It is no more news that Nigeria’s national football team Super Eagles were defeated last week Tuesday on home ground, by a better prepared Ghanaian national team—the Black Stars, and there ensued a riotous scene of mayhem and destruction of facilities at the Moshood Abiola Stadium Abuja, the venue of the contest. Just as well have ripples been cascading in the aftermath of the development. Without much equivocation, prominent among these ripples are the swirling tales about the post-match invasion of the pitch. While, some had viewed it as an expression of frustration by the spectators over the failure of the Super Eagles to win to game, other more perceptive observers look beyond the game and see a bigger cause for the riot. After all, as is easy to recall, this was not the first time Nigeria’s national team had lost a match at the same stadium.
A more realistic reason for that instance of anomie at the stadium, therefore, has to do with something beyond the match, which certainly borders on the mood of the nation. This is a factor which the country’s leadership community has seemingly failed to come to terms with, and rather demonstrated lack of capacity or unwillingness to heed. Hence leaders at the various tiers and theatres of governance have in most situations, been wrongly placing every foot, in resolving the nation’s numerous problems.
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Even the most cursory flashback on the country’s public space outside the build-up to the Nigeria-Ghana encounter, (including the historic football rivalry between Nigeria and Ghana), points to the circumstance whereby the country is hurtling towards a breaking point— as if in dalliance with a self-destruct agenda. Taken in context some of such developments actually portray the dynamics of the Nigerian society as such in which government at any level is at war with the citizenry, and hence pays scant premium to being on the same page with them. While a comprehensive treatise of such tendencies may fall outside the space constraints of this article, a few instances will actually clarify the point.
Right now, the country is grieving over at least three avoidable instances and mindless massacre of innocent and unsuspecting Nigerians, who could not have been found elsewhere judging from what they were engaged in at the time of their mishap. The Abuja Kaduna Rail Service which had been the saving grace for commuters between the two cities since unknown gunmen took over the highway between the two strategic cities, was attacked last Monday night, with casualty list not finalised but with many dead, injured and yet others unaccounted for and probably in the custody of the assailants, awaiting the now routine ransom horse trading for their release.
Two days earlier on Saturday, the Kaduna International Airport came under attack by about 200 armed assailants who killed some persons before being repelled by the security personnel on ground. These attacks are coming in the face of the unrelenting wave of attacks and killings going on in several parts of the country, simultaneously.
Meanwhile, even as the country laments over these heinous developments, a dispensation whose insidiousness seems underrated was the manner of conducting the last National Convention of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), s it is needless to emphasise that it was anything but democratic, even by the most liberal consideration. Not surprisingly, several court cases have been instituted in different parts of the country over tendencies associated with it even as their outcomes are keenly awaited by not a few Nigerians. However while the long wait may last, it behooves Nigerians to keep their fingers crossed over whatever expectations they may be nursing over changing the status quo in a hurry.
Even as the symbolism of that APC National Convention may be lost to some observers, the dispensation does not diminish the fact that what was at stake at the function was a process of fostering leadership of the country in both the near and distant future. What type of aspirants which the outcome of the APC national Convention will foster by adopting the parochial process of manning its national party hierarchy with a consensus list, is any body’s guess. However, for now the country’s political culture has been translated from the ordinarily discomfiting paper democracy into a full blown monarchy, as far as the APC is concerned. Nigerians had been lamenting over the excesses of a cabal in the Muhamadu Buhari administration which has been identified with driving the country off the road to national progress. The APC National Convention has simply perpetuated the reign of that cabal even after Buhari’s tenure. What that holds for Nigeria is not far to see.
Expectedly, the leading opposition party—the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will soon commence its process of fielding aspirants for various offices. How it may go about its own process is of interest to not a few Nigerians. Will it also adopt the consensus approach and deny the country the benefit of the popular choices emerging is the question.
While the operators of the levers of power in the political establishment may be asserting their capacity to act at will, including the playout of their visceral aversion to allow change in the status quo, the situation only mirrors the wider Nigerian society, who are increasingly induced to hold that access to authority is license to impunity. However where nobody reserves the monopoly to mischief, it will serve the better interest of the elite to self-regulate their excesses as such are only avoidable faces of a creeping self-destruct agenda. The Abiola Stadium incident was just a tip of the iceberg-like resentment. The continued misreading of this scenario remains an existential error by them and to the detriment of the country.
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