What will you change about Nigeria?

[Dave_McEwan_Hill]

A very good point, Bakangizo

But the common man takes his example from his leaders.
And if the police are not up to the job and the churches and mosques are full of thieves where does society go?

[HUSNAA]

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!!

[Muhsin]

Salam,

That lengthy reply by Husnaa reminds me of the old days. That's exactly the Aunty Husnaa we know. I'll peruse it and have my comment later, inshaAllah.

[Dave_McEwan_Hill]

Sadly, I have rarely read such a lot of nonsense.
I have no time for the Americans who are the most destructive force in the world but Nigeria's failing are Nigeria' s and nobody elses.
Nigeria is bigger than every European country except Russia.
If Nigeria is being run by American elements it is only because Nigerians are in collusion with these Americans.

That is all - and excuses like Husnaa's are completely wrong.

[lionger]

Husnaa abeg dis ya tori get too much unsubstantiated myth mixed with half-truths. With the sole exception of Patrice Lumumba, all the other leaders you mentioned were largely propped up and/or brought down by their own inadequacies and follies with little foreign input. I think it is high time we stopped consoling ourselves by blaming the West. Ffrankly it gives the West too much credit, and and in a childish way relieves us of too much responsibility. This is the sort of argument that our grandparents and those who came of age during the independence era held dear to their hearts. It was the result of anti-colonial zeal and was understandable then, but after 50 years of indigenous misrule that frankly dwarfs that of our formers colonial masters, perhaps the time is ripe for us to admit some painful truths about ourselves.

How is it that Western interests are hell bent on putting us down, while at the same time hauling other nations from the gutters into modernity? For example, has Nigeria suffered more from world powers than Vietnam? By 1975, Vietnam had spent 116 years fighting brutal wars of survival  against the British, French, Japanese, Chinese and American goverments'. By war's end, 90% of its infrastructure was destroyed. But look where they are today - a nation that was facing food shortages 30 years ago is now world's second-largest exporter in rice. Its agricultural sector contributes 20 % of its GDP, has a growing service economy, and is rapidly industrializing thanks to growing FDI. I don't need to tell you where we are in comparison, though from natural observation we ought to have long been a industrialized food-basket. There is also the examples of South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Singapore - nations that also suffered under colonialism and have their own tales of woe concerning Western exploitation, but are not the basketcases that we are today.

We are not the only nation that has subscribed to IMF - infact, last time I checked, hardly any African nations are among the top borrowers. Top borrowers such as Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil are forging ahead. Many countries borrow from IMF and some have been able to turn their economies around (Trinidad and Tobago comes to mind) - yet African nations who borrow less are the ones screaming the loudest. Why? Of course if IMF had denied us loans we would be screaming racism, yet now we are complaining that they forced loans down our throat to destroy us. Do we really have anyone other than ourselves to blame for the fact that we railroaded ourselves into a last resort scheme via economic mismanagement (and that is what the IMF is, a last resort lender), then we chopulate the money and find ourselves sinking in a bottomless pit of debt? Sometimes such complaints smack of childish naivete and ignorance about how the world works.

We are also not the only ones to have an 'alien' democratic system 'forced' on us -  if that statement is even correct. It happened to Japan after WWII - but do you hear the Japanese complaining today? Something similar happened to the Germans at the same time - are they crying blue murder as well? Ironically it is here that I slightly agree with you, in the sense that strong-arm rule is better placed in making the difficult decisions necessary for industrializing societies than classic Western-style democracies. But when we switched in the 60s to a military dictatorship, what happened?

The difference between Nigeria and all the other nations I have listed is that the latter have leaders with vision and hardworking technocrats at critical levels. We have not yet achieved that in Nigeria. Take the issue of corruption, which BakanGizo has again brought back to the forefront as our biggest problem. We frankly have not done enough to curb it, and there is hardly a point in our post-independence history that it seemed like we were. And as I said before, the roots of corruption go far beyond independence to precolonial times. As the British began to hand over power to Nigerians post WWII, corruption began to explode. There was a further explosion during the Gowon and Babangida regimes to the the sorry state we now find ourselves in. But the fact is that all industrialized nations - including Western ones - at some point in their history noticed the inhersent corrupt nature of their societies and took serious steps to curb it to manageable levels, and some like Singapore were able to achieve that withing a generation. We will have to bite the bullet and take similar steps to do the same. Nobody else will do it for us.

We had better grow old and  up to the way the world works. In this global village, no nation is an island. We are all connected and dependent on each other to survive. We need Western investment in order to develop our societies, whether we like the West or not. That investment isn't simply going to come out of the goodness of Western hearts - we have to create the conditions for that to happen. So we can either follow the examples of other nations that I listed or remain the footmat of the world. It is that simple.

[HUSNAA]

Sadly, I have rarely read such a lot of nonsense.
I have no time for the Americans who are the most destructive force in the world but Nigeria's failing are Nigeria' s and nobody elses.
Nigeria is bigger than every European country except Russia.
If Nigeria is being run by American elements it is only because Nigerians are in collusion with these Americans.

That is all - and excuses like Husnaa's are completely wrong.

It was quite therapeutic though!! Besides what do you want, a peer reviewed article worthy of an A list journal? You aint getting it. If neither you nor Lionger believe me, it doesnt necessarily mean that there are no hard truths in what I wrote. We have different ways of looking at the same thing that is all. Neither is wrong. Depends on yr outlook!!

[Dave_McEwan_Hill]

But the question still is ......are you grown-up enough to run your own country and look after yourselves - or do other people still control you.
If that is so, fifty years after independence, that is shameful.

Nigeria will remain in a mess until Nigeria takes full responsibility for Nigeria's problems and Nigeria's failures.

[ummutameem]

i am not one to go through lengthy posts, but are people still blaming d white man for our failures?

i recommend walter rodney's 'how europe underdeveloped africa', that book will clear any doubts we may harbour dat we r still under colonialism, we don pass dat stage i beg, any problems we have are ours, if we have help in creating those problems is bcos we allowed it.
besides i think d statute of limitation has expired on colonialism, come onnnnnnnnnnnn!

[lionger]

i am not one to go through lengthy posts, but are people still blaming d white man for our failures?

i recommend walter rodney's 'how europe underdeveloped africa', that book will clear any doubts we may harbour dat we r still under colonialism, we don pass dat stage i beg, any problems we have are ours, if we have help in creating those problems is bcos we allowed it.
besides i think d statute of limitation has expired on colonialism, come onnnnnnnnnnnn!

Walter Rodney was a brilliant man no doubt; however I think he got many fundamental issues woefully wrong in his seminal work. The idea that imperialist European machinations from the late 15th century onwards is largely responsible for the present African underdevelopment is a very bad argument. This presupposes that African societies were actually headed towards anything like 'development' before Europeans came and 'ruined everything' - such an argument is not sustainable, as much as some would like to believe it. It was wrong at the time Rodney wrote his book in the early 70s and it should be even more obvious now that it is wrong, when after several decades of independence many African nations are yet to get their act together.

[Dave_McEwan_Hill]

Well said,guys

[ummutameem]

@lionger, im refering to cap. 7 or 8 of d book, where he debunkd all his theories n blamed us for our failures, dats d beauty of d book actually, for me anyway

[bakangizo]

Good posts everyone, but I go with what lionger and Dave said. No matter how much we may want to blame the West for our misfortunes, bottomline is, 99% of the fault lies at our feet. Granted the Western ways may have corrupted our morals, but fact is the difference btw doing what is right and what is wrong is very clear. If really we do copy everything from there, how come we fail/refuse to copy their type of good governance? Why do we only copy bad things? Was is it the West that forced your LG Chairman, State Governor and President to steal the treasury clean? Are we saying up till this moment we, as a nation, do not what's good for us, and what's bad?

Our failure as a nation is our responsibility, no one else's. Both leadership and followership of this country has failed in thier responsibility. The leaders for failing to provide the purposeful and selfless leadership needed for to steer the country towards economic development. The followership failed in resisting bad governance. We either collude with them, excuse them or are too passive to resist and insist for better. Worse, we compete with them in corrupt behaviours, forgetting that the most important contribution the common man can give to his/her nation is to abhor, shun and resist bad behaviours as may be exhibited by the leaders. Not follow suit, as is the case here.

[Suleman]

Without being a conspiracy theorist, I think there is little or no doubt that the western world have done and will continue to do whatever is necessary to "protect their interest". That not withstanding, other Nations have overcome that hurdle so why not us? The answer is surely within.
I suppose one of the major issues we have to deal with, as a society, is the issue of responsibilty. At the moment, most people agree that it is the responsibilty of the government to provide infrastructure, law and order and possibily even sustenance to its citizens, which is fair enough. What a lot of us do not feel is the responsiblity for the government itself. I would advocate a complete overhaul of the tax regime, such that every one pays tax one way or the other and no matter how small. This will force the citizens to (a) get off their back sides and be productive and (b) question every thing the government does cause its their money.

[Dave_McEwan_Hill]

Suleman

Exactly. That is how democracies develop. "Democracy " may be thought of a a noble ideal. Actually its much more mundane than that.
What drives democarcy is the concept of "If he's getting it so should I"  or " If I and my family can't get the same opportunity as him and his family we must do something about it"

What prevents this in Nigeria and, in particular, in the north of Nigeria is the undue deference shown to rich and successful people.
Many are satisfied to get some crumbs from the big man's table

[HUSNAA]

i am not one to go through lengthy posts, but are people still blaming d white man for our failures?

i recommend walter rodney's 'how europe underdeveloped africa', that book will clear any doubts we may harbour dat we r still under colonialism, we don pass dat stage i beg, any problems we have are ours, if we have help in creating those problems is bcos we allowed it.
besides i think d statute of limitation has expired on colonialism, come onnnnnnnnnnnn!

Read the post first and then decide if there is a mention of a white man through out the essay.
and PS, there's more than one type of colonialism.............