Nigeria, let us build a wall

Apparently the title immediately extends your thoughts to Mr. Trump, president of the United States’ proposal to build a security wall across the US/Mexico border.  What I have in mind is not this kind of wall of separation.  After all, Nigeria’s borders all around the country are as porous as porous can be.  In most instances, the government does not know what belongs to Nigeria, or to the Cameroons, to Chad, Niger or Benin republic.

Nigeria has found a way to manage her affairs no matter the absurdity and lack of control on the part of successive governments.  But we do need to build a wall; not like China’s great wall.  We could not manage such a feat even if our lives depended on it.  For one, contractors will be paid (or not paid) and refuse to supply.  One can recall the great Berlin wall that separated the East from the West in the cold war era of the old Germany.  Out of the other notable walls that have been built around the world, one can mention the Israeli West Bank wall forming a barrier around Jerusalem as a protective wall against a possible Palestinian attack on the Holy City.  Conversely, we also have memorial walls like the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington DC, built to immortalize Americans who fought and died or went missing during the Vietnam War.  In Nigeria, it is not now uncommon to build massive ‘Kiriki” like walls complete with electrocuting barbed wire on top as protection against possible unwanted visitation by any combination of a possible home invasion by heavily armed persons, cattle rearers and kidnappers not excluded. As a nation, I feel an urgent need for us to build walls in all states capitals and at the federal capital territory, Abuja.

Before coming to the need for building these walls and what the walls will stand for, permit me to give the background leading up to my proposal.  The recent visit of Bill Gates to Nigeria, and especially his brutally frank but honest speech in the presence of President Buhari, his vice, Prof. Osinbajo, the senate leader, Bukola Saraki, and quoting Nigeria’s creative analogy, “all protocols observed”, Mr. Gates reiterated that Nigeria’s potential for growth in all facets is unlimited.  Bill Gates was quick to point out Nigeria’s Achilles heels stating that for the Nigerian government to be successful, “Maximize your greatest resources, the Nigerian people.  Nigeria will thrive when every Nigerian is able to thrive.”  Further on, Mr. Gates insists “To anchor the economy over the long term, investment in infrastructure and competitiveness must go hand in hand with investment in people.  People without roads, ports and factories cannot flourish.  And roads, ports and factories without skilled workers to build and manage them cannot sustain an economy.”This ‘lecture’ epitomizes the shame of a people who have handed over their rights as citizens to men who have no business in democratic governing and leadership.  I presume Mr. Gates was thinking he was addressing people who are patriots or have any desire for common good.

I make this claim based on verifiable history.  After the true founding fathers of the nation, like Albert Macauley, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and others of that era, can we point at one government led by anyone else who is truly educated in the related arts of statesmanship, diplomacy or public policy making?  We have had successive re-cycling of soldiers trained in the art of war.  Once they tasted power and the allurement of office, they got drunk.  Thereby recycling themselves in coups and counter coups and when the time was ripe, they changed from Khakis to babanrigas and suits to morph into politicians.  They are the creator of their own political parties.  They crisscross party lines like political prostitutes without shame as long as it serves their bid to hold on to power.  They clone themselves in their hirelings, former thugs and position them in the different levels of government to perpetuate a system of government where stealing public funds is not corruption.  When a society devolves to the level where participants in the governing process are not intellectually equipped for such duties, no one should accuse them of impropriety.  Every human being can only act according to his epistemic capacity.

What the political class in Nigeria has been able to create is at best a fiefdom regimented by people bereft of ideas, surrounded by special advisers who are fake futurologists, sycophants, bootlickers who will lie and sell their mothers’ souls to retain a hold on their share of public goods been looted.  The very ones at the top of the chain of command have never studied Plato or Hobbes.  They bring their parochial sense of feudalism to democracy thereby building a system of patrimonialism and clientelism; a system of political privatization of a country’s common patrimony. Here public service is a route to personal wealth and power.  The people in power think tribally where loyalty to one’s kin or group is of the highest value, and representing that sole group is a norm to be followed.  They are blinded by their allegiance to their ethnicity, religion and political clique-dom to the point where nothing else matters. The patrimonial and clientele system will design any script to remain in power; they are extremists and terrorists within a nation.  There are no shared values or legitimate commitment to the people of the nation or its institutions.  Unknowingly, they create a negative empirical state without adequate and capable management of the nation’s telos; a working social contract.  Things then fall apart, they cannot enforce the laws of the land, therefore barbarians form associations for bloodletting at will.  The citizens cannot be protected by the armed forces of the failed nation.  They are unable to neither control their territory nor repel invaders.Under these leaders, Nigeria is merely a country in a cartological sense; recognized by other countries in its legal status as a nation.  Yet it is not a nation in the same sense like Australia or Sweden.  A country becomes a failed state because they are not functional.  They are not functional because the same sets of despotic feudalists have held the nation by the jugular.  Nigeria has created a monster and christened it “federal character” which simply translates to ethnic biases and religious bigotry.

Let me return to my initial proposal, to build walls.  According to Prof. Patrice Lumumba, part of Africa’s problem is the fact that those who have ideas have no power, and those who have power have no ideas.  In the mind of a despot, praise over nothing doing by his praise singers massages and soothes his ego and testicles.  If they thrive on empty praise, then they are revolted at condemnation and public shame.  I therefore propose that we build walls of shame in our state capitals and at the federal capital.  Let us inscribe in bold capitals the names of those who have plundered our nation.  Let their names be remembered in infamy.  Let future generations go to that wall and learn thatany nation bereft of moral and patriotic leadership is bound to fail.  Nigeria let us build our wall of shame.

Rev. Fr. Odeyemi, lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US