he realized that Abiola had the majority mandate over the other candidate and gave over to Abaca after a failed attempt to maintain Ernest Shonekan as a puppet president.
Abaca was a no nonsense guy as well as possibly being anti IMF. All of a sudden there was this hue and cry over the military leadership in Nigeria. There were the imposition of sanctions and a pariah status on Nigeria by the Clinton administration. As a result of this, Abaca steered his focus from the West and brought China on board. Hence probably the start of the love affair between Nigeria and China and we probably pioneered this polygamous affair between other leaders and China across the African continent.
Abaca was very much a nationalist and wanted what was good for the nation, although his detractors will never agree with this statement. But Biri yai kama da mutum according to the Hausa adage(?)/idiom(?) I believe that Abacha wasn’t a fan of the IMF and he actually got to peg the Naira at 80 to the dollar and kept inflation down and anchored to the ground. He was a good guy despite his rubs with Abiola. But he wasn’t pro west and therefore he had to go. He died allegedly poisoned from a drink he had.
So here we are with the most corrupt set of public officials the world has ever seen, practicing a democracy about which we wear blinkers and refuse to admit that we are not even toddlers at it any more and our democracy is well past its infancy and toddler hood. At fifty we cant even call ourselves matasa for God’s Sake!!!! Haba!! Da haihuwar akuyoyi mukeyi, ai da yanzu mun tara jikokin tattaba kunnen mu!!!
The present corrupt set of Nigerians that we are lamenting about is nothing but the successful outcome of the years of deliberate suppression of the latent goodness of Nigerians through the nurturing of bad leaders over the good ones – something which at some level the average Nigerian had no control over, because it is akin to the effect of the changes in global weather systems, that have been brought about by global warming. The cause originates externally from somewhere but the impacts are felt negatively thousands of miles from source.
What never fails to amaze me is just how blatantly the West flaunts its interests in our faces without the least regard for what will work for us or what’s good for us in the long run! We must behave according to how it wants us to behave regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad and in most cases the outcomes favour them not us. To me, a good military leadership is way better than a bad democracy!! Buhari’s tactics were dictatorial and heavy handed, but that was what we needed at the time (and still do).
I think Nigerians have got so unruly and undisciplined that one needs a proverbial hammer to panel beat them into decorum. We needed and still need to be told what to do in the harshest possible way, but with the proviso that the scolding cuts across all spectra of society, and especially the shorter wavelength regions where the hotshots reside!! However the West has refused to recognize this. The West decrees that we be soft pedalled by a set of democracy touting louts who come to fisticuffs inside the hallowed chambers of the National Assembly. These honorables should really be called dis-honorabble rousers, a name more in keeping with their calling as area boys/ yan daba or (what do they call them in Gombe state?) as they were forced on their electorates through threats and coerscion by that malignant tentacle called the PDP. This is what the West wants for us, misleading men who only get passionate to the point of criminality when they think the golden goose is being pulled out of their greasy grasping paws. Heck we are not even soft pedalled as much as steamrollered out of life and livelihood! Allah Ya Kyauta dai.
So as far as I can decipher, we have bad leadership now, because we were never meant to have good ones, as they will conflict with the interests of the Western World. We have been successfully slotted into the niche that was designed for us 50 yrs or so back and our leaders are nothing more than the bitter fruits of that Grand Design. Now that the common man has been pushed to the end of his tether and he is getting wiser about the lay of the land so to speak, new ways to subjugate us are being conceived. Witness the new world order in which Nigeria is a labelled a harbour for terrorists and terrorist activities. This is part of the next Grand Design to keep us anchored in the dust of poverty and underdevelopment.
Watch out!!
