The Soyinka generation or the military generation?

Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, said it again for the nth time last week that his generation has failed the nation. He does not lack supporters for this view. The temptation to blame the past for the failures and the problems of the present is difficult to resist by those who believe someone has to blame for our arrested national movement. The present, after all, is a child of the past. Arguably, if the Soyinka generation had set the nation aright, the succeeding generation would have inherited all the goodies; and Nigeria, our Nigeria, would be ensconced in the stratosphere of progress and development today. It did not happen.

The problem with that argument is that it is a feel good theory that excuses our continued indulgence in the blame game. The past has become a victim of the unkind views of the present. It is the dead horse we love to flog. I find the thesis that we are victims of the failures of our past political leaders dangerous and unhelpful to our current plethora of political, social and economic problems on three grounds. This is not necessarily a romanticisation of the past and whatever it did or did not do to put Nigeria on the path of greatness but an appreciation of the simple fact that no matter how much we flog the past, its failures can no longer be an excuse for the failures of this generation. We have had time enough to do better than they did. If we fall short, as we have, it is unfair to blame them.

One, heaping the blame for our current failures on the past is a sterile exercise. The past does not matter that much any more except as a repository of our national history. Two, it excuses some of the inexcusable failures of the present generation. This is convenient. The search for a victim often ends when you find the scapegoat.

Three, we are victims of military propaganda with this cynical equation: khaki good; agbada bad. We are unable to extricate ourselves from this vicious military propaganda that served the military well because it legitimised their criminal incursion into our national politics.

I think it would be foolish for anyone to deny that our post independence political leaders played the political game in a manner that magnified our teething problems as a newly-independent nation. But removed as we are from the times and the problems they faced and how they responded to them, in condemning them wholesale, we are only relishing the luxury of sitting in biased judgement over them. It should be possible for us to accept that they acted within the political exigencies of the time. They could not escape regionalism and tribalism, two of our national fault lines now replaced by state-ism and ethnicity and joined by religion. They did not birth these fault lines. We tend to think that the Soyinka generation was in power for ever. Not true. They were in power for all of thirteen years or so. Hardly enough time for them to master a strange political system thrust upon their shoulders. They had to self-tutor themselves on the job. As the Onitsha man would say, it was not easy.

But what is happening in and to our country today for which the Soyinka generation would take the blame? Herdsmen killings? Banditry? Kidnappings? Armed robberies? 419? Drug trafficking? Boko Haram? Poverty? Unemployment?

I cannot connect that generation to these national security and other challenges. Nor can I connect it to the inability of the Nigerian state to keep Nigeria safe for Nigerians.

A less sterile exercise is for us to abandon the blame game and pay some attention to what Nigeria is passing through under the military generation. We can correct what is wrong now; we cannot correct the wrong of the past. The military generation was born on January 15, 1966. It is the generation in charge of our country today – in politics, government, the professions, academia, etc. It consists of the military politicians and the civilian politicians.

This complicated combination has given us a democracy that is not wholly democratic because it is tethered to the apron strings of military dictatorship. It has given us a military federalism with the consequence that uniformity and the military command structure have become the defining characteristics of this strange form of a federal system of government. It has effectively arrested our political development because our civilian politicians, most of whom grew up during the long years of military dictatorship, see themselves as wearing both the military uniform and agbada. Unexposed to and untutored in the nuances of democracy, we find them acting like drill sergeants with the delusion of power.

The military generation redefined political power in purely military terms: might is right. The civilian politicians learnt a vital lesson from the military politicians, to wit, a vertical political power structure in which one man dictates to the others. Among the civilians, this important personage is known as the godfather. A cluster of godfathers is known as stake holders. Every political power seeker is beholden to them. They anoint or dis-anoint political acolytes. Persons so anointed emerge as candidates in the so-called party primaries. Ordinary party members are denied the right to have a say; ordinary voters are denied the right to make a choice.

The singular excuse the majors gave for why they struck was to get rid of the ten per centers, those, in the words of Major Nezogwu, that made “the country big for nothing.” Could you recall how many of the ousted politicians were jailed for taking ten per cent? None. Check the court dockets and see the number of former state governors in the military generation who have to answer to the EFCC as to why they turned their pockets into their state treasuries. Should we blame the Soyinka generation for this?

Nigeria, an oil rich nation, now lives with the irony of being the poverty capital of the world. What did the Soyinka generation do to make this happen in the military generation? That generation made do with the earnings from our agricultural produce. It was a pittance compared to the petro-dollar flowing into our national coffers. Chief Obafemi Awolowo used what the Western Region earned from cocoa to give free primary school education to his people. They managed but we squandered and still squander our riches.

I can find no one among our present crop of political leaders with the vision and the breath of Awo, Zik and Ahmadu Bello. I see mostly venal men whose only mission in government is to enrich themselves at the expense of their people in particular and the nation in general.

My unbiased verdict is that the Soyinka generation did not fail the nation; the military generation did – and continues to fail us. That is how you call a spade a spade.