Dreaming of revolution..

Changing oneself can take a few seconds or may never happen at all, no matter how intense the reflective frustration. Changing societies involves an exponential increase in complexity. The rate of change for the good in Nigeria is still at present frustratingly slower than the rate of change for the ill. Worse still, I don’t see this equation changing very quickly. Prevailing attitudes are cynical, lazy, unethical, fast-buckish, out here in the Wild West. Meanwhile, other developing economies are getting their act together apace. The legacy of the black-hole years of military dictatorship is still bleeding scar tissue on the surface of the polity. Pus and gangrene congregates; the wound isn’t allowed to suture and to heal. There is still corruption from the very top to the bottom of society on a level that only a few other countries can match for sheer hutzpah (witness the gargantuan amounts of moolah Dariye extracted from the citizens of Plateau State). There is all-pervasive bad faith and self-delusion among the elite: everything is illusion, from religion to business to love. As long as you have a Benz and live in VGC you’re ok. Those in leadership are usually clueless, too old, too tainted by the past, unaware of technology, over-burdened by dependents, turned-on by their power and the freedoms of abuse over others it affords. It is testimony to the enduring (and utterly non-rational) power of social norms that the African duty to respect the elders continues when those elders have so utterly failed to build a nation.

My whinge (if it is that: I’d call it productive criticism) is that so few here take responsibility for their actions. Everything is outsourced to God. Nietzsche’s criticism that Christianity can involve an abdication of responsibility is surely correct in Nigeria’s case: everything (in the South at least) is deferred to Jesus (or to the Devil). Evangelical Christianity has become the crack of the people. Cold turkey and facing the realities of the task ahead for Project Nigeria is not going to be easy or pleasant. Slowly, the tide turns against the pastor-thieves.

The frustration is that we all know that countries can transform literally overnight. We all remember images of the Berlin Wall coming down, and more recently, of freezing nights in Kiev when the people demanded change and change came. How many dream like me of an overnight victory for Nigeria, when all the intelligent, ethical, passionate Nigerians out there in the diaspora decide to return en masse to take back their country? MM Airport swamped by people with funky hair and funky brains, re-taking each and every organization and institution one by one; homophobes and fascists and theological nutters retreating to the margins, as elsewhere.

All one can ever do is to continue to work toward change and hope for change. It might not come in our time, but it will come.