By Bayo Oluwasanmi
Despite its very evident prosperity, many people in
Nigeria are in excruciating pain. That distress is most
visible to the poor majority while the ruling elites do not
see it or pretend not to see it.
The broken covenant – the social contract – between the
government and the governed illuminates the ineptitude
and callousness of those elected by the people to fight on
their behalf.
Romantic yearning for Utopia and revolt against a polluted
society are the two poles which provide the tension of all
militant uprising or civil agitation.
We see things differently. While the psychiatrist sees the
craving for Utopia and rebellion against the status quo as
symptoms of social maladjustment, the social reformer
sees both as symptoms of a healthy rational attitude.
Max was right when he said that a moribund society
creates its own morbid gravediggers. Revolt against
injustice is not only honorable but it is imperative.
Since independence, Nigeria has been blessed with
nonentities as leaders. Leaders who perceive no need-spots
for specific problems. Leaders who possess no gift and no
competence to address the needs of the people.
Leaders who cannot persuade people. Leaders who are not
able to attract others to join a cause. Leaders who pursue
no purpose and employ no measures to accomplish the
desired goals.
We lack a strong leader who could cast a national vision.
In these days, there is no one in charge in Nigeria:
everyone and everything seem to thrive in chaos.
The federal economic and finance minister/coordinator,
manipulators, and other self-styled economic gurus,
continue to deceive Nigerians with voodoo economic
analyses that things are not as bad as they seem. But
behind closed doors, they sing different tunes.
One thing however they cannot refute is the reality of the
perpetual chasm separating the poor and the ruling class.
The ruling class inflamed the anger and the pain of the
working class by refusing to talk about it and being
disinclined to listen.
The impoverishment of our people keeps me awake at
night. I hear them in the darkness around me. It is the
cries of these countless victims which rouse me in the long
watches of the night.
It is the willing silence and sheepish submission to
subjugation, poverty, and oppression that infuriate me to
write today and always. It is thinking of the martyrs who
fought and died for the starved and strapped Nigerians that
egg me on.
The members of the ruling class have destroyed the vision
of the future. They have turned their backs on the future
and embraced the past. The addiction of these vultures to
corruption and wickedness frankly and nakedly set them
against all human values and democratic norms.
The slightest opposition and the merest criticism expose
the few Nigerians who dare the authorities to the severest
penalties. People in our reform social ladder are instantly
suppressed and those who stand out independently are
mown down.
Nigeria is in a mess. Able-bodied Nigerians turned
beggars wandered through the streets. Petty street hawkers
of underwear, socks, rubber heels, corsets, silverware, and
other ancient objects appeared like a rash over the face of
Nigeria towns and cities.
Graduates at all levels across disciplines drive danfos,
molues, and bolekajas for a niggardly amount. Others
settle for the “Area Boys” specialties and dark alley
businesses of assorted brands.
Our unemployed youths in the millions have become a
wild and homeless lot, socially disinherited, candidates for
Aro, morgues, prisons, and the electric chair.
Our elderly are hungry. They depend on public charity and
their Good Samaritan neighbors for food and for a place to
sleep.
Days of somber discouragement follow our pensioners.
Some died in penury, of hunger and disease. The rest of
them live a vagabond, lonely, and perilous lives. Their
depression soon reached that extreme stage when the will
is paralyzed and physical resistance suddenly gives way.
Like inflated currency, Nigerian workers have lost the real
meaning of living. They look like a huddle of stragglers
from a beaten army. Irony and shame kept intruding in
their chosen vocations and careers. Their former passion
for dignity of labor has turned into perversion.
The once virile and vibrant Nigerian Labor Congress
(NLC) of Michael Imodu and Wahab Goodluck has
become a castrated giant whose brag and bluster only
served to cover its lost virility.
Oil – our commonwealth – has been cut into cubes and
blocks shared among the military hyenas and civilian
vultures.
Nigerian governments – federal, state, and local – always
stand for swindling, intrigue, and privilege. They could
not stand for anything else. Neither law nor force can
change it. If retribution occasionally catches up with them,
this can only be by the dispensation of God.
The hopelessness of Nigerians’ limited lives – lives
truncated and impoverished by the oppressors – keeps the
rest of us wondering what next?
Majority of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day. And it is
their starvation wages which permit the swollen pay
packets of the ruling class and other privileged economic
saboteurs.
Once Nigerians started on the slippery slope, nothing
could hold them back. At every turn, they are forced to
advance, sliding further into the abyss of shame.
Each federal legislator takes home N29 million every
month. The governors, state legislators, and local
government chairmen and council members receive
criminally huge compensations. The same governors said
they couldn’t afford the minimum wage of N18, 000.
The ruling native tyrants have seized as it were, all
available prime land and jerked up prices everywhere in
the country. Few days ago, I read that a plot of land in
Banana Republic in Ikoyi sells for N1 billion while the
landless poor have nowhere to lay their heads.
Also last week, I read that a village head in Akwa Ibom
State had begun a three-month hunger strike in protest of a
dilapidated high school building erected 31 years ago. He
said the governor had repeatedly ignored his pleas to visit
the school. Here is a story on Governor Godswill
Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State reported by SaharaReporters
June, 30:
“Three stewards working in the Akwa Ibom state
governor's lodge in Asokoro, Abuja was on Friday
summarily dismissed by the governor, Godswill Akpabio,
over missing bundles of mint fresh dollars valued at over
$250,000 (N40 million) kept in the governor's bedroom.
The governor who reportedly issued the instruction to
dispense with the services of the political appointees
personally found out on Wednesday during his visit to
Abuja that four bundles of the foreign currency he left in
his bedroom had been stolen while he was gone to a
dinner with President Goodluck Jonathan at the Aso Rock
Villa.
Saharareporters gathered that the bundles of dollars kept in
the drawers in the governor's bedroom were leftovers from
stacks of hard currency stashed away in a private security
safe.”
Instead of building new roads, the rulers have resorted into
buying jets with stolen money from our treasury. As at the
time of writing, 400 privately owned jets were reportedly
parked at hangar of Abuja International Airport.
The death trap roads are now exclusively reserved for the
poor. Meanwhile, Nigerians are dying in abnormal
numbers every day on these roads.
Our local schools, colleges, and universities are but
wastelands of academic refuse. The institutions have been
abandoned long ago by the children of legislators and
other robber barons. Our hospitals have become death
houses for the poor – the only patients that still patronize
such institutions.
As humiliated and downtrodden people, Nigerians endure
the worst abuses without complaint. One would have
expected Nigerians to develop a strong hatred and dislike
of the obviously rich- the thieves, crooks, scammers,
embezzlers, looters, and leeches - of the economy, not
because they could afford to buy things at any price, but
because they were able to do so without a guilty
conscience.
Few among the suffering Nigerians deny their anger even
as they show it. A large number has been beaten into
almost numb submission into accepting poverty as an act
of God and that they’ll never reach the goals they once
thought possible.
But the few, very few, refused to accept being treated as
lesser human beings and they respond to the insult with
furious indignation by brief sporadic, uncoordinated,
protests and resistance.
For a moment or so, the cultural atmosphere would be
saturated with experimental resistance, protests, and
movements. With the exception of one cleric who always
pitches his tent with the poor masses, the rest of legion of
jet pastors would admonish the poor to embark on
marathon night vigils and fast for their deliverance from
the oppressors.
For once – Occupy Nigeria – looked indeed as if Nigeria
convulsed after the subsidy removal, underpinned by
scourged inflation, depression, unemployment, and the
absence of a faith to live for.
Composed mainly of handful of Nigerians, Occupy
Nigeria attests to the all time truth that at all times and in
all creeds only a minority has been capable of courting
trouble and committing emotional hara-kiri on behalf of
the proletariat.
The bedroom confidence of the protesters soon evaporates
like a puddle under a scotching desert sun. The protest
was high jacked by lukewarm labor leader corrupters.
The uncompromising fire of radical, and purist zealotry lit
by the organizers was instantly put out by the union bosses
who clung to the empty shell of greed driven by polluted
civilization.
After Occupy Nigeria protest (and like many previous
protests) had been effectively neutralized and vanished
like a tantalizing mirage, social life went back to normal.
Nobody asked: Why can’t the oppressed prolonged and
sustained the protest longer? Why can it not become a
permanent basis for the reorganization of our public life?
It is not a false interpretation to conclude that the major
obstacle to Nigeria’s version of Arab Spring is fear.
Nigerians are cowards, spineless, and weak.
Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with your shoes? Or
tighten a screw with a fingernail file? Or shield yourself
from a rainstorm with just a newspaper? When do you
need a hammer or screw driver or umbrella?
The ruling class has provided the ingredients necessary for
their successful overthrow. So far, Nigerians are
substituting lethal weapons generously supplied by their
oppressors with shoes as hammers, fingernail files to
tighten screws, and newspapers as umbrellas for
rainstorms.
The rigor of the economic clime, the poverty colony, and
the harsh living conditions should have made Nigerians
one of the toughest, hardest, and enduring protesters and
resisters in the world.
The cautious, calculating, submissive, nervous time-server
Nigerians watched their steps, looked over their shoulders,
loudly professed loyalty, and monotonously repeated the
official propaganda in exchange for crumbs from the
master’s table.
Everything about Nigeria is different. Everything is in the
reverse. Things that worked in other countries won’t work
in Nigeria. Which is why the country is not moving
forward and it would take eternity for it to advance with
the rest of the developed world.
Nigerians are afraid of police arrest, police clubbing,
police shooting, afraid to be handcuffed afraid to endure
the sun or the rain for a little longer than necessary, and
afraid to confront their oppressors.
They are easily cowered and easily bought. They forget
that freedom is not free. And that the only language that
oppressors understand is force or fire.
A poor, powerless Black woman by the name Rosa Parks
ignited the American Civil Rights movement. She risked
her life when she dared the white oppressors by refusing
to give up her seat for a white passenger. Men, women,
and children were killed, maimed, beaten, and jailed in
the fight for racial equality.
Steve Biko and other countless patriots sacrificed their
lives to end Apartheid. Of course our legendary President
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for the cause of
freedom.
Not long ago, a young unemployed Tunisian graduate
preferred to be immolated than surrender to the oppressive
Tunisian regime. His personal sacrifice gave birth to the
Tunisian Revolution.
Egyptians have taken to the streets again calling for the
ouster of their newly elected President Muhammed Morsi.
Brazilians came out in thousands to protest against
increased fare in public transportation. President Dilma
Rousseff had since bowed to the people’s will.
Remember President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines
whose wife owned 2,000 pair of shoes? Well, the dictator
was brought to his knees by the People Power Revolution
in 1986 comprised over two million Filipino civilians as
well as several political, military, and including religious
groups led by Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of
Manila.
Lech Walesa the unemployed Polish electrician organized
the illegal 1970 strikes at Gdansk Shipyard in protest of
government’s decree raising food prices. Because of his
singular act of bravery, the Solidarity Trade Union grew
into a 10 million-member movement. The government was
forced to accede to the workers’ demands.
The list goes on and on, and on.
The world watched with disdain and mockery at the
stupidity of oppressed Nigerians:
If these native oppressors are worst than colonial masters,
why didn’t they rebel?
How could small band of thieves in government enslave
so many people and exert complete control over the rest
99.9 per cent of the 160 million people?
How could they have successfully immobilized and
sterilized so many Nigerians mentally, spiritually, and
physically?
How could they have successfully perpetuated a blend of
covert and overt tyranny, public policy, and secret
alliances with the very oppressed?
Why didn’t the tyranny, humiliation, and primitive
stagnation of life of the poor caused by these vultures in
government provoke a rebellion on the part of the
oppressed?
The answer to these and other nagging questions could be
summed up in one sentence: 160 million dumb Nigerians!

Source: mobile.saharareporters.com/article/160-million-dumb-nigerians-bayo-oluwasanmi