Ademola Araoye,

Ademola Araoye

All is well. All shall be well. Massive propaganda around the solidity of the Nigeria project is blanketing the totality of the spaces throughout the land. The crass fictional depictions from another planet portend dangerous consequences across the board: for the political entrepreneurial class instigating the surreal narratives as well as the mass hapless consumers of a packaged deceit. The situation can only accelerate the eventuality of a doomsday for all trapped in our febrile contraption. These abrasions of reality are orchestrated by a perceived majorly criminal and irresponsible political class, agencies and a fawning ethnic-affinity motivated section of the national elite. The propaganda, enveloping everywhere and encompassing diaspora human agencies, is a desperate conspiracy by all institutions and organs of the state and their allied collaborating agencies in society to impose the fictional surreal in place of the stark reality of the existential human condition. In this setting, interactions are motorized by transactional relationships to protect partisan vested dividends for generations yet unborn. The dubious intersections of inter-communal relations are thus forged against the good of the public and in the context of neglected public good of an embattled vastly dysfunctional polity. In the circumstance, the dilapidated polity is bereft of any legitimacy from its citizenry disenchanted by the predictable unending litany of quotidian woes. Nothing works, except the most welcome efficiency of good old corruption, the entrenched deviation from the natural order, as the organic glue that binds the dystopian entity together.

The propaganda project is contrived to consolidate the national culture of denial of the pervasive horror, sad and grim existential reality. It is not mass amnesia, but contrived national forgetfulness. Some would attribute to this culture the apparent ascendance of irrationality and absurdity as the motor of national life. National process is characterized by its Kafkasque attributes. The imperiled state comes off as a vast mindless criminal enterprise of the elite in the guise of a state very ready to unleash the vicious physical and emotional instruments and the whole coercive paraphernalia of statehood to protect the enterprise at all costs. The original state, hollowed out of its essential character, has transmogrified into the dystopian minefield of the corrupt with potential tragic consequences. Nothing matters. Not even a yawning predictable potential descent into the abyss, as long as the dividends of a horrible status quo are guaranteed. Mindless and panicky legislative assaults to shore up the preferred fictional against the factual reality merely underline the irrational and absurdity of the deceit and phantasmagorical state of affairs. It is a rugged national kpalongo dance along the thin edge of the precipice of catastrophe.

It is therefore perplexing that most Nigerians seem oblivious of the gravity and potential consequences of the precipitous circumstances of the Nigerian state. Or are they? The propaganda is belied by the quotidian empirical sores of society that the individual is confronted with. There are no wins here at all levels even as everything contrived for the good of humanity is subverted for the benefit of a greedy few. But all are trapped in the boiling cauldron and a superheated kiln. “Ebi npa wa” has its unfortunate paradoxes. Society is shredded. The wizened aged play the foolish ostrich. The youthful in this space are ensconced in their tragic gambles of a yahoo-yahoo generation. Elsewhere in the same young millennium, Man is chasing asteroids and extricating adventurous humanity trapped in adventures into space. Here, everyone else is in a trance, immobilized by the sheer bravado of the times watching helplessly. The daily ugly mirror reflections of a state in decay is not alarming. Just taken in stride. The recurrent unmitigated and disastrous humiliations of a pretend nation of 200 million, the largest aggregation of black humanity on planet Earth, are rationalized in the concept of a state permanently in gestation: of a recurrent lack of capacity to win one medal, even one forged out of wood, at the global Olympiad, the virtual collapse of the educational system, the flailing economy, the sprint of the Naira to the South pole, the hunger in the land, still unquenchable zeal for Biafra, the ever simmering embers of the Republic of Oduduwa, the Islamic Caliphate of the Boko Harams, the bloody bifurcation of the Fulani from the Hausa, terrorists occupation of Allawa community in Shiroro Local Government, the run for life of IDPs, the defections of the sane intelligentsia abroad, the exodus of a tired medical corps, the stench of decay of the national process spanning from politics to the judiciary, the historic unbounded and galloping reciprocal acrimonious ethnic relations, “Lagos is no man’s land” and the “Igbo must go” discordant choruses, the sycophancy paralyzing the universe in the age of beatified charlatans. A disavowed tattered foundational testament of a state with no subsisting contract, neither a legal contract nor a social contract leaving a people hanging in the void. Just nothing to worry about. “Chop your own” is the mantra in the vast wasteland of deceit!

The world is aghast. These national blessings have culminated in the constant stream of the contempt of the global humanity of this space and a people renowned for its incapacity to win trophies: the undying P&D scandal and now the Zhongshang Fisheng Investment trap, the perpetual oil bunkering and the constant hemorrhage of the state all attained with the connivance of the state, to say the least. But wait a minute. Is this a conspiracy to rub salt into the self-inflicted wounds of a careless people? Or is there a Western conspiracy to spite the Chinese claim to moral rectitude in Africa? So, what is Zongshang Fisheng all about?  What comes next from this collusion of the East and West? Is this the extension of the prevalent Nigeria mantra “Chop your own” to the international community? And why Nigeria, of all the concrete myths that go for states in Africa, as a scapegoat?  And why not? Nigeria loves to pick on its weak in its misplaced furious hostility against itself. Read Bobrisky against Yayah Bello. Who cares that your son wears a padded bra to school? A mere idiosyncrasy of social liberty raised to higher pedestals by the simple minded. But I should care when a Kogi governor destroys a tarmacked road to prevent the fans of an opposing candidate from accessing the polling station. While, we are engrossed in finding out the gender of a man wearing “gele”, more important events further highlight the fragility of the construction of our distressed post-colonial state and the mismanagement of that near mortal distress by the irresponsible political class in Nigeria. Russian flags flying in the eerie space. Meanwhile, it is a crime not to know or recite the national anthem or to insulate oneself from the common creed and universal greed. What an ingenious panacea to the fundamental malaise of the land.

Nigeria is not working. Again, Nigeria is tottering at the edge of a precipice. The intentional tendency to deconstruct systemic rot in futile, even if deceitfully convenient, atomistic engagements is designed to hide the reality of the dire situation of this expired amalgamated spaces. But all is well. All shall be well, says Baba G.O. The dark cumulus clouds shall pass this land of prayerful hearts, so sayeth the Lord!

*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).