Letter to a young Nigerian

“Advise and counsel him. If he does not listen, let adversity teach him.” Ethiopian Proverb.

 

This is a letter from an elder to young Nigerians. Please read it, if you can read. If you know other young Nigerians who cannot read, please read it to them. This letter will make you more angry than you are already, but it will not necessarily make your situation worse. Actually, if you can read this, and you have access to a newspaper and the time to read this, you are more fortunate than many other young Nigerians. When you are tempted to dismiss what I say as belated apology, it may do some good to remember that you may still have a good future, with jobs or assured incomes and some peace. The number of young Nigerians in your class is dwindling, so remember that you are part of the privileged class.

There are many young Nigerians who will not have access to this letter. Many are illiterate, and will live and die in that state. Many know how to read, but have no place for reading in a life of drudgery, drugs, despair and despondency. Many will hear of this letter, and will dismiss it as lamentations of privilege pricked by conscience. Many others will use the cyberspace to insult and abuse me, my generation, my region, religion and ethnic group. They will then insult and abuse each other, and blame all their woes on generations which have bequeathed them legacies of hate and hopelessness, designed and built by other ethnic groups.

In this season of goodwill, your challenging life must have been made more uncomfortable by letters and reports flying all around, all of them saying how wretched the state of our nation is. You would have read that the CBN Governor is challenging the President to say what happened to trillions from sale of crude. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of university students who have been locked out for six months as a result of the ASUU strike, you may have done the maths, and established how much even a small fraction of that amount would have prevented your prolonged stay at home. You would have read of the speech of the Speaker of the House of Representatives lamenting a weak will in the presidency to fight corruption. You would have read of the widening investigations into the pensions scam; the tussle between legislators and the Ministry of Finance over the state of the economy, the foot-dragging over the purchase of bullet-proof vehicles by a Minister and the lamentations of President Jonathan over the absence of impact of the Niger Delta Development Corporation (NDDC) in spite of the trillions spent through it. You would have read that medical doctors are embarking on their own strike just as university lecturers are ending theirs. Polytechnic lecturers have been on strike for about two months, and INEC is requesting about N90b to conduct the 2015 elections at a time serious doubts are being raised over its capacity and integrity. 

At a time when it must seem as if the fight against an insurgency in the north-east will go on forever, registering deaths on daily basis, you must be reading or experiencing the meltdown of the once mighty PDP and the major repercussions it is generating. You will be forgiven if you think your leaders and elders have abandoned you. There are few jobs being chased by thousands of graduates. Young people without higher education or skills have no hope, no future and no stake in the system. You must know of peers who have since taken comfort in drugs and crimes, and many others who are bitter at being led to believe that honesty and hardwork pay.

Your life of uncertainty and frustration just got worse in the last few weeks when leaders and elders started a war, using letters that should frighten even their peers. Stepping forward from a long line of former leaders who ought to have been as concerned as he was, former President Obasanjo sent a long open letter to President Jonathan detailing many wrongs and warnings with frightening consequences. In the light of your upbringing in African traditions and values regarding appropriate behaviour by adults, the quarrel which that letter triggered must have left you thoroughly confused. First, President Jonathan’s people answered with invectives against Obasanjo, and said those are only opening skirmishes. Then the President himself virtually calls Obasanjo a liar over his allegation that he was training a killer squad and developing a shopping list of opponents. Then Obasanjo’s daughter writes her own father her own letter publicly exposing deep family secrets and addressing her father in a manner and language no one should address parents in. Now everyone is joining the fray, and it is by no means certain that even Senator Iyabo Obasanjo will not have some relation write her a public letter to put her in bad light.

If you are not shocked by all these developments, it will be a great tragedy that the nation will pay dearly for. It can only mean that my generations have brought you up in a cultural context where authority, age, decorum, decency, honesty and accountability have no values. The corruption which we have allowed into every facet of our existence has prepared you to expect nothing good or incorruptible in Nigeria. We bought and stole our ways into wealth and political mandates and other social values, and we used it to show you that this is the only way to live in Nigeria. All our fights are about money in the final analyses; all values can be bought, compromised or hijacked by money or power. 

If you do not experience anger at the conduct of our nation’s leaders these days and the manner they have brought our nation to its knees, it is likely to be because we have brought you up to believe that only members of your ethnic or religious groups are worth defending or fighting for. We brought you up to think of a nation of zones, ethnic groups, and regions; of corrupt and violent politics which give false or doubtful victories; governments which exist only to use public resources to bestow patronage and create wealth among very few. You inherited a nation which generates huge revenues and incredible levels of poverty among its population; which puts very little store on the values of human life and compassion for the weak and poor, while  venerating God in all its endeavours. We bequeathed you a nation without its proud history; education which perverts character and the soul; and value systems which justify every evil by its outcome. We brought you up to believe that leaders do not need to account to us; they live by
their own standards; and the governed have no say in how they are served by leaders.

You ought to feel more than slightly shocked or betrayed that leaders you expect to find solutions to poor education, unemployment, insecurity, impunity, corruption and endemic crimes are behaving as if the only problems they have are other leaders. If you are neither surprised nor disappointed, then the nation has hurt you more deeply than you realize. No one has a right to take our nation to the brink of disaster just because they can. As things stand, even with a much more committed, competent and honest leadership, it will take the best part of the next decade to reverse the decay in our social and economic infrastructure and stop the damage which impunity and corruption have wrought on our lives. It will take much longer  without the anger and energy of young Nigerians to turn this nation around.

Difficult as it is, young Nigerians need to distance themselves from part of their past. True, you are direct products of all our false starts and victims of a nation that has failed to live up to its promises and potentials. A few of you are also beneficiaries of a system built on the corruption of everything of real value in our history and culture. But it can change, and must change. It will need your personal commitment to move beyond anger and lamentations and become actively engaged in the fight to reverse the slide into disaster in which our nation and your future are engaged. Denounce in your heart, and in your deeds, the abysmal levels which Obasanjo’s letter exposed in terms of our national existence. Denounce his role and active connivance in erecting the foundations of a building he is trying to bring down today; and denounce his suspect motives and his pedigree. Denounce the spirit, the language and the medium of the letter from a daughter Iyabo to her father. This, by any standards of judgement, is not to be copied, admired or justified. Do not do that at home. Denounce President Jonathan’s reaction to the entire letter saga, and demand that he answers some of the more damaging allegations Obasanjo has made against him. Insist, henceforth, that leaders should not hide behind insults at opponents as responses. Denounce the silence of other leaders and elders who are behaving as if they have no obligations or roles to play in this dangerous game. Denounce the antics of politicians who are dragging our nation to disaster, confident in the belief that you younger Nigerians will be too busy abusing each other to notice. Rather than abuse each other, organize and do something practical and productive. Before it is too late.