It is one of the foibles of people of very little civic education who also lack the power to dream positively to always think that the solution to their contemporary problems is to beat a retreat and return to some mythical, if not delusional “good olden days” instead of looking forward with hope and faith for a brighter future, which has remained one of the major evolutionary factors propelling human civilization.
From the dwelling caves to the skyscrapers and even to the moon, Man has always looked forward to new and higher possibilities. Who can forget, even in this our moment of severe hardship, how we transitioned from the once elitist desk telephone to the now commonplace cellphones, neither can we forget the “tally number” banking era compared to the new miracle of the “ATM” and mobile digital money transfer capability. Yet, some folks want to sell the tired booboo that there is something worth going back to in our 80s, 70s and 60s apparently in ignorance of the natural trajectory of human civilization!
A good example of this revisionism occasioned by a deep sense of frustration in the face of the daunting challenges of the moment, is the experience of Moses in the hands of his Jewish brethren who, following God’s fulfillment of the promise to liberate them from captivity in Egypt where they have been harshly enslaved for years finally, set forth on their homeward journey.
Unfortunately, so soon after the miracle of safely crossing the Red Sea, when God parted the large body of water into two in order to create an escape route for them as they fled from Egypt, they suddenly lost faith in the ability of the same God to take them to the Promised Land because they became hungry and, for doubting God’s promise to them, they wandered much longer in the wilderness than was necessary as punishment.
Today, Tinubu’s “Renewed Hope Agenda” is generating hopelessness amongst Nigerians just the same way that the children of God (Exodus 16:2-4) lost faith in the “promised land” due to hardship and instead, demanded that Moses return them to Egypt, complaining that: “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt … There we sat by pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, but you have brought us into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death”. In effect, they were saying that they were better off as slaves in Egypt just because they had plenty “meat” and “bread” to eat!
This same pattern of lamenting the present and romanticizing the not-so-glorious past by people of little foresight animated largely by malice and insidious partisanship has become the stock-in-trade of politicians who play on the short memories of citizens for their own selfish ends. They falsely present dazzling imagery of a past Utopia which only they can recreate again whereas they actually failed woefully when they had the opportunity to serve the country.
This is not an excuse for President Tinubu and, indeed, cannot be because he has not been able to demonstrate the kind of operational discipline both in terms of policy implementation and personnel choices like FDR who fearlessly offered the depressed Americans of the thirties a New Deal, which promptly restored prosperity to the country through very tough policies. The doubt and apprehension of the people over the genuineness of Tinubu’s economic prescriptions and the requisite good faith have been further eroded as the government dispassionately revels in unabashed hedonism and extravagant opulence at the expense of the commonwealth. People want leadership by example and nothing else.
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That, however, can never be a good reason for a return to military dictatorship by maliciously celebrating the aberrational circus currently taking place in Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso or is it a valid reason for provocatively flying the revolutionary Russian flag inside Nigeria.
Some have even called on Britain to re-colonialize Nigeria! It is sad to observe that most of the people making these horrible retrogressive statements are those who recently lost elections which they bitterly disputed up to the Supreme Court without success but are now inciting their unsuspecting citizens unto treasonous paths by seeking to unduly weaponize their sufferings.
The mere fact that Tinubu’s policies and their implementation styles are presently hurting us badly does not make a return to the darkness of yester-years an option, whether full-blown military dictatorship or the Obasanjo’s misunderstanding of constitutional democracy typology. I also do not see any redeeming element in the succeeding administrations up till Buhari that is worth going back to because they all contributed their negative quotas to the ruination of Nigeria because the political process that brought them to power was systemically programmed for failure, ab initio.
Under the current system, Nigeria shall continue to suffer embarrassing decline in qualitative governance because her constitutional and nation-building foundations are extremely weak while our leadership recruitment processes are skewed against the best candidates because of their rabid monetization and petty partisanship coupled with the absence of discernible ideologies and governing values as guardrails.
In fact, what we are dealing with is a vicious form of ‘State Capture’ in which all the arms and levels of government have become captives. Nigeria will be saved not by looking backwards but by looking forward with common purpose and patriotism and further by dislodging those entrenched obstacles of religion, tribalism, ethnicity and other mundane considerations that have held us down.
Nigeria needs a forward-looking, progressive and patriotic leadership that wholeheartedly accepts the higher obligation for nation-building instead of corruptly lining up their private pockets and paying disgraceful loyalty to partisan enclaves resulting in debilitative nepotism at the expense of the common good within the egalitarian framework of Bentham’s ‘Felicity Calculus.’ That means a nation where everyone is recognised on the bases of their capacity, integrity and nothing more. So, going back to Egypt in the present circumstance would be both defeatist and stupid. Nigeria’s future remains bright if we all patriotically work for it.
