“Every nation has the government it deserves”, is a famous quote by 19th century French philosopher, Joseph de Maistre. Fast forward to the 21st century, although a cause for painful rumination today, nothing can be closer to the truth. Indeed this is true of many countries whose electorate take the electoral process for granted. Some leaders have earned their marks, others are Incompetent and self absorbing but yet they sit in the most powerful office. But when you think about how they got into positions, they can seldomly be blamed, they ask the people to vote them in, and they did, and perhaps they ask again, and they get a second term. So they have a mandate from the people, and when the chips are down, battered blue and black, the people are stuck with their leader, and rightly so, it’s a mandate for four, five, eight or ten years as the case may be, no turning back, and whatever form or shape bad leadership comes, “we must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope” of good governance, no doubt, choosing a leader is incredibly dangerous and complex, you can get it right or very wrong, either way, the electorates deserve the leaders they elect, but do leaders deserve the people they govern?
The name Africa still resonates sufficiently to animate interest, even though the subject of attention is not any of its country playing significant role in the world order. As the world’s fastest growing continent, this apparent strength has not translated into plain economic significance, the exponential growth has been more counter productive than favourable. As the world’s second largest and second most populous continent in the world accounting for around 18% of the world’s population, it is not surprising why the likes of China sees the continent as an important economic market, to put it in lay terms – a gold mine.
The failures of successive government has driven up a spike of immunity against national prosperity. The bar for political success is lowered to the depths of death. This is borne out of the fact that majority of the electorate have never lived through economic prosperity, only through blizzards of governmental failures. Our parents and grandparents on the other hand knew atleast one government that transformed the country. As Africa’s top oil producing country, Nigeria has one of the highest poverty rate in the world, from north to south, east and west, our country’s wealth has barely impacted on the lives of the people except for a handful of political elites who continue to enjoy the country’s wealth at the expense of the many. They enrich themselves and their unborn lineage by exploiting the country with insane allowances, each Nigerian senator earns approximately $450,000 annually in allowances alone, multiply that by 109 senators, then you still have House of Representatives, ministers, Governors and commissioners having their own share of the Nation’s wealth. The president of the United States earns approximately $450,000, Nigeria is not richer than The United States, but a Nigerian senator is richer than an American president. These gourmandising foolish fools are the major principalities destroying our country, we must all choose to call them out; one by one. Their gods are from old, they know not how to cater for the people, our God is no friend of theirs. Their greed has turned the African giant to the African dwarf, the largest economy in Africa unable to boast of any political legacy in infrastructure, healthcare, education, technology, or science. And although the country crows of a pool of wealthy elite including Aliko Dangote, by far the richest man in Africa, yes the richest man in the entire African continent is from Nigeria, just to bring you up to speed. Ordinarily this should in some ways reflect on the economic power of Nigerians, sadly, it does not. Our fat cat Politicians are unable to nurture the richness of our natural resources, instead, their belly is stuffed with it, their greed has turned the people into vessels of despair, they have failed to bring development, advancement and happiness to our forsaken and bereft people. Sadly, we have become tolerant to their avarice and incompetencies while Nigeria remans on a precipitous downward slope.
Whenever the machinery of electoral polling is in motion, the masses faced with the opportunity to vote out the same political robbers that have ripped them off, inevitably vote for rice and vegetable oil to meet their economic needs however short term. The money-grubbing political elite keep dragging the people back to the quicksand of their own dysfunction, our appetite for the kind of revolutionary movement of the 90s that drove the juntas out of power is no more. When shall we unresign from fate and fight off the forces against our national destiny, each time there is a window of opportunity to act collectively, it exposes the limitations of our nationhood; tribal and ethnic division. We sacrifice our national interest for regional ambition, this must end now, we must not continue to carry this albatross around our neck, our values should and must now be Nigerian not Igbo Hausa or Yoruba, our leaders must stop seeing themselves as our masters, but they won’t stop until we make them, so let’s come together and embrace non-violent civil conduct, only a revolution will save us now. As Martin Luther King said, the ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad leaders, it’s the failure to do something by the governed.
