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Have you heard the latest news? Our President, Bola Tinubu was in South Africa on Wednesday to participate or is it to witness the swearing into office of that country’s President, Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa, for a second term of office where he was not received with respect at all. The world saw it. Nigerians saw it. They saw the maltreatment and since then they have been up in arms. It is not about handshakes, more about having a presence. We had none and they gave us no attention.
I had the opportunity to watch the event live on Arise and a South African television and it was as if Nigeria›s President wasn›t in town, in an event held in Africa. Their news stations never gave Tinubu any mention. President Ramophosa in his very detailed protocol outlay didn’t feel anything about the presence of the Nigerian President, head of the largest democracy in Africa.
Even in the sitting arrangement, President Tinubu was tucked away in the second row. Dr Reuben Abati of Arise Television said leaders are seated according to year of ascendance to power. He should be told that is not true. No one can sit an American President on any second or third roll because those who got into office before him are there or that he came late to the event. President of a big, very strategic country is respected in all things, especially when they work hard to retain their position as a leading country. Bad politics brought opprobrium. It brought us destruction of the political system, we lowered standards and lifted social injustice. Our leaders created insecurity on the scale we see. The South African treatment isn’t the first and won’t be the last.
The same scenario threw itself up at Senegal where a boy young enough to be our president›s son was being inaugurated into office as President of that country. I saw the President of Nigeria struggling to gain attention too. Our leader at least in Africa should be courted but that is not what we get. We get scorned. Relegation and dishonour. This ought not be but the plain truth is that it is happening all over the world. We saw it in Qatar where news filtered out that the country had even canceled the visit. In spite of the slur cast over that visit our President still went ahead. To do what? Visit museums and tourist sites and talk to “foreign investors”. President going abroad to talk to businessmen, swearing to honesty, another bad approach and virtually begging; a task a director in the Federal Ministry of Trade and Industry should perform. The sights were pitiful. It depicted people without knowledge and direction. One saw the scene and wondered what is in our genes that creates this penchant for all, including our leaders to want to hop into any available plane and run away to foreign countries.
Before we discuss the negative consequences, it is important to elucidate further on the scope of this phenomenon of junketting about the world by citizens. It is so pervasive to the point it would have a place of origin we don’t don’t like at all. Every publicly exposed person in our country isn’t complete except he or she has traveled to nearly all the developed countries and perhaps found a home there. They steal public funds to buy up residences abroad. Buildings by economic categorization are not assets but liabilities. Yet they keep those fallow structures in existence with funds embezzled from the local end.
Many have made a mess of family cohesion. They ferry their wives and children to live in developed countries at the expense of economic health back home. The husbands remain in Nigeria to either play politics or engage in a renting kind of business to raise funds to support wasteful, very unproductive outings abroad. They visit regularly also dealing terrible blows to the country›s foreign exchange base.
Every Nigerian who one way or another has access to our finances goes abroad to treat ailments as simple as malaria and cold. Others spend millions to battle terminal diseases in foreign hospitals. All these enhance capital flight. The latest craze is the «Japa syndrome” manifesting in the phenomenon where all citizens empty themselves into foreign countries in the guise of searching for greener pastures. Many sell properties just to embark on this journey of slavery, humiliation and death.
The consequences are very visible for all to see. You don›t want to see it, you don›t have to stress because you live in it. Disorganized systems and processes are part of it and we all feel the heat arising therefrom. There is no sense of bonding and ownership so a territory that should be a blessing isn›t so; rather it has turned into a curse. Those who should be peripheral players in the governance arena have become the real system drivers and power brokers. Men and women of lesser gift drive the country. So a richly endowed enclave that should be an embassy of wealth and abundance lies prostrated and the far greater number of it’s citizens left very hungry.
Any surprise that honour and dignity have deserted the land and the citizens. Progress and honour are not wishes neither are they commodity that can be purchased in the market. They are earned. We have not done anything, no special efforts whatsoever to do things that could earn us honour and dignity. Our leaders have failed us woefully in this regard, they failed to provide a good example.
Every leader we have had wants to fly off the country to attend all kinds of meetings and summits. Sometimes, they stay for the whole four to five days conveying the impression they either don›t have jobs to do or don›t know what to do with power in an underdeveloped environment. Really this attitude rattles those who know better. Some establishment people would say nothing wrong with the penchant of our leaders traveling the globe, the plain truth is that the President and the country lose a lot, and it affects development in most critical ways and areas.
Nelson Mandela knew this much even though he was very popular worldwide he hardly stepped out of South Africa, not even for medical reasons. It is an old lesson that a man about town hardly has regards. Much more, there are economic dimensions attached to travels: government funds are expended and when these visits have to do with seminars, the leaders and countries lose respect. Those who know better laugh in derision. Countries with yet to develop productive sectors have a «closed country» where citizens are taught to stay in and contribute to building a country that will flow in abundance and opportunities. This is the right way to go.
We cringe over the manner people of developed settings treat us, for which reason we have become crying babies when in fact we are the architects of our misfortunes. There is the case of sovereignty when our Presidents and other top officials enter another country so frequently under the pretext of «private visit». Presidents Buhari and Yar’Adua were in hospitals in foreign countries for some six months and beyond. Apart from wastage, it was demeaning.
It is more degrading when citizens in droves want to leave the place of their birth. Everyday the airports are filled with citizens traveling abroad not for anything in particular but voluntary slavery. All of them want to be caregivers.
What that is in real terms is that they are domestic servants. The consolation is whatever one earns in servitude and manages to send home would make more sense. The question is does a slave have honour and dignity? What is paid, is it enough to sustain a good life in the country, where they elope not to talk of cash repatriation?
If one is slaving abroad what does sending money home do for him or her when it is more likely the sender may not be returning home to stay. By the way, beyond the superficial posturing, how many of them can afford flight tickets to frequent home? What indeed can compensate for loss of dignity inflicted on the Black man? Unfortunately nobody cares. Not even those in public offices who should make everyone sit here and develop our space. Citizens developed those other spaces our leaders and people run to stay. Let the President learn to sit down in the country.
