Tag Archives: Okey Ndibe

Sorry, But My Country Is Ugly – By Okey Ndibe

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What lofty and enduring dream could sprout in us when we have become accustomed to squalor, habituated to decrepitude, made our peace with detritus? What hope is there for us when we fetishise Dubai and flaunt our expensive Louis Vuitton handbags, and yet fail to realise that our country has become—is—an endless open toilet, overflowing with septic sludge?

I’ve known for a while that Nigeria was in a sorry shape, but not even that knowledge prepared me for a side of the country I saw when I arrived on January 3 for a ten-day visit. The last time I traveled by road from Lagos to my home state of Anambra was in 2002, when my wife and I were Fulbright fellows teaching in Nigeria for a year. On this recent visit, I had little choice but to go by road. Friends and relatives had warned me that flights from Lagos to Enugu were prone, at best, to interminable delays, and at worst to incessant cancellations owing to the harmattan. The best bet, I was told, was to make the trip by road. So my younger brother and I hired a Toyota Siena, one of the most popular vehicles in Nigeria for long commutes.

I’m willing to apologise for the bluntness of this assessment, but there’s no deodorising the reality: the ride was a nightmare. Before we set out, I had instructed the driver to take it easy. I made it clear that my brother and I were in no particular hurry, that what we sought, above all, was safe, cautious driving. The instructions fell on deaf ears.

In typical bravado, the driver told me he was not really a “driver.” He was married to a Togolese woman who lives in Belgium with their two boys. The Belgian authorities had deported him to Nigeria on account of some infraction he seemed in no haste to divulge. His wife was processing papers to enable him to rejoin his family, so he was, in the interim, just “managing” with the driving job.

Well, the short of it was he drove as if he were in an Indy 500 contest. It was all speed and all recklessness. He seemed to think any other driver who passed him—overtook him, as we say in Nigeria—were questioning his very manhood. And to reassert his manhood, he would give chase, create a veritable speeding derby, determined to reclaim the speeding title. I was awfully sleepy, but I knew that to fall asleep was to abandon my fate to this maniacal speedster. Countless times, I had to warn him—often by shouting at him—to slow down, and to refrain from cutting in front of his speeding adversary.

Yet, if our driver behaved like a crazed speeder, compared to many other drivers, his craziness seemed of a much milder variety.

Driving in Nigeria is an exercise in daredevilry. I hardly exaggerate here: the experience was akin to watching hundreds of clinically insane men and women who had been handed licenses and cars—and then unleashed on the road, empowered to suit themselves. To observe traffic in the country is to behold anarchy and chaos unfold before one’s eyes. Every sensible driving code is disdained, tossed aside. To describe the speeding as excessive is to equivocate; too many drivers seem on a mission to commit vehicular suicide and homicide. Many people assured me that the highways from Lagos to Anambra were now in excellent condition. I found patches of the road to be good, but the word that sums up the overall condition is: awful.

But drivers were the most potent, terrifying factor. Too many drove too close to the cars ahead of them, even though they couldn’t see what was in front—and vicious, tyre-wrecking potholes frequently ambushed cars.

I confirmed a sneaking suspicion: that Nigerian driving mirrors the country’s malaise, its pathology. At the slightest appearance of stalled traffic (say at the Lagos-Ibadan expressway), many Nigerian drivers responded in a counter-intuitive manner. If drivers acted with restraint by staying in line, everybody’s vehicle should be able to move on in ten or so minutes. Instead of which too many drivers attempted to out-maneuver others, to get ahead of everybody else. On a two-lane road, suddenly, to one’s amazement, four or five lanes would be formed. Often the ensuing gridlock would grind all movement to a halt, leaving everybody stuck for hours.

It reminded me of the disastrous price the country has paid for our politicians’ and bureaucratic elite’s depraved, boundless greed. That greed has sapped the country’s vitality, depleted its resources, left it a shell, and cast most of its people into abject impoverishment and forlorn resignation.

For me, traveling by road was a chastening, despair-inducing experience. One beheld Nigeria in its fulsome ugliness. The roadscape and landscape were marred, cheerless. From Lagos to Anambra, the roadside was a litter of plastic bottles, plastic wraps, discarded black plastic bags, orange rinds, banana peels, etc. No inch of space, from the journey’s beginning to its termination, was spared the plastic infestation. I had never encountered blight on this scale and in such unrelenting manner anywhere else in the world. But the assault wasn’t limited to the ubiquitous invasion of plastic. The carcasses of cars, trucks and tankers, many of them burnt, left the impression of battle zones—and compounded the eyesore. Numerous times I saw fast-moving fires burning up the roadside grass, shooting tiny sparks and plumes of vapour. The fires left their grotesque marks on the roadside, deepening the sense of gloom and ugliness.

Our driver said local hunters set most of the fires. The aim? To dislodge small game from holes and other hiding spots! What kind of country allows such backward practice, such mindless endangerment of the lives of commuters on highways plied by fuel-carrying tankers?

A common sight: people peeing or defecating beside the road or just a few feet off, openly. The picture struck me: we have been reduced, and have accepted our reduction, to animal-like status. We have allowed our political and bureaucratic thieftains to steal our humanity away, to strip us of what it means, at bottom, to possess human dignity, and to animalise us.

And how do we respond to this affront? We garland our dispossessors with flamboyant chieftaincy titles and festoon them with national honours. We reserve front seats for them in church and unctuously pledge to them—contemptible gluttons that they are—that we are fully loyal!

Each major town or city we passed exhibited a mini-mount of trash by the roadside. In no other place in the world had I seen trash so openly exhibited, as if it enhanced local character and burnished the country’s image. Indeed, it seemed as if different locations were proclaiming, with profane pride, “We’re a major (or up and coming) town, and we have the trash to prove it!”

Each mound of trash emitted a vile, dizzying stench. Yet, I saw bereft Nigerians who had scaled the bursting, steamy hills of waste, scavenging for some morsel of food to sup on, hunting for some tossed, varnished treasure.

I came out of Nigeria with a heavy heart, a certain sense of the gravity of our crises. Why is there no outcry about the blight, much less action? Where was the demand for an end to the conquest of the Nigerian space by “pure water” plastic?

What lofty and enduring dream could sprout in us when we have become accustomed to squalor, habituated to decrepitude, made our peace with detritus? What hope is there for us when we fetishise Dubai and flaunt our expensive Louis Vuitton handbags, and yet fail to realise that our country has become—is—an endless open toilet, overflowing with septic sludge?

Traveling by road, I saw Nigeria in a new way. The portrait, unflattering, left me deeply dispirited.

Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe

NIGERIA: Time to think about 2019 – Okey Ndibe

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There’s something about this year’s presidential election in the US that is oddly reminiscent of Nigeria’s 2015 presidential polls. Many Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, can’t quite fathom how the country’s two main parties ended up with candidates with such significant ethical or mental deficits and who inspire little popular enthusiasm. After eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, one that restored gravitas, dignity, a humane touch and intelligence to the White House, there’s a certain anxiety that the next president will be something of a letdown.

I remember feeling profoundly bewildered about the two candidates advertised as Nigerians’ real presidential choices in 2015.

Whatever the cause – whether he had feeble political spine or the political opposition sabotaged him at every turn – Goodluck Jonathan failed to rise to the challenge of leadership. He left the impression of a malleable man, too fickle for the wolves that were his coterie and cohorts, easy to manipulate by some of the sinister men and women he trusted for advice.

How press a case for the reelection of a man of such meagre achievements, a president whose mediocrity was writ large?

Yet, some of us also warned of the dire prospects of handing Nigeria to a man quick to appropriate the rhetoric and mantle of “change,” but slow – if not reluctant – to offer even the merest outline of his vision of change. Above all, the All Progressives Congress (APC) never persuaded me of their difference (in terms of principles and policies) from Mr. Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And Candidate Muhammadu Buhari of the APC struck me – as I told an interviewer – as a dud-in-waiting. The man seemed entirely to belong to a different time, a long vanished analog moment. Nigeria stood in need of a man able to combine deep intellectual insights with sharp political instincts. It needed somebody with the mental acumen and physical stamina to broadly envision its transformation – and the path towards it. I had no doubt that Mr. Buhari was not that man.

Even so, when I entreated Nigerians to renounce both the PDP and APC and seek a third option, the overwhelming response was to accuse me of irresponsible idealism. We were stuck, I was told; we were without any other choice. It was too late in the game to take on the task of championing a third political path. Like it or not, we had to embrace the one party or the other.

We did just that. Disdaining the once imperious PDP, ignoring every other party in the race, most Nigerians cleaved to Buhari and the APC, the candidate and the party whose mantra was “change.” It didn’t matter that they hardly defined what change meant, that they merely hoisted up brooms at rallies. Having put Nigeria and its affairs in their hands, many a Nigerian returned to the business of daydreaming that God – or some superhuman – would take up the task of solving the problems we work hard, individually and collectively, to create.

A year and a half into his administration, it is clear that President Buhari is overwhelmed. He has said as much, in oblique as well as direct terms. His wife, Aisha Buhari, has joined the likes of Junaid Mohammed and Senator Bukola Saraki in proposing that some forces inimical to Nigeria’s interests have hijacked the current administration.

The immediate crisis facing the Buhari administration is a severe shortage of cash. For decades, a parade of Nigeria’s visionless leaders frittered away their country’s oil earnings. Sometimes, they just stole the funds. When they invested the earnings at all, it was on gigantic projects that had little connection to the vital interests and lives of the Nigerian people. Nigeria has never had a leader, who remotely resembled the late great Singaporean prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Mr. Yew had his negative side, including a notorious impatience with critics, but he envisioned his city-state, as a first-tier economy – and worked assiduously to steer Singapore towards that lofty dream.

Mr. Buhari as well as Nigeria’s governors and local government councilors have little at their disposal. Yet, this impecunious circumstance is not the sole reason for the current disaster in Nigeria at every level of governance. Those who run Nigeria, the president included, have found in the dwindled oil revenues a perfect excuse for their failure. But I’d suggest that, even if they were to get a sudden infusion of cash, they would remain steeped in mediocrity.

Cash is important for running any social community, but leadership is far more critical. And leadership has to do, above all, with vision and imagination. For a man who sought to lead Nigeria as compulsively as Mr. Buhari did, it is astonishing that he has no bold blueprint. He does not appear to realise that Nigeria’s educational sector needs to be revamped, that the country needs something called a healthcare plan. He has no plan in place for addressing Nigeria’s colossal unemployment crisis. For that matter, his approach to fighting corruption is shockingly ad hoc and jaded, hardly more effectual than what passed for anti-corruption efforts under former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan.

In her widely discussed BBC interview, Mrs. Aisha Buhari served notice that she might not support her husband to run for reelection in 2019. Her statement got me thinking: It is about time Nigerians began to think about creating a coalition of progressive, enlightened and visionary citizens to seek political power at every level and undertake the task both of founding their country and realising its potential. It would be a tragedy to wait until 2019 and, throwing up hands in despair, declare again that we must cast our lots either with the PDP, despite its long history of failure, or the APC, which is just as bereft of ideas.

Talking of visionary leadership, I am rather fond of recalling a TV programme in which Steve Kroft, a correspondent on “60 Minutes,” an American news programme, interviewed Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai. The correspondent began by asking what the sheik was trying to do. The sheik’s response was instructive in its clarity: “I want [Dubai] to be Number One – not in the region, but in the world.” Next, the reporter asked, “What do you mean by Number One?” The sheikh had a ready response: “In everything: Higher education, health, housing, just [giving] my people the highest way of living.”

The journalist then remarked to the sheikh might have chosen to transform his kingdom within the longer span of a generation, not at the hurried, sweeping pace of a few years. Eyes sharpened, Dubai’s ruler came back: “I want my people to live [a] better life now, to go to the highest schools now, to get good healthcare now – not after twenty years.”

“60 Minutes” showed that the sheikh had carefully chosen young, soundly educated people to supervise critical areas of his transformation agenda. Apart from their youth, these aides were also seized by a palpable dynamism and can-do spirit. By contrast, Mr. Buhari and his predecessors make a habit of entrusting too many critical assignments to old, superannuated men and women who are set in their (bad) ways and obsessed with personal aggrandizement.

Time is short, 2019 around the corner. It’s time Nigerians of developmental vision and moral acumen coalesced around a political party to ensure that the PDP and APC do not crop up as our sole default choices in two and a half years.