Last week in Lubumbashi, DR Congo, some men broke into an animal sanctuary and kidnapped three baby chimpanzees that were rescued from the wild. Within hours, they sent proof of life photos to Franck Chantereau, founder of the sanctuary. They wanted ransom and they wanted it now.
The irony was that they had planned to abduct Franck’s children, who were supposed to be back for the holidays. When they discovered the children didn’t make it back for the holiday, they decided to stage what is possibly the world’s first kidnapping of chimpanzees for ransom.
It reads like a joke. Except it isn’t. Kidnappings have become far too rampant and governments across the continent, especially here in Nigeria, where kidnapping for ransom has become endemic, have failed to come up with strategies to deal with it. And we have continued to pay the price for it with broken systems and interrupted development. Whatever little progress or advancement we make as a people suffers regression over such crimes and the ineptitude that allows them to fester. In essence, such things are possible and rampant only because we seem to allow far too many things to be taken as jokes or to be treated as such.
As I write, there are reports of the release of the last remaining 23 victims of the Abuja-Kaduna train abduction that occurred in March. It is excellent news that they have survived this most harrowing ordeal and have been or will be reunited with their families at last. Their abductions and the killing of some of the passengers of the train were all avoidable if we had taken with any level of seriousness the threat that the terrorists made, their failed attempt to derail the trains in October last year, subsequent intelligence reports and if Rotimi Ameachi were to be believed, his persistent warning to safeguard the rail track before something happens.
Nigeria has lost the lives of its citizens, the liberty of others and billions in revenues by having to ground the rail services since that incident. After investing billions and years of manpower into getting the trains running again, we take things for granted and here we are.
This sense of treating everything with levity is so pervasive and consistent that it seems to be our default formula for everything. As we have seen this week, how concerted responses have brought down abductions by 28 per cent. Yet, we often wait for the absolute worse to happen before we start seeking solutions.
It is the same attitude we have brought to, say, our education system for instance where universities have been closed for eight months and counting now because of a union strike. This strike did not start overnight. There were warnings and threats by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, there were discussions with the government and there have been antecedents.
In the life of this administration alone, there was a strike that lasted nine months just in 2020. Yet, the same attitude of taking this strike as a joke, some kind of shaggy-dog-story and the attendant laxity it births persisted. Even when the strike started, it was more about the drama, the comical power tussle between the labour and education ministers. The education minister, Adamu Adamu, who lamented that he had been side-lined by the scheming of his labour counterpart Chris Ngige and the president’s docility, has now been put in charge of those negotiations and months later, we are still here, frolicking away the future of our youth.
This very distasteful joke was taken one step further when the National Merit Awards list appeared and on it was the name of the minister of education, who in the last seven years has overseen four different industrial actions, in 2017, 2018-2019, 2020 and now 2022. The shortest of these strikes was for 36 days in 2017. The longest was the nine months in 2020. Already the 2022 strike has ticked past eight months and there is no end in sight. Universities aside, what remarkable transformation has the minister brought to bear in the nation’s education system that has merited him this national award?
The tone-deafness that has allowed the constitution of such a questionable list has made a mockery of the National Merit Award. Accusations of nepotism against the president have been long bandied about, and with reasonable cause, but this list has taken those accusations one step further. Of course, I don’t expect the president to honour his enemies, but then again when he has his cousin, his nephew, his in-laws, his assistants and their friends on the list, it takes the joke one level further and amplifies those claims of nepotism. That national merit list is something that shouldn’t be joked with. But then again, nothing is sacrosanct in this country. Not even the country itself or even its immediate future.
I say this because of course one looks at the latest developments in the political sphere and wonders what dangerous games we are playing at, yet again.
We have yet again a presidential candidate who has been missing from the campaigns, tending to his health in a foreign country. And when we should be discussing the state of the nation, policies and strategies, we are instead served with the photos of an old man on a bike. Not that being old, or being on a bike is a crime. But making that the focal point of political campaigns is just in bad taste. A joke we don’t need right now.
The problem is that we have been here before, with Yar’adua and with Buhari. Should Nigerians be concerned about a president disappearing from the campaign trail and eventually from office? Yes. Absolutely. The chaos and stagnation the health crises of both Buhari and Yar’adua wrought on the system should not become the new normal.
And then to complete the joke of a week the ruling party has had on the campaign trail, the nationally televised interview featuring the party’s Lagos women leader, Jumoke Okoya-Thomas was a train wreck and a disservice to both her person and her party. It was full of cringe moments like when in trying to rationalise Tinubu’s absence she said, “Even small me, when I feel unwell, I go out…”
I am glad she can afford to travel in these difficult times to escape the people who she said come to say “help me, help me.” There is a lot to unpack in there but focusing on healthcare, and embarking on medical tourism, especially for a politician whose party has promised and failed to deliver basic healthcare should not be a badge of honour but one of shame. As should be putting a failing minister of education and the president’s relatives on a National Merit list because “it is their turn to chop.”
While all this is going on, the Wike vs Atiku brouhaha has degenerated into a full-blown comedy skit series. The chaos in the PDP is just laughable, made funny by Wike’s theatrical antics. While the PDP should be focusing on building a strong campaign and subsequently building a strong country, which they helped rip apart in their 16 years of misgovernance, they are here tearing themselves apart.
Sixty-two years of independence, 22 years of uninterrupted democracy and we are still here, playing games with our country’s future.
It is only possible to treat everything in a country like a joke when you have little regard for the people of that country. It is like those men in Congo who kidnapped those chimps. If the baby chimps have no understanding of the concept of being kidnapped, by humans of all things, it is easy for discussions about their freedom to be negotiated over their heads. Except Nigerians are not baby chimps. They have been toyed with for far too long. And someday, they will ask the tough questions. And then what?
