Matters that keep you awake

• “Prepare now for the solutions of tomorrow” – African Proverb

You may have noticed that Daily Trust has a strong stable of excellent weekly columnists, and some of them will take up some back pages, including mine. I had asked to be relieved by the paper (again!) to attend to other equally important matters. I am particularly excited that the columnist  you will read on this page from next week, Bulama Bukarti, has a reputation as an outstanding writer with rich insights and an analytical ability that will do great justice to the back page on Wednesdays. So, this will be my last column, and it is difficult to express how grateful I am to the leadership and management and staff of this paper for giving me a platform to express basically personal perspectives on a very loud medium. I want to thank you, the reader, who followed what I wrote, either to gain something or to criticise something. I enjoyed the criticisms as much as I was lifted by  the commendations. This is where I have to say that those who will be happier if I disappear entirely are likely to be disappointed. I plan, in sha Allah, to remain visible and audible on matters that affect our communities and our dear country.

Although the future will be without a weekly squeak  from me, I will be one of millions of Nigerians who will continue to stay awake from worry over personal and social problems that are produced or shaped by contemporary issues in our country. This is no cliche: we never had a combination of pervasive and multiple security challenges, weak leadership, damaging divisions at elite and political levels, a weakening economy, natural disasters such as the pandemic and mountain of challenges around our future as we have today. Are our leaders likely to get a handle on insecurity before it drowns our entire nation? Is there the strength to re-engineer a national will to fight back and retrieve the nation from the criminals? President Buhari is either in deep denial over how insecure every Nigerian is, or is completely overwhelmed, to the point that he has no idea what needs to be done at all. There is a third option that would have been unthinkable but for  the state of our existence: does the president really know how desperate our circumstances are?

Governors are beginning to dare to call out a president over his management of security. They also quarrel openly over what needs to be done, with the very little to do it with. All these add to the panic of citizens who have a right to expect protection. The military is not winning its war, and current battle to recapture the town of Marte will test the value of the change of guards at the top of the military.

Either way, Boko Haram these days likes to show off its  weight gain under the Buhari administration. Public safety is not being policed and protected by the state. The federal police has lost its confidence and competence, coming alive only periodically when the administration’s pride is pricked by groups who are getting good at it. Citizens worry daily when they will fall victims to an assortment of armed criminals who now appear to have the run of the country. Abductions from schools in the North are threatening  the already poor state of education in the region. Kidnappings in the South are triggering quarrels which threaten the fragile state of  our co-existence. The bandits in our forests grows in confidence by the day, and may soon acquire a solid political consciousness and a capacity to transmute  beyond periodic forays into a fighting force.

With two more years to the end of President Buhari’s non-governance, you would have thought there will be serious efforts to put in place the type of leadership that will commence the reversal of the rot and reconstruction of the Nigerian state from 2023. Even the most hardened  optimist will despair at the state of the elite that  will inherit Buhari’s failures. The two major parties are lost in battles that will destroy them and each other. Ordinarily, this will not be a cause to lose much sleep over. After all, between them, the PDP and APC have wrecked dreams and the promise of a nation that could have emerged from ashes of military rule with vision and commitment to realise the potentials of a truly great African nation. Now they confront new threats with antiquated weapons. Their remnants will be involved in even more damaging scramble for the carcass of a nation that really cannot stand further abuse.

Their sole aim is still to provide platforms for state capture by politicians who have no feet to stand on unless they smash the country and leant on its rubble, or they cover themselves in tatters of ethnic particulars and aspire to govern a country running away from being destroyed by narrow and offensive identities. Will the politician emerge who will inspire an elite to assume the responsibility to govern a country desperate for good governance (or even survival), a leader who  will use  power to defeat the criminal, reduce poverty, build bridges across the nation and restore trust and integrity to public office and institutions? Instead of learning from the most pronounced legacy of President Buhari, which is the mountain of evidence that ethnicity or faith of the leader is no guarantee that his language or his faith will be of benefit to those who share them, our future leaders are laying the seeds for further damage by defining the prime quality of a leader as his sub-Nigerian identity.

Will there be a revolution that will change the basic structure of Nigerian politics, sweep away the old order represented by most of the politicians currently holding or angling to capture the state and give the nation a new lease of life after the Buhari misadventure? Is there enough constructive anger and faith that can be converted into fuel for major changes before the 2023 elections and used to ignite mass support to take the nation away from its liabilities represented by today’s politicians in the two parties, generate national consensus that this country is worth saving and serving, and give assurances to tens of millions of our young that they have a good future as Nigerians? Will very old Nigerians stop quarrelling with each other over restructuring, and get down to the business of giving it meaning and substance? If the country survives in a state that allows for the conduct of the 2023 elections, will the electoral process withstand the negative impact of a severely damaged political system? Will there be alternatives to the old order? Is there a chance that the quality of leadership can be improved because the political system has been challenged  enough to yield to a fairly new order, and an electoral process that has been strengthened to reflect the people’s will?

The nation can be pulled from the brink of collapse even  after its foundations have been eroded by poor and indifferent governance, poisonous politics and assaults from multiple sources that capture populations, territory and power through the use of violence. This, however, will require a massive effort which re-unites the elite with the population to insist that President Buhari and politicians who prop him up  cannot wait out their term at the expense of more damage to our lives today and more uncertainties over our future. Of all the matters that should keep Nigerians awake at night, none is more serious than the absence of evidence that some Nigerians of substance who possess courage and integrity will step up and challenge our racing decline.