The orphan country

At his inauguration on January 20, 1961, the youngish and popular American president, the late John F. Kennedy, told the American people: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

It was, perhaps, the most memorable exhortatory statement in the president’s entire inaugural speech. It is still unbeatable as a patriotic call to duty. It is sensible to presume that many Nigerians are pretty much familiar with it. It is sensible too to presume that many of us have chewed on it, wondering what the exhortation really means in our own national context. I am willing to bet a pretty penny that if a Nigerian president issued such an exhortation, we would shout Aro! Aro!

We have never been exhorted to think of what we can do for our country. We have been conditioned to ask what our governments – federal, state and local government – can and should do for us. That, indeed, is right. Indeed, why should we be asked to do anything for the country? Government is there to make the country do well by its citizens. By the sheer privilege of our being citizens, the country has a moral and legal duty to do everything for us, right? 

Here is a partial list of what we expect the country can and should do for us: build good schools and give us good education; give us potable water so we do not continue to battle waterborne diseases; give us good roads so we can travel in comfort; provide for our security so we can sleep with our two eyes closed; give us hospitals and health facilities and rescue us from the guess work of herbalists and also save us the cost of sacrificing chickens and goats to appease the gods at the shrines; give us light 24/7 so we can best observe the biblical injunction to abhor the works of darkness; give us transport services on land, rail and water, to ensure our free and unimpeded movement; give us employment so that our shoes do not wear out on the pavements. 

I think our reasoning is simple and logical. Government has all the power and all the money to do what the citizens want. We grow up in this country, firmly convinced that the country has an obligation to do for us; not we for the country. It is the product of a warped reasoning but it hardly lacks takers. 

Let none think it is a small problem for us and our country. In case you have not noticed, we do not think of what we can do for our country. We think what we can do to our country. Note the difference. What we do for our country is positive; what we do to our country is negative. We do less for our country and more to our country.

 If you ever thought of the missing link in our arrested national development, you might give this a deeper thought. If you ever wondered why the gallant efforts of the khaki men to eradicate the word corruption from the English dictionary thoroughly failed, you might wish not to overlook this. If you ever wondered why our young men and women choose to walk the delicate paths outside the pale of the law as armed robbers and kidnappers, you might wish to look into something called the self.

We are, not to put it delicately, in a sorry pass. We got in here because of a disconnect between the government and the governed. There is nothing new about this. It is in the nature of progressive deterioration that a problem left unresolved is a problem destined to fester and multiply.

We and the government, for which read the country, have different ideas about government responsibilities to its citizens and the responsibilities of the citizens to the country. The cynical attitude of the politicians is that the responsibility of the government begins and ends with bread and butter, as in crumbs from the master’s table. Chew on it.

The irony is that the people own the country; therefore, they own the government they bring into power, hence Lincoln’s definition of democracy as the government of the people by the people, for the people. The word that best defines the relationship between the country and the people is patriotism. Patriotism is not what the citizens must do for their country. It is how the people must reciprocate for what the government does for them. It is a two-way traffic or reciprocity or in the local Agila idiom, mutual hand washing. 

Where the people feel abandoned or ill-treated by their government, they withhold the right to be patriotic. They believe that being on their own, whatever they do to the country represents vengeance for what the country refuses to do for them.

People exploit their positions in government to do grievous things to the country. The true citizen revenge against the country is to become wealthy at its expense. Here is a rough picture of what emerges from what we do to our country: A judge bends the legal truth to grow rich; the policeman collects egunje at checkpoints for his family support; young men and women rob and kidnap because these are the defined paths to quick money; our governors pocket our common purse because their high profile position is a chance to collect their permanent meal tickets; our top civil servants devise a zillion ways of cheating the system; our military top brass and the police taint their uniform because it is folly to wear clean uniforms with empty pockets. 

So, the road is not built because of what the contractor chooses to do to our country; NEPA is in a permanent epileptic state because money poured into it flows into private pockets. And the candle replaces cold bulbs. 

So, our lawmakers do not make laws for the good of the country; they are in the permanent lawless mode for the sweet feel of lucre.

My thesis is that when patriotism degenerates into a mere word, a country is orphaned. Think of this and think of Nigeria.