Tonight, as I sat on the porch, on a lightless night, another word for bland darkness, the ripple on the surface of the lake adjacent to my abode glinted in the moonlight, underneath a sky whose grey clouds married with a thick bank of clouds appearing from the west, and instantly syncing as one. Looking through the sky dotted with array of stars, the elements were not saying much, not inviting much to be said, nor revealing anything to my psychic reading senses, just the feel of its sensuous freshness.
My German Shepherd, Flint, a furry ally, whose moss was soft and furry to the touch, kept rustling its fur around my ankles and bare feet lying on the Persian carpet. Then the thunder rumbles in the distance mightily pleased with itself. As the storm nears, Flint tears into the front yard to meet it, furiously doing battle. As it passed, Flint, returns to my company on the porch, convinced the storm had been driven away. So much for climate setting.
As the dog was settling to its place on the carpet, I was thinking of what came out of tinkering with the innards of my ancient Citroen D Super and what the auto technician’s bill, lying on the table looked like. Meanwhile, the DSTV decoder lost its connection, and I picked the remote control, searched for a local TV station. In the process I got one and listened to a recast of:
a. Senator Shehu Sanni’s and the Senate’s confirmation of their 40.5 billion sitting allowances monthly jumbo pay, b.PMB’s administration’s amassing a whopping #9.6trillion debts, c.the Senate’s feeble attempts at amending the Electoral bill, d. the terrorists attacks in parts of the north, e. the renewed attacks on police station in Anambra, and on and on.
These were the deep gloom over the nation, and to wit, the ill-defined role of the nation’s politicians, which were all developments prejudicial to the nation’s development, growth and in its strict sense, its future, and, it all read like a book which glorifies the horrors of war and of deluxe suffering.
I sat on, glued to the cathode and blue ray of the tube, even, as hunger gnawed at my innards, ruminating in silence, and in a horror of mixed feelings at the nation’s otherwise confusing outlook, and without as much as prejudging all of the issues on ground. One prejudiced, could come to the conclusion that so many things were wrong with the dynamics of the internal politics and cohesion of the ruling party, which has made the country and its peoples unproductive in an wholesome uninspired environment.
There and then, the thought of a head-on clash on principle between PMB and the ‘avowed leader of ‘opposition’ to the very principles and ideals of the ruling party, the misnomers in what has become of the nation’s ruling party, seen surrendering its legitimacy and authority to the opposition in a swinging aberration; on immoral spending that is putting the PMB’s administration, the anti corruption stance and what it stood for on the spotlight.
As there’s a serious difference; a conflict of interest and a clash between ‘two classes’ in the same ruling party. The world could see what the APC led administration has been reduced to; the colour of the wallpaper clashing with the colour of the carpet. A classic case of political ineptitude and tactlessness. All of which made the nation’s marching on the same spot in itself an art.
The evident clash in character and persona, erupting into a fight for political survival, is neither here nor there, just that when you are in darkness, you see the light before you see the carrier of the light. The old saying, “First impressions are lasting impressions,” is true.
The nation’s politicians of the last 22 years or so of parliamentary democracy have continually showered the nation without any pretences, with subtle “clues” of rudderless fecklessness and with more problems, moral and ethical and commonsensical than it can handle; utter recklessness, a large dose of insincerity, inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the public service and utilities, while huge debts are debilitating the economy.
As the tide roll and toss, the reality of the Nigerian situation economically, socially and politically is getting into deep waters, even as the citizenry keep struggling with the fact, truth and reality that the nation is lagging behind. Can PMB and APC in the present state of conflict of interest and confusing ideals brave the elements, ride out the storm as they doused the alarmingly growing tension in the land?
Discountenancing the feelings, traditions, norms and values of a deeply traumatized people, whose beliefs is that government is not doing enough of what it could, to help the people foster private business and prosperity would be a great disservice to the fatherland.
You will ask, what does it take for government to take advantage of the peoples self-help ethos, to create the most favourable conditions for dead and ailing industries and encouraged birthing new ones. The politicians have become like foxes in our chicken – poultry fed fast but must now fast to get out of the poultry. I chuckled in patches of fog of misery. But as an optimist, the nations patches of fog will clear some day. I’m sure!
Whether the good people realized it or not, whether they showed it in their reactions or not, in their facial expressions, gestures, stance, and energy, they seemed to have sized up the politicians motives, arrogant posturing and attitudes. That goes without saying, that, the politicians, scheming, speaking or performing, their actions and or inactions make all the difference in the world.
The good people have taking so much battering, beating to a point, that in their apathy, may, justifiably, decide they don’t want to hear anything the politicians have to say again in defense of the ineffectiveness in the public service system, and a rudderless political and general administration; rather than being struck by awe and love by how much they’re drawn to the politicians – the political class.
There are persons so radiant, so genial, so kind, so pleasure-bearing, and more, that’s all the politicians promised, that the people instinctively feel in their presence that they’ll do the nation good and support them with their tears and blood, as if, the politicians coming into the nation’s political space was like bringing a shining lamp there. Alas! What do the people have in return, from a bunch of selfish, self-serving and greedy individuals, nothing but excessive taxes, double taxation, unemployment, poverty, more poverty and its frater-cousin, hunger.
In short, the politicians appearance on the nation’s political landscape do not match the peoples expectations. The assessment may not be fair – but in view of the nation’s prevailing circumstances, altogether it’s a fact.
These politicians most of who pride themselves on “playing with a poker face,” and on their abilities to not let the people know what they’re really thinking, often conveyed an unspoken message of detachment the moment they’re voted into office. And that makes meaningful connection with the people well-nigh impossible; but communicating all the same, the wrong things.
The politicians are good actors who find it difficult to fake a reaction. Let me state here categorically, that politicians should however begin to take a cue from the 2015 Election. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The message and the dollars were wonderful and much needed by the people, but the look on the man’s good luck face turned people off before he opened his mouth.
The word “good” comes from the Greek word kelos, which means “winsome” [attractive, pleasant, engaging] PMB’s (as against GEJ’s) attitude won people over every time! What we say accounts for 7 percent of what people believe. So, if any politician thinks in 2023 it’s going to be mere talks on the soapbox, you’ll be missing the boat, and the chances are that you’ll have a hard time connecting with the people, who will be trying hard to match your words, with your actions and deeds. Be wary, otherwise, you’ll be seeing spider’s web as a wall and a wall as a spider’s web.
The pressures of the nation’s present time have had many of our compatriots caught in a web of the most acceptable, yet energy-draining pastimes: Worry. They have strapped on their well-worn backpack of anxiety, loaded down by worry.
In spite of the fact that worry solves nothing. But has created unrest and uneasiness in the minds of the people expecting politicians to deliver on their promises, what with the tide of the future flowing beneath the nation’s seas, promising riches such as the nation have never envisioned. The source of the wealth is the elegance of oil – the lifeblood of the modern world. And our country sits atop some of the greatest pools of oil ever known to Man.
But its men and women are left feeling insecure and unappreciated. They suffer on the unemployment queue in the labour exchange market, high incidence of taxes, no light, no water. They’re told of unending payments of colossal amount to legislators (the most lucrative calling and avocation turned business in the republic); payments of billion of naira on fuel subsidy, yet the grace refuses to go round.
While the rape go on, the people are sold on the Machiavellian principle that keeps pauperising the people and keep them asking for more. They’re hooked on the opium of the nonsense that their only hope is for government to fix their problems.
You are wont to ask, what has happened to that generation who have bought into the yarn and were mired in poverty and despair, because the promised solutions don’t work. And they’ll never work – they have never – the basics are wrong.
If the notion is left unchecked may soon churn the peoples waves of anxiety into a perfect storm of emotions, a lâ #ENDSARS. Add a little imagination and creativity, and their worst fears come to life in Technicolor brilliance.
Expecting the people not to worry about the problems on ground is asking them to exist in a state of denial. “Don’t worry – be happy! Yet, the politicians continually fail to apply measures congruent with the seriousness of the situation and offering them no alternative to the pointless and exhausting habit of worry.
The politicians don’t perform to the peoples expectations, because, often, you can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t tell brilliantly what you don’t know. You can’t share effectively what you don’t feel. You can’t give out of a vacuum. The fact is, nothing great is created suddenly. That’s why it’s pretty difficult for the politicians to discern and recognise the difference between what the people want and what they truly need.
Now, thinking about the senators #13.5 million monthly sitting allowance per senator, one is unable to subdue a mounting sense of excitement at corruption and immorality of the highest order – a film that creates an atmosphere of menace to the society, threatening the nation’s visage and ménage.
Nigerians are placated with PMB’s widely acclaimed zero-tolerance for corruption and are filled up with expectations that he can winkle the political will; and expected things to move quickly and in the way they want. They know that when a water-pipe bursts, the only option you have is to turn off the stop cock immediately.
Nigerians thought with PMB, they can see trouble in store for people who’ve set much store by immoral material acquisitions. But this mindless fleece and immoral allocation at a time the nation is wallowing in economic crisis is questionable.
It left endless questions with no answers! Has PMB acquiesced? Be reminded that corruption, especially of people with authority, here I have the Senate in mind, still runs contrary to norms and traditions which are the cornerstone of our civilization. The PMB’s administration should therefore, not be seen as
i. wilfully, condoning and encouraged the laying of the foundation for building a cortex corrupt leisure industry, and,
ii. a PMB avowed ‘war’ against corruption, purely, patronisingly, cosmetic.
The menace of corruption hurts everyone whose life, livelihood and happiness, as it were, depends on the integrity of people in a position of authority, particularly, under a ‘Change’ regime that has no gold standards.
A change whose conception, blueprints, and strategies resides only in the mind of PMB; the rest are merely defined by feelings. Even at that, PMB himself only has a starry-eyed notion about reforming society’s corrupting influences and a scourge that has remained an enigma, even to himself.
Why? Every other person in the administration, be it the legislature, executive or the judiciary were merely acting on their preferences, very few share his passion and enthusiasm.
In the face of this misnomer and menaces, the senators 750k monthly salary, #200million annual constituency allowances, #13.5 million monthly sitting allowances and a nation mounting debts of about #9.6trillion all in a nation with swingeing cuts in public services leave much to be desired.
Now talking about sharing monies, and the so-called “constituency allowance,” this lame generation don’t need a handouts – they need a hand up. Let the politicians connect with the people at the point of their needs. The politicians are so blinded by circumstances and emotion that they can’t survive without the ‘allawee,’ even though the people are pointing them to it.
The bad news is that the senators, the HoR members were moving alone. If they wish to connect with the people whose plights should arouse their compassion, they have to slow down and go at the people’s pace. Now, talking about compassion – pity for the suffering of other Nigerians, and willing to truly help them, (“ka f’owo Abu se Abu lalejo”).
Compassion shares a root system with Splanchnology, the study of the visceral [inner] parts of the body.
Compassion, then, is a reaction from deep within – a kick in the gut, if you will. Perhaps that’s why people turn away when they see news reports of children starving in homes, on the streets, at IDP centres, and hear about the myriads of myriads who live on less than $1.25 a day and go to bed hungry every night and waking up to the most challenging economic crisis.
Crisis so much, so overwhelming that our politicians couldn’t begin to meet it, in spite of the nation’s embarrassment of riches. But what if you could? What if you as a senator can make life better for a couple of hurting persons, by being there. Not by hand out but hand up. It’s your compassion that flips the switch.
The senators can do better, with the full knowledge of their highest potential and lowest proclivities. I’m convinced, going by several conclusions and takes on the NASS jumbo pay saga and for relatively doing less work, why won’t terrorists take over. That’s why it’s not easy being a politician in a world where peer pressure feels as if it’s crushing down on you at a million pounds per square inch; where values are at an all-time low and immorality at an all time high.
These are devastating times. Several of our compatriots are hungry, hundreds are trafficked in slavery, and pandemic diseases are gouging the nation, each year myriads are farmed away to Europe where our leaders and citizens alike have became objects of ridicule. So many of our people are exploited in the global sex trade.
In the few minutes it took you to go through this, (that is, if you managed to come this far), almost ninety children would have died of preventable diseases. Nigerians don’t have access to modern health facilities. As a result, several die each year from chronic diarrhea, acute respiratory illness, malaria and measles. And many of those deaths could be prevented by one injection.
As politicians and the peoples elected representative, you picked the jumbo pay, but are surrounded with great causes in need of attention, without as much as asking of what to do about the wholesale suffering, lack and poverty in the land. Their tenure is racing by, and if they aren’t careful, one day they’ll look up and their one shot at life, at making the difference will have passed by. It’s amazing that most of our politicians don’t concern themselves with such thoughts. They grind through their days in office without lifting their eyes to look.
The time to crash the party and lift the people out of their wretched existence in the face of so much money is now. Now that anxiety has become a favorite pastime the people love to hate. And worse, they’ve passed it to the young ones. As their children see the worry, of no money, no food, no schools, on their faces and hear it from their lips, they are mentoring them in the art of anxiety.
Meanwhile, the politicians are either inattentive and busy misreading or do not understand what is it the people desired and its priorities. They also do not have the temperament and depth to identify what’s really happening in the polity. They are too busy calculating the endless permutations and combinations of x,y and z as xyz,xzy,yxz,yzx,zxy and zyx and assumed victory for either the APC or the PDP in the upcoming 2023 polls.
They basically, based assumptions on the old North/South political relationship. With such calculation and summation, the nation’s problems are far from over, as they seemed to have been destined to keep repeating itself. Those that agreed with their calculations may have had reasons to think so, because deep inside, they know Nigerians are not communicating and growing.
Of course, while political power does not give anyone, least of all, politicians and elected representative, a license to live as they pleased, the judgementalism that comes from insisting that others live by our standards has caused untold damage into our moral fabrics.
Nigerians must learn to eject and or reject those politicians who have been insensitive and unreceptive to them. It’s doing the right thing for the right reason. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. And you’re called to do that in whatever circumstances you find yourself. Anyway. Anywhere. Anyhow. Whatever. Wherever.
Now that politicians tend to focus on external circumstances more than internal attitudes, because they want to change the people rather than change themselves and their warped logic and orientations of what public service entails. It’s a lot easier that way and costless. They’ll try to change the hallowed portals and face of Party politics only that the portents are not good for changing the people.
But the politicians (PMB must note this) miss the point altogether. It’s the worst of circumstances, poor planning, heists, etc that often brings out the best in a people. And if it is the bad things that bring out the good things, then maybe those bad things are the good things to the grand scheme of things. Let the rebranding and change start from up down and what a better time to do that than now, for PMB’s valedictory.
What we have today at all levels and branches of governances and democracy is manifestly failure of leadership. Yet, as the nation looks back to the last twenty three years, this failure hasn’t inflicted a permanent damage at all; it appears as if the nation actually grow through it all. After all, to go anywhere in life, one must as of necessity launch out from somewhere, or would get nowhere.
On one of the crowd pulling stunts of politicians, this time in the name of consultations, I looked at the sea of faces beneath me, I saw mendicants, sluggards appeared too slap-happy about their attitudes to how they’re governed, and who showed no frills or feelings that they are entitled to things that make up a good life – affordable housing, accessible health care schemes, good food at easy reach, free education, dignity, self worth; not being willing to do the needful and the necessary sacrifice and labour to provide them make us a society of sluggards on the fringes of civilization.
There’s one thing you’ll never convince the sluggards of: that they’re sluggards. Their familiar and favorite refrain are: “Tomorrow,” “E go better,”
“Ogadinma,” “One day,” “One day, I’m going to…” (You fill in the blank)! Yet, they look out the front door of life, they don’t like their political leaders, but like their leaders refused to see a highway of opportunities only one big Brian patch. “Like frailties like disposition”, “like begets like,” “A people deserve the leaders they get,” were the time-worn clichés that accompanied this feeling.
Benjamin Franklin was right when he said, “I never knew a man who was good at making excuses, who was good at anything else.” Nigerians like their politicians are vastly gifted in the art of making excuses than create an environment worth living in. Always going to “get around to doing the job,” but never get around to getting around. They forget that when you do what you have to do, when you have to do it, then you get to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. What happens in that instance is that they destroy the core essence of a collective existence.
The word ‘destroy’ pulsates with liabilities, it destroys motivations, drive, enthusiasm and passion. Before long, all would have to do more to compensate for the politicians negative influence, merely canvassing for restraint; is not enough, to have the right answers; you need the right approach. Good ideas and sound advice are wasted when you use a ran-it-down-your-throat approach.
Even at that, the senators and HoRs too acquiesced, therefore, the present shadowboxing isn’t a grand idea.
Last line: Our longest regrets are our inactions regrets – the thing we would have, could have, or should have done but did not do.
Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger and a writer. He can be reached via Twitter: @bickerstethjimi