I have in the last nine years doubted the authenticity and purpose of the phrase “Happy New Year”! It appears as if we chant the words without giving a second’s thought to its real meaning or bearing on our daily experience. If each beginning or New Year was intended to make life better, Nigeria defeated that essence many years ago. Each New Year came with its challenges to the extent that we yearn to flee back to the year or years before it. Once I resolved not to say “Happy New Year” to anybody or acknowledge it when it was said to me. That resolve melted the next second as hardly had I thought about it that a deluge of “Happy New Year in advance” flooded me. Yes, we not only wish people “Happy New Year”, we do so “in advance”. Despite the plethora of the “Happy New Year”, that particular year was anything but happy. That year offered us COVID-19 and shut our world down. It was a year of great suffering, plague and affliction. Of course, death roamed the world. If good planning and altruistic leadership mitigated the consequences of COVID-19 in other places, it was not so in Nigeria. So we plodded through the year in fear and uncertainty. I remember the joy and loud celebration that greeted the end of 2020, the year of COVID-19. That night as the year wound up in hours, minutes and seconds and finally the time chimed twelve midnight signaling 1st January 2021, the world around me erupted with “good bye to 2020”, “welcome to 2021” and “happy new year”! It was humanity’s way of rejoicing and saying thank you to the Divine force that sustains all things. Whether 2021 was going to be better or not was not immediately clear, but the atmosphere was full of prayers and good wishes for the New Year.
In the course of my adult experience I have come to embrace Tai Solarin’s New Year wish of “may your road be rough” as the only ideal and pragmatic wish we should offer one another as the year unfurls its beauty and ugliness before us. Whether we said “happy new year” or not, the sun will shine when it will and the rains will fall when they will. Good things will happen and so will bad things! Expectations will be realized and they will also be dashed. Hearts will glow in triumph and gratitude and so will hearts cave in in disappointments and regrets. It is the ordering of existence and it is difficult to decipher or explain existential incidents. So when things happen people react or respond as appropriate. Solarin startled not a few with his 1964 New Year article titled “May Your Road be Rough”. The great thinker that he was, Solarin early enough came to terms with the hollow ritual of “Happy New Year” and urged his readers to face life with its grimness. He alluded to the Chinese who adopted the philosophical stance of embracing life without expecting the rays of hope that have made others weak limbed in anticipation of a divine intervention that will bring Eldorado to our doorsteps.
Looking back, our people had their own world view and idea of a new year which was marked with festivals. They had their days and among my Urhobo people we had ediruo, edibi, edewo and eduhre and like many other societies the moon which we called emeravwe counted as months. The year was ukpe and the festivals which marked certain milestones signaled the beginning of another year. Our ancestors also wished and prayed for good things during the festivals marking a new year. They prayed for long life, peace, good health, children and good harvest which symbolized wealth. They prayed for whatever was good. Yet things happened that confounded them. They gave birth to children and some also died. They had good harvests and also suffered losses. They lived in peace and also fought wars. They had their own accidents too as they fell off palm trees and got killed by wild animals as well. Yet they were happy in their pristine, but imperfect world. They never anticipated any intrusion. Then colonialism encroached for good or bad.
Advertisement
The colonial intrusion occasioned the transition from Akpo r’ Oba to Akpo r’ Oyibo for my people and many other societies. Akpo r’ Oba was the epoch of the imperial presence of the Benin Empire which defined the world of our ancestors, while Akpo r’ Oyibo was the defining tag for the era of colonialism and its cultural abrasiveness. As a phenomenon, colonialism ruptured our lives beginning from the Benin punitive expedition of 1897. We are yet to recover from the consequences. Looking back, colonialism has been the most disruptive experience in the annals of our people. And why did it happen? Was it because our ancestors and all the seers including the great Ominigbo did not offer enough prayers and the right sacrifices during the new year in times of old? Were there things they were supposed to do that they failed to do? What happened and why? I think the answer lies in the imperative of change and the ineluctability of adversity on the road to advancement. And it is left for humanity to adapt and adopt new ways to survive.
If we continue to blame colonialism for our woes then we would be confined to the abyss of mental and intellectual lameness. We must now look at ourselves, look inwards and devise ways out of the present quagmire. Our woes are now largely self-inflicted. And we must tell ourselves that no amount of “Happy New Year” and end of year crossover services would remedy our situation. Our woes and our failings derive from our actions and inactions. Chants of “Happy New Year” and crossover services, therapeutic as they are, will not end corruption, improve power supply or wipe out insecurity. They will not build us schools and hospitals or help us to industrialize. They will neither create more jobs nor put food on our tables. They will not give us good roads or make our waterways safe. They will not reform our electoral system, judiciary and police. And certainly will not end strikes by university teachers and medical doctors.
The outgone year 2024 like previous years was tough, but we survived. We survived not because of our skills or instincts. We survived because we were fortunate and we must be thankful to God! Were we to do a critical evaluation of our afflictions in 2024 we would discover that they were largely self-inflicted. We were largely undone by the twin factor of failed leadership and bad followership. There was nothing that assailed us that didn’t fall within the loop of poor leadership and compromised followership. What has sustained the seemingly interminable cycle of pain in Nigeria is the ease with which “good” people of yesterday get recruited to join the “bad” system they once criticized. Sooner have they joined that they help perpetuate the “bad” system and advance our affliction. Yes, 2024 abound with affliction, but we survived. I must not forget the many others that couldn’t make it. I must pause……and salute their memories! Mr. Emmanuel Umukoro, Professor Atare Otite, Dr. Damaro Arubayi, Mr. Emmanuel Esemedafe and many others! May the earth rest light on them! Even if we bade them farewell in the year 2024 I am yet to come to terms to talk about them in the past tense! We will always remember them and in that they also survived! Will I be saying “Happy New Year!” to people this year?
