Shortly before he withdrew totally from
discussing and keeping abreast of Nigerian
current affairs, a friend once advanced a thesis
that has since haunted my consciousness and
kept me awake at night. What worries me is not
just the suspicion that his nightmarish
proposition may damn well be right, it is the
knowledge that I have come close to that
conclusion so many times myself. Now, that
really scares me.
He is in his fifties. Some thirty of his fifty
something years on earth he has spent in
Europe, Canada, and the United States (Egbon,
sorry o, I warned you I would have to use this
your story in an op-ed one day). The thirty
something years he has spent outside of Nigeria
has been spent permanently agonizing about the
terrible tragedy that is Nigeria. The success he
has made of his life outside has not been any
comfort. Thirty years of pain and anguish, of
gnashing of teeth, of sorrowing, of headache, of
being in a state of permanent dissatisfaction
because of the terrible failures of his Nigerian
homeland. When he left Nigeria in the 20th
century (1980), regular electricity and water were
the stuff of miracle in his hometown. He visits
every other year. During his visit in 2010, he
realized that he was now in the 21st century and
regular electricity and water were still the stuff of
miracle in his hometown.
That visit was in 2010. What he also realized is
that the Nigerian tragedy has consumed the self-
worth and dignity of the citizen. Water and
electricity were irregular when he left (although
much better than what obtains today) but you
knew that those services were your right. You
did enough social studies in primary school,
enough Government in secondary school, to
understand that those are things that must come
with the territory of your citizenship. And there
he was in 2010 surrounded by citizens ready to
call you a traitor and shout you down if you are
not sufficiently grateful to whoever is currently
stealing from them for providing a kilometre of
road here, one hour of electricity there,
refurbished World War II locomotives here and
there.
There he was surrounded by folks ready to go
and give testimony at Church on Sunday for the
miracle of three hours of electricity. Between
1980 and 2010, the ruling classes had ensured
the total annihilation of civic sentience and
awareness, producing the sort of psychology
ready to be grateful for President Goodluck
Jonathan’s mediocrity – and to label those who
are not grateful for it unpatriotic. Nigeria has
thus produced two generations of citizens
without civics and that in itself is a crime
committed against the people by their rulers.
We are talking about 2010, the year of my
friend’s crisis of consciousness when he
travelled home to Nigeria. Things were even still
good. That was long before the incubus that is
President Goodluck Jonathan went to Kenya to
announce to the world that Nigeria has the
highest number of private jets in Africa and that
is how he measures the well-being of Nigerians.
My friend put all these scenarios together and
announced to me that he was through with
Nigeria. At fifty something, he was going to
dedicate the next phase of his life to being a
patriotic American citizen. I asked him why and
that's when he gave me the rationalization that
has traumatized me ever since.
He told me coolly that he is no longer interested
in thinking through Nigeria's endless self-
inflicted woes and self-designed failures because
he has accepted and made peace with the fact
that not all countries are meant to be good. Not
all people are meant to make a success of nation
statehood. Not all people are meant to make it
to the mountain top of project nationhood. Some
countries, he said, are meant to be permanently
bad, permanently dysfunctional, and permanently
unsuccessful and even if you gave Dubai to such
countries they'd transform it to Darfur in no
time. He is able to live with this sad conclusion,
he tells me, because in their badness, such
countries serve a good purpose, a good cause:
they serve as examples to others of how not to
run a country, how not to envision and envisage
project nationhood, how not to be a country.
Another Nigerian would later make this fatalistic
claim on my Facebook wall: he has accepted his
fate and accepted Nigeria as is because some
countries are not meant to be good.
When I heard of the great evil that Goodluck
Jonathan had visited on our country today, my
mind went to this thesis. I was despondent and
discouraged. My heart palpitated. I very nearly
drove to the Residence of the Nigerian High
Commissioner to drop my passport with Ojo
Maduekwe and be done once and for all with a
nation-space that has found permanent
employment for my tear ducts. I don’t need this,
I tell myself. That one wicked, evil man could
scheme to reverse every gain we have made on
our journey as a people since June 12, 1993 was
just too much for me to bear.
Make no mistake about it, what Goodluck
Jonathan has called a postponement of the
election, after getting his compromised security
goons (especially his irresponsible National
Security Adviser) to intimidate and blackmail
INEC, is a pre-annulment of an election in which
he was going to suffer a humiliating defeat. Boko
Haram has never stopped Goodluck Jonathan
from frolicking and partying away in Kano or
from marriage festivities anywhere. Boko Haram
murdered two thousand Nigerians and he was
more worried about a dozen journalists murdered
in France. To now use Boko Haram so cynically
to rape our democracy is an ultimate act of
treason for which, one must hope, Goodluck
Jonathan and all the enablers of his evil shall
one day stand trial.
Questions assailed me: are we meant to do
Africa and the rest of humanity a good turn by
being bad as a country? Are we the bad example
that aspiring democracies in Africa must use as
a guide out of the woods? If you want to make a
success of 21st-century nation-statehood and
the practice of genuine democracy, study Nigeria
and avoid her steps? Is this the good ordained to
come out of our bad? Is this the joke we have
allowed folks like Goodluck Jonathan to reduce
us to?
I found my answer in hours of online and
telephone interaction with outraged Nigerians all
over the world. Across all our fault lines –
ethnicity, religion, etc – they poured out into our
spaces and spheres of national discursive
communion to condemn evil. Even career
Jonathanians, too far gone in whatever highs he
serves them to be able to openly admit that
Goodluck Jonathan is not Jesus Christ the
infallible – had enough sense to recognize the
great evil that their man has visited on our
country and wisely kept a low profile today. Only
a few irredeemable career Jonathanians have
been out defending this treasonable civilian
coup-d’état.
The near-national consensus on the recognition
of the great evil that was done to our country
today and the strident determination of our
people to persevere, persist, and overcome has
taught me a fundamental lesson. Perhaps some
countries are meant to be bad and, in being bad,
serve a good purpose of example to others.
Perhaps some people are fated to eternal self-
inflicted injuries and self-designed failures on a
doomed march to nationhood. Perhaps some
people are not meant to make it to the
mountaintop of project nationhood. None of
these things matters to me anymore for
Nigerians have taught me today that what
matters is how history records a people’s
reaction to the badness in which they find
themselves on the great pathways of history. In
your millions, you poured out to the public
sphere to have your voices recorded against
badness and evil. The Jonathan junta rolled out
troops, thinking you’d give them the excuse of
violence to shed your blood but the fools do not
know that your victory lies elsewhere.
And we must pity President Goodluck Jonathan,
holder of a (P)owerful (H)igh (D)egree from the
University of Port Harcourt. We must pity him
because he is devious and he has surrounded
himself with criminals and evil men bent on
ruining Nigeria. That is why they are afraid to let
him know the truth they now understand only
too well. Reuben Abati, for instance, has read too
many books not to understand that what is
happening now is a mass movement for integrity
in which Buhari has become a transcendental
sign. Buhari is now a sign and a movement has
coalesced around that sign. When that happens,
no force is powerful enough to stop the
movement of such a tide. Even Buhari is
powerless to stop what is blowing across Nigeria
now and has adopted him as arrowhead
irrespective of his human strengths and
weaknesses. This tide has become so much
bigger than Buhari now – big enough for a Nobel
laureate to sense it and carefully arrange himself.
Those who have read some books in the
confederacy of criminals around President
Jonathan are afraid to tell their Oga that pre-
annulment or postponement – whatever they call
it – is powerless against this sort of tide. This
tide is an idea whose time has come. We have
now heard them in the Ekiti tapes so we
understand only too well what they hope to
achieve with this so-called Boko Haram
postponement: re-oil the rigging machine and
promise juicy promotions to key military men.
Unfortunately for these puny little men trying to
stand in the way of the hurricane that is blowing
across Nigeria, their scheme is dead on arrival.
The people who rose up en masse today to
condemn Goodluck Jonathan’s evil were going to
do just one thing on February 14: punish him for
failure and send him packing to Otuoke. Now, he
has annoyed many more people than were going
to sack him. He has merely strengthened the tide
and the movement. The Nigerians who were
going to sack him for only one reason in
February must now sack Goodluck Jonathan for
two reasons in March: (1) Failure; (2) Treason.