I spent many of my early childhood years growing up in Makurdi, the capital of Benue State. It was the mid to late 1980s, and I have the fondest memories of this blissful period. Indeed, there is a part of that bliss that came from the ignorance that childhood freely accorded me. However, a major part of it came from my environment – the infrastructure, the culture, the people. I remember that at barely ten years of age, it was safe enough for my brother and me to regularly ride our bicycles across town to visit with friends. I remember the warm ambience of Sunday afternoons and customary after-church family visits, the sweet aroma of cookouts, the elation of regular sleepovers, and so much more. I am filled with acute nostalgia whenever I wander down memory lane. Sadly, only a couple of decades later, it appears that someone pressed the rewind button on Nigeria’s development and many of us who grew up in towns outside Abuja and Lagos are reluctant to raise our children in those same places due to the arrested development that they have suffered. For most parts of Nigeria, the most notable growth metric is age. One may say that the lights have been on, but it is questionable whether there has been anybody home.
The #endsars protest by Nigerian youth finally confirmed that there is someone home. For me, the protest made two critical statements. The first relates to the urgent and needful fight against the prevalent crime of police brutality. The second relates to the palpable transitioning of a people from a passive position of victims pleading for accountability, to an active posture of citizens demanding for it. The tumult we have witnessed has the makings of the labour that precedes birth – a long-overdue rebirth.
From the commentaries I have seen, criticism has principally been levelled against the police and the ruling class, and rightly so. Nevertheless, it will undoubtedly take more widespread reform to birth Nigeria’s great destiny. I believe that now is as good a time as any for sober introspection. As I joined the cry against police brutality, I could not help but reflect on the many times that I have also witnessed brutality in other spheres. While some rogue policemen and women have been using guns and bullets to shred the fabric of our society, other citizens in varying degrees and capacities have been very busy contributing their quota to the damage. We have troubling instances where civil servants who have used the power of the pen to turn government service into personal enterprises; lecturers who have turned university campuses into marketplaces for the sale of grades to students in exchange for cash or kind payments; many artisans are now more like conmen, exhibiting a worrying disregard for integrity and quality of service. Almost every direction you look in, there seems to be someone with a finger on the country’s self-destruct button. As the protest unfolded, I wondered how many people guilty of a persistent disservice to Nigeria were amongst those leaving their houses daily to go and march for what in itself remains a noble cause.
Real reform must start with each of us as individuals. We should each seek to remove the log from our own eyes so that we can see more clearly to remove splinters from the eyes of others. We owe it to our country to continue to ask tough questions of those in authority, without neglecting to ask similar questions of ourselves and each other. Both the Police force and Politicians whom we have rightly called to account are individuals drawn from Nigeria’s vast pool of human resources. If what we have is a cesspool, we will continually nurture and produce a putrid society. Let us, therefore, work at sanitising the pool.
I feel sad when I hear Nigerians, especially youth, prescribing migration as a reasonable solution to our national predicament. While respecting their freedom of choice, we should not disregard the opportunity that presents for well-meaning youth to become involved in the political process. I am convinced that if we can show the same level of participation, innovation, organisation and cooperation as we did during the protests, the outcome of the next set of elections will be more reflective of the will of the people. We should position ourselves to take full advantage of the unique platform that the ballot box provides to engender change by advocating for appropriate electoral reforms, vying for political positions, and obtaining our voters’ cards to come out en masse and exercise our civic duties. The future of this country belongs to us, and we owe it to ourselves and posterity to secure it.
