Comment & analysis

Political awareness in Nigeria: We do not beg your pardon

Oluwole Onemola

2010-07-28, Issue 492

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/66282

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cc talatucarmenNigeria must unite in its pursuit of democratic freedom, writes Oluwole Onemola. Onemola urges Nigerians to shed a history of timidity in the face of government repression. This vast country can indeed unite to hold those with power to account, writes Onemola, if only drive and diversity can catalyse reactions of change amongst the populace, ‘the dormant daggers of the southern hemisphere’.

Like the slave-era abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, we ‘will not equivocate’, neither shall we excuse. Like Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and all those who stood beside him for the profits of freedom during the American Civil Rights Movement, we have come to cash a cheque, and we will not accept ‘insufficient funds’ as an answer to why the basic benefits of living have not been disbursed to the common Nigerian. We will not ‘beg any pardons’, and do not forgive us if we will not ‘pardon your begging’. Excuses will remain what they are, but unanswered questions will not pass unnoticed. Nigeria needs answers, and neither the dullness of gradualism nor the politeness of civility will make us expect otherwise.

The prior timidity with which we have conducted ourselves against our government and our inability to unite, not even for ourselves but for our younger ones: our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters, makes us simply resemble the proverbial ‘chicken’. The keenness, with which we allow the same people to suppress us, and make us think we are unworthy of common utilities like electricity and water, startlingly appals.

We are not the children of a scared people. We are not the descendants of runners who continually looked abroad and to the West for the answers to their hopes of better dreams. We, Nigerians, are the children of a powerful people, the dormant daggers of the southern hemisphere and the trepid terror of the north, because our rise will signify a change in global politics. We, Nigerians, hold in us the prowess and potential of the fictional Okonkwo, who defeated Amalinze the Cat unfazed by the possibility of a fall. We exude in us the brilliance of our south and south-western regions, the innovation of our east and the humble power of our north.

Our dissimilarities should make us strong because as we are ever changing, we are also ever evolving. Our common unpredictability should make us great. Our collective dreams should be able to guide us, as our individual goals should be able to drive us. Our sharpness, our wit, our God-given grace and values and those insignificant little things we overlook by taking them for granted are what makes us who we are: Nigerian, nothing else, and what else more?

What do we need to realise that in us the great African empires of old exist? What will it take to make us stand up like the Murtala Mohammeds, the Azikwes, and the Awolowos? Where does it say we have to settle for a constantly unrepentant and non-productive government in our constitution, flawed as it may be?

We deserve more and we deserve better! It is time to say to those unprincipled politicians, from whose pores corruption pours, that this relationship, this traverse arrangement, this unrelenting investment and this dormancy will no longer be accepted. Like a failed first date, or a marriage run on infidelity, the time has come to ask for a divorce from policy as usual. The clock is ripe; the moment has arrived when we are tasked by the future, for our children, to select new leaders who hold stakes in the normal everyday successes and failures of the Nigeria to come, who will tirelessly strive to achieve, even when achieving is tiresome, but – most importantly – leaders that serve by leading, and lead by serving.

Nigerians, let us not allow this era of advancement in the politics of the world to leave us behind. Let us take our seat aboard the blissful train that is integrity, so that one day we too can be a reckoned force in the world that conducts and operates it to its end station.

Fear is not an option. Failure is unacceptable. Dedication is our key because it drives us. Freedom is our watchword because with it we are entitled to criticise, and as Wole Soyinka once said, ‘The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.’ And, as this is what we lack in Nigeria, we need to learn to speak out against those in power. We give our government their power in exchange for provisions enumerated in the articles of our constitution – provisions which they have not delivered upon. Without us, without the millions of us who wake up every day to provide what little we can for our families, Nigeria would be a festered sore.

Let us tell Abuja and all its cronies and crooks that, from today, rigging of elections will not stand. Let us let the people’s democratic oppressors know, along with all others who wish to contain us, that the intense disease that is awareness has awoken us. Let us make it clear as the waters of Calabar, to those who come, see and steal our natural resources for a fraction of their worth, that as from today, Nigeria and Nigerians will not beg their pardons. We will not excuse ourselves anymore in shyness, or cower in cowardice. Their time is up; our time is now. Nigeria, change is coming, and when it does, let us only pray for the souls of those who stand in its way!

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