Democracy – our demonstrations of idiocy (1)

Aliyu Musa

Recently I was discussing with some friends the situation in Nigeria, particularly the thievery sadly going on with total callousness and the fact that no one cares, not even those who are swindled with such impertinence. We recalled how as teenagers in the 1980s we began witnessing this entire slide but in a very gradual process and a much smaller scale.

At the beginning of the Second Republic in 1979, which remains my reference point here, life was much easier for Nigerians. Prices of commodities and essential services were much cheaper and the quality was much better. There were middleclass families because SAP had no sapped them out of existence. Soldiers who had just retreated to the barracks had not stolen like rodents before handing over power to civilians. The politicians that had taken over were not retired military men and were not as stupendously rich as the crop of politicians we have today. Those before them had not inappropriately stolen from our commonwealth and so there was no culture of stealing to emulate.

Even when shortly after assuming office many of them started looting the scale was not as reckless as it is today nor did they insult us further by offering themselves jumbo salaries and outrageous allowances. While some of them laid the foundation for callous plundering, amongst them were honorable men who worked hard to move the country forward and invested hugely on people. Education was given maximum priority especially in the southwest and the labour market was not as saturated as it is today.

Despite foreign induced policies that led to the downsizing of workforces, devaluation of currency and trade liberalization we still could boast of raising our shoulders to proudly identify with the Nigerian brand and refused to identify with everything foreign including culture in the name of globalization.

But all that suddenly began changing as we swallowed without questioning foreign prescriptions that tossed many out of employment in the name of downsizing, rendered our Naira valueless against the Pound Sterling it once competed with or the Dollar it effectively dwarfed because we were deluded into thinking devaluation would automatically translate into economic prosperity, and turned our country into a junkyard for all sorts of perishable low quality nonsense while our local industries effectually crumbled in the face of the aggressive competition they were not prepared for. And with these happenings our economy simply went down.

But, curiously, the biggest gainers are our politicians, basking with new vigour and armed with physical and psychological strength, unlike our traumatized, psychologically defeated selves. Truth is, military rule has immensely helped the transformation of our politics because without the years of plundering that produced the likes of Ibori, a twice convicted criminal who joyously rode on our inanity, and many other greedy characters that found their way to the top, our politics would not have been such a vibrant ‘non-altruistic’ venture.

It was in the years of military rule that those super-rich demi gods surfaced – men who would sit back and remote control our and our children’s future with total abandon. It was in those days that all sorts of nomenclatures were invented to brand our kind of democracy, which we were happily bequeathed as they plotted their perpetual hold on to power by all means. That is why to be some big shot in politics or anything, you need to brandish some military experience or link in your CV.

So, even when we resumed democracy and were rest assured there won’t be any interjection from the barracks, we knew we would trust those bragging it because it had been their call to decide whether we had democracy or not. And because many of them directly benefit from the spoils of our democracy, democracy shall we continue to have. Thus have they ruled and so shall it be.

But democracy at whose expense do we now have, the ordinary man whose N18000 minimum wage is hardly paid or the greedy politician who earns millions for doing nothing but helping to milk our treasury dry?

Now they have every reason to not fix our roads that have long turned death traps because they own private jets and have no need for road travels. They jet out of the country at every excuse, including quiet times away from the maddening crowd that was once their constituents. Many of them who once campaigned on the platforms of social media have since found out that after winning elections their biggest detractors are the monsters that derive their monstrous power (voice) from the social media. So, social media is a vice from which they must distance themselves.

Postscript:

This article appears in the Blueprint newspaper of Friday 23, August 2013.