A failing regime seeks to appropriate what it sees as the success of a lost and irredeemable daughter, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch. Africa’s most populous nation tried and failed to latch on to someone it hardly knows but perceives to be at the zenith of her political career.
Rushing to identify with every successful milestone and claim every perceived son or daughter it believes to be making a positive impact across the globe is like dancing naked in the market place.
Social media is full of global citizens praising the enterprising and resilient spirit of the Nigerian. South African opposition leader, Julius Malema, basically idolises the Nigerian spirit.
Across the globe, patients treated by Nigerian doctors latch on to them. Students lucky enough to pick classes taught by Nigerian professors constantly eulogise them. There was a time when frequent flyers feel safest with a Nigerian pilot at the controls. The story out there was that Nigerian pilots could safely land a plane anywhere.
In the field of sports, Nigerians are making waves. Four enterprising female athletes raised, equipped and qualified a bobsled team to the 2017 winter Olympics. Tobi Amusan is a global sensation like Chioma Ajunwa before her. Abraham Adesanya, Kamoru Usman and their group have raised the Nigerian flag at the UFC. Jelani Aliyu was a celebrated designer for Chevrolet. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Oby Ezekwesili attained global fame and relevance that President Olusegun Obasanjo head-hunted them to come home and serve. In the case of Ngozi, he agreed to pay for her services in US dollars.
Dr Oluyinka Olutoye broke the fake Pentecostal preachers by giving the world a taste of what it means to be born again. When he discovered a congenitally defective foetus in its mother’s womb, he took her to the theatre, fixed the deformity and returned it to be born at full term. It remains an unmatched feat. And if that sounded like a fluke, Bennet Omalu, another Nigerian-born forensic pathologist, almost necromantically talked corpses into exclusively revealing to him the nexus between dementia and heavy combat sports.
Give it to the Nigerian, we are an exceptional lot even when we do shitty stuff. The bad eggs that tend to obscure the legacy of the stars among us express a wicked trait of genius. Nobody is proud of Hushpuppi, but even law enforcement marvels at the fraudsters’ capacity to break codes with little schooling. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to down an airplane with explosives hidden in his shoes. These are aberrations revealing that the same fountain sometimes oozes cold and hot water.
Each of the successful stories mentioned above comes with a condition – they would have amounted to nothing if they had not left the success-killing-shitstem in Nigeria. That rings true of the Tinubu/Shettima regime as it does for all the ones before it; and if we keep walking the same trajectory the result would remain the same.
The above narrative shows that the diaspora success stories of many Nigerians are beyond the case of prophets not having honour in their own home. It explains the principle adumbrated in Bob Marley’s classic I Shot the Sheriff, the principle of each time we plant a seed, they say kill them before they grow!
Scanning through social media daily, you find local stars rising like comets and plummeting into obscurity. Youngsters building vehicles with wood, helicopters from scrap metals, scientific inventions from the garbage dump – all with little or no formal education. Uproot these prodigies and plant them in any good soil where the fertilizer of their raw talents could strengthen their innovative minds and you find geniuses.
Unfortunately, many of them would die with their dreams of stardom unrealised, their talents and inventive mind buried while Tinubu and Shettima junket the globe begging for businesses to come and set up in Nigeria. While at it, the arid policies they impose at home force those already here to pack up and leave.
If half of the energy and resources Nigeria’s leaders spend ‘wooing’ foreign investors were channeled into identifying and tapping local talents and creating the enabling environment for them to grow; Nigeria would be an Eldorado. If Nigeria had charted a plan towards not just making the country an economic potential but a practical hub, the likes of Kemi Badenoch would be proudly out there telling anyone who cared to listen that though born in England, she has Nigerian roots.
It is a sad irony that so often, the best lives and thrives outside Nigeria. It is saddening because most of them would long to identify. The atmosphere where they have bloomed is fraught with impediments, but the opportunities are always there encouraging excellence. Unfortunately, many have given up their Nigerian identity and the reasons are obvious.
Every time a political party congress holds and delegates are bribed in dollars to produce a winner, these stars reassure themselves that Nigeria is not ready. Each time an electoral cycle is completed with mindless violence producing a ‘landslide victory’ for the least qualified, these patriots cringe. Each time they hear a minister making excuses for failure instead of a turnaround roadmap for progress, these Nigerians turn away in shame.
It is hard to identify with a country that has participated in peace missions before it ever raised its own independence flag; almost single-handedly restored peace to two war-torn nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone only to crumble at keeping its own borders safe. The shitstem that Tinubu and Shettima preside over repeats the sick phenomenon in which a new national assembly announces itself by first importing foreign SUVs rather than patronising Innoson Motors in Onitsha or before it has debated a roadmap for fixing the bad roads.
They know that the schools they attended have been run down and that there is no safety for the kids left there. They could be picked up by bandits for ransom, raped and turned into baby factories while the state displays crash incapacity to intervene. By Jove, they are disappointed each time a thieving politician wriggles free from the supposed long arm of the law while journalists and human rights activists are handcuffed for cases that are civil in nature.
These and many ills of Nigeria leave these stars feeling nothing to being Nigerian. It is hard enough that the new passports exhibiting their adopted homes record their birthplace as Nigeria. All these because, much as the leaders deny it, the potentially successful country they ruin is a failed state.
It fails to provide security, electricity, water, good road, food, peace and sanity required for progress. It fails to preserve human life, maintain a sane environment to cure a Kemi Badenoch of the disease of the self-hate that plagues her. It fails to reveal to Shettima that there is nothing to be proud of in a black political upstart who eulogizes colonization, romanticizes slavery and exculpates the colonial overlord of her crimes while opposing the clamour for reparation. This young lady has nothing on the real stars who outshine her from coast to coast to coast.
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