Naija’s litany of ‘not my portion’ problems

If you’ve had encounters with the Naija pentarascal zealot, every issue of sadness or calamity is met with ‘not my portion’. Surrounded by natural disasters to which real nations have found solutions, they benumb their national inadequacy by chanting religious slogans and dogmas. Animism is dead, long live spiritual incantations. They believe that these chants would ward off the calamities for which they have voted people to help tackle. The elected take jumbo salaries but implore the electorate to pray to God for answers. Ours is the type of society that western politricians would love to serve - take the pay but ask God to do the work. The zealot lives on the diet of hope hanging on the principle of divine exception for himself and his friends and wish that all evil is diverted to the ubiquitous enemy. After all, the Naija zealot is the selective apple of God’s eye.

Ours is the only nation that rallies against no national interest. Every form of national shame brought by government inefficiency and insouciance is excused on primordial spiritual exemptions. No sense of national interest and no sense of national outrage. The student whose school is shut as unions demand better pay and learning conditions uses his parents’ airtime to defend those responsible for his condition.

The closest we’ve ever been to rally on anything comes with the male brand of football and only when the ‘national team’ is winning. When losing, the hitherto unseen cracks resulting from nonadherence the principle of federal character opens.

Last week, Gimba Kakanda lamented how people mock the almajiri rather than being outraged to call for help for him. Instead of seeing the altruism from which the tweet came, many responded by mocking this ‘northern’ problem. We somehow feel privileged not to come from that region where, Patience Jonathan derisively say that children are ‘born troway’; that is, born to be discarded, unloved and uncared for.

We’ve had a drug situation in the north, but even here, it’s not the portion of the poor, it’s the influence of the arne, the infidel for their rejection of Allah’s divine injunctions. The BBC documentary on the issue could’ve been a national call to arms - but our government tackled it with the usual dismissive thoughtlessness - a ban on cough syrup. It’s as if syrups are the only substance that is abused. No thought about about long term plans for prevention, nothing said or done about rehabilitation. Since almajirci and the codeine epidemic are ‘northern’ problems, it’s not the portion of the ‘nation’. By northernizing it, we fake our consciousness into believing either that it doesn’t exist or that it would go away.

Kidnapping is now a national shame, but it started as an ‘Ibo’ problem when Peter Obi was demolishing the homes of kidnappers. No need for a national marshal plan to tackle it. Northerners heckled their Ibo friends about the scourge. Today, this national scourge has turned the 200-kilometer Abuja-Kaduna stretch into one of the deadliest roads to travel for motorists. Professors have been killed there and other citizens have been kidnapped. There’s no guarantee for anyone using the roads that they would reach their destination. An ‘Ibo’ problem has taken on the status of national disgrace, but we’ve learnt nothing.

Boko Haram started as a Kanuri problem. Then it mutated into a full-fledged international scourge wiping out Muslims, Christians and those who profess nothing. Schools and businesses in the area were affected. Chibok girls were abducted, but we were unfazed. Then Buni Yadi happened and several other unsung disasters. Today a large chunk of our country and indeed four others are under the threat of annihilation by the zealots. Soldiers are losing their lives as much as citizens. It is said they impose levies and taxes on anyone still left within their sphere of influence for their lives. Today, the tragedy has been brought home to virtually every tribe, region or religion.

Several national tragedies jostle for our scale of preference. Ritualists have turned our nation into a senseless killing field. In 2018, while the world is reducing the impact of human activity on the climate, we have a group of people making business from recruiting young girls as baby factories. Their offsprings are sold to the highest bidder. In this century, there are still people in our society willing to buy other human beings for slaughter on the belief that their anatomical parts would make them rich.

The scourges we dismiss as sectional malaise blight us as a nation and diminish our humanity. No matter how much we try to distance ourselves from their effects on our scarred consciousness; these things rub off on our shine as a nation and a people. For as long as we dismiss shameful national disasters as ethno-religious plagues, we would remain diminished in our personal and collective strides. In times of calamities, we need to paraphrase John Donne (1624) and say - no man is an island, entire of itself; every Naija is a piece of the whole, a part of the main. If a life is wasted anywhere in the north, east or west, the national cardinal point is less, as if one’s father or mother were afflicted, any man’s calamity diminishes me, because I am mankind, so I never seek to know which part of Naija is hit, the blow hits me.