Nigeria is dying…in installments

Chief Afe Babalola is as much a Nigerian statesman as they come. He’s accomplished in many fields. He is a legal luminary and a senior advocate. He commands respect before judges and outside of law courts. He is a colossus not just in law but now in education. He’s the founder of one of the best private tertiary institutions in the country, the Afe Babalola University in Ado Ekiti, Ekiti state. He’s also a giant in physical human frame. He has a presence and with him there are no half measures. He can be litigious if and when he chooses to be so. I should know because I had been in his crosshairs in my earlier incarnation as a newspaper editor about three decades ago.

We flexed muscles in what should be treated as a ‘’fight’’ between an elephant and a fly. I was young. I was heady. I was drunk with the axiom that the pen is mightier than the sword. I failed to reckon with the fact that the saying concerning the pen and the sword was probably more appropriate for, and applicable in, other climes, if actually any such climes existed. A rethink of that axiom is especially more urgent and compelling now,  given what has been happening between the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump [the sword], and the media in that country [the pen]. Until the advent of Trump’s non-consecutive second presidential term last year, it was thought that America was the home of free press and free speech.To an extent some of us used to think so about Nigeria also. In that dispute with Chief Babalola over a publication about 30 years ago, I convinced myself that I would not be intimidated. After a particular telephone conversation between us, I was persuaded by well-meaning and a lot more experienced professional colleagues and supervisors to accept Chief Babalola’s invitation to visit his Emmanuel Chambers [I hope my recollections of the name of the chamber is correct] in Ibadan, Oyo state. I made an appointment and took a team of two for the visit. We met. He was gracious. The interesting thing was that Chief Babalola [SAN] instructed that we be taken out for lunch in a popular ‘’amala’’ joint in the neighbourhood. And when we got set to return to Lagos, he insisted that he would cover our transportation costs, ignoring our protests that we came in an official car. This is only one side of Babalola. The same man is capable of being an ‘’ikiri’’, an Igbo name for a particularly stubborn animal that almost never lets go of any prey in its grip – recall his encounter with activist lawyer, Dele Farotimi. It was a bruising face-off. It was riveting. It was titanic.

For more than 30 years I have been a follower of Babalola and his rare interventions in the public space. Though his interventions have been infrequent, they were usually profound. He once said that our country was degenerating, and was sliding towards becoming unrecognisable. His prognosis about Nigeria and subsequent analyses inspired the above headline and provoked this article. The triggers for this piece are the current foreboding happenings in our country.

Babalola is not known for granting media interviews or hugging the limelight. But in 2023, he wrote an article for a national newspaper entitled ‘’Restructure or reconfigure’’. He wrote at the time that ‘’Nigerians have sadly lost their Nigerianness; that is: the true meaning, essence and quality of being Nigerian. Many of our young ones have lost the true meaning, essence and quality of being Nigerian’’, adding that ‘’to be a Nigerian today is synonymous with internet fraud, criminality, gangsterism, drug peddling, romance scams, corruption and generally evil deeds’’. In recent years, the nonagenarian has dwelt on poor quality education which he described as worse than illiteracy; insecurity which has made ‘’many Nigerians now live in fear, unable to go about their daily activities without apprehension’’; and the looming debt trap for the country. It appears now that the elder statesman has fully retreated to his cocoon and left Nigeria and Nigerians to their devices. His choice can not be likened to the choices of a section of the usually vocal Yoruba elite who have gone mum and lost their critical voices on national issues since one of their own, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, acceded to the presidency more than three years ago. Very prominent in this new Class of ‘’mum is the word’’ is Prof. Oluwole Soyinka. This man of Letters who was alleged to have coined the derogatory word ‘’Shepopotamus’’ in reference to a former First Lady, Dr. Patience Jonathan, while he levied verbal war on the administration of her husband, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, has failed thus far to find a label for the more egregious conduct and disposition of the current First Lady, Pastor Oluremi Tinubu. Remi Tinubu is presently consumed with the politics of how to return her failed husband to a second term in the presidency than spare a thought for the privations Nigerians are going through on account of the ill-digested economic policies of Alhaji Tinubu.

The First Lady is focused on acquiring luxury vehicles, likely sport utility vehicles [SUVs], for women leaders in states not controlled by the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] political party, and leaning on or expressly directing APC governors to buy the cars in states where they control the government. The cars are for political campaigns ahead of the 2027 elections. Needless to state that the cars, which Remi Tinubu directed should be bought and registered in the names of the beneficiaries, would be procured with tax payers money.

Given the parlous state of Nigeria’s finances, it will be safe to conclude that the largesse would be funded from proceeds of monies borrowed from external international commercial lenders. That would be a double jeopardy for suffering citizens as public funds will be diverted in pursuit of private and partisan political ends, and it would be done through external debt. The directive of the First Lady to procure personal vehicles for women leaders of her political party ostensibly with public funds would not be less offensive, insensitive and egregious even if the directive was to be effected with proceeds of funds from domestic borrowings. Prof. Soyinka, understandably, gives them a pass because the first family were said to be the benefactors of the Nobel Prize winner in literature at a particularly difficult time in his life.

Everything that can go wrong in our country has gone wrong in the three years of an obvious misrule by Tinubu. Nigeria’s currency, the Naira, has been recklessly devalued. The national economy is not export-driven nor export-oriented which could have made the argument for such massive devaluation compelling. The pricing and even the quantity of the country’s dominant export product, crude oil, are not under the control of our government and our rulers. In spite of fiddlings and manipulations, national inflation, particularly food inflation, has been trending upwards and stuck in the double digit zone. Unemployment, youth unemployment inclusive, has been pervasive. The same for underemployment. The cost of living for a vast majority of Nigerians gets worse everyday. Corporations are not in a better stead. Because citizens drop below poverty by the minute, our country has since 2019 retained the dubious status as the global capital of poverty.

Nigeria’s dire situation is being compounded by pervading insecurity. Insurgency by Islamists was a problem that was once confined to the north east zone of the country. Not anymore. The north west was the primary zone for kidnapping for ransome. The north central, and now the south west have been thrown into the mix. As it stands, nothing suggests that the south east and the south south will escape the blight of kidnapping for ransome. The south east is just coming out of the chokehold of the ruinous agitations of separatist or self determination groups with its peculiar insecurity.

The frightening thing is that this regime appears to be unconcerned about what could be the unavoidable fate of this country.  It’s preoccupied with the politics of reelection. Well, it had been so focused since it came into office in 2023. For Tinubu and his enablers, politics and power trump governance.

It should be concerning to Nigerians that their country is dying before their eyes. As has been noted by some scholars, the death of any country starts in the hearts and minds of its citizens, not necessarily through loss of territories. Except for a myopic few who think that they are benefiting from the system, many Nigerians are no longer invested in this country. Nigeria is not working. Many no longer regard this country as fit for purpose. Its mores are corrupted. There’s no hope for the creation of an opportunity economy and a merit-driven system for the majority. The picture is bleak. We are increasingly becoming inured to shock. Terrorists beheading kidnapped citizens and sharing the video is now rife. In fact, a mathematics teacher was kidnapped and his throat slit on live video barely two weeks ago. About 40 pupils, including a two-year-old, students and teachers kidnapped along with the slain teacher are still in the kidnappers’ den. These are our compatriots’ children, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, nephews, grandparents, grandchildren etc. etc. Elsewhere, a viral video showed a young girl who was stripped to her skin by terrorists, hung on a string with her legs spread apart as wide as possible, and exposed to a flame of fire between her laps. And yet another video where kidnap victims were being tortured with the droppings of a burning plastic material. We see such videos daily and we shrug our shoulders and move on. When a newspaper columnist wrote about 40 years ago that Nigerians had become unshockable, he surely did not foresee that there would be a day like this. He certainly did not reckon that those were the days of innocence. The question that we should be grappling with is no longer whether the already dire Nigerian situation would get worse? What we should worry about is how worse it will get before we hit the rock bottom or before something gives.