Let’s drag Yar’Adua to the cafe

I hate to be numbered among alarmists. Even if alarm has its therapy of lifting the indolent from his canvass, it upsets the normal course of movement. Alarms don’t get natural results but synthetic ones; they spruce up actions for the moment, lest the flickering warning of the red light arrest the one for which the alarm is set. This is why, rather than alarm on what is on our hands - the deeply troubling hopelessness of Nigerian youths - I seek to paint the true picture of decay that we have oozing pus on our hands; a sore that makes it difficult to agree with optimists that this country has a future to call her own.

There is no doubting the fact that the implosion in Nigeria’s population census has wreaked a great havoc on those sectors of the economy that we used to hold aloft. From about 1980 when the country’s economy was caught by a sweeping earthquake of maladministration in the hands of civilian rulers, things haven’t been the same again. As good governance caved in, to be replaced by gross immorality in office; as bountifulness got replaced with austerity, attention shifted from tomorrow of the nation to today. We began to live like the biblical Zarephath woman whose preoccupation was to eat, drink and wither.

But how did our tomorrow get trapped inside this inferno? The road we shuttled past to this sorry pass is no other than our terse understanding, or refusal to understand, in this nation, the place of those youths who play plastic balls in the backyard. Interests of rulers of the country have shrunk from bothers about the collective to the narrow confines of their immediate families. That is why there have been renewed efforts to parcel children of the rich and powerful to saner countries, leaders of which daily bend over backwards to project the tomorrow of their nations, through thinking strategically on how to engage their youths’ tomorrow.

I doubt if President Umaru Yar’Adua ever knows about the horror that is the tomorrow of a country thrust into his hands. If you look at it from the implosion in the number of those who leave universities and other higher institutions yearly without a job, whose figure is piling on our shoulders daily, we could effectively tell Yar’Adua that his meek mien belies and simplistically views the Armageddon on our hands. Every home – except, of course, the homes of those who wield power – is besieged by a Myammar-kind earthquake of youth hopelessness and joblessness. The jobless and ipso facto hopeless, youths are our children, siblings, relatives and wards who pine out on the streets with astonishing rapidity. A United Nations survey is said to have put the number of jobless Nigerian youths at four school leavers in five. It is that bad.

The result is what affronts us on a daily basis. When robbers gain entrance into our homes brandishing pistols and AK47, they are these young boys, barely off their diapers, requesting for our all in amazing Queen’s English. Those who visit red light districts regale us with the high level of literacy on the streets among sellers of the flesh. Even in our neighbourhoods, those who terrorize us are those kid spill-over whom society has failed to create a space for in the midst of the employed. Visit the nearest police station and you would be alarmed at the rate at which cases of larceny, robbery, theft and other societal crimes are being taken over by knowledgeable Nigerian youths who are nevertheless jobless.

The one that assails me week in week out is the colonization of cyber-cafes by youths who try to circumvent the blocked roads to eking out honest living by successive Nigerian governments. Good-looking and precocious, they storm the cafes in twins and pound out dross on the computer to unsuspecting victims in God-knows-where. As you wait to take your turn, these youths make phone calls to these victims in improvised voices, asking that the money be remitted as soon as possible. When you imagine how such wizardry and intelligence would have rescued our archaic industries, you will weep for this country. I was told that there is a similar pattern of an unabashed caveat emptor placed on goods abroad: We will not sell to Nigerians and Indians. And when Yar’Adua flies to Germany to keep appointment with his doctors, he is looked at as the president of a fraudulent people. I hope that testimonial is good enough, isn’t it? Tell you the truth, a holocaust is here.

Being precocious and seeking to jump off this barricade, the other group of these youths suffering the hostility of Nigerian leaders to their tomorrow, resolve to Andrew-ing. You would be alarmed at the number of Nigerians – mostly youths – who have been decapitated and wasted in hostile jungles of the world in the name of jumping over the Yar’Adua barricade. Climbing impossible hills, mounting walls laced with dynamites, crossing rivers whose crocodiles and sharks bate human blood with astonishing wonder, many of our promising youths have been sacrificed to the ineptitude of Nigerian governments. Yet, so far as the elite children are screened from view by space at John Hopskins and allied Ivy League institutions of the West, the rest of Flora Shaw-named people can go jump inside River Zambesi.

Look at the blood that South Africa, which we funded with our petro-dollar, is squeezing off us in the misplaced xenophobic unrest in Nelson Mandela’s country now. Many of our youths, who sidled out to do menial jobs in SA, I am sure, would be easy tinder in this class anger at the pauperization of District Six, Soweto and allied poor in South Africa. A country that projects is one that is interested in her tomorrow. Since the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) scheme, I would be pleased to be informed of any other revolution-like policy by Nigerian governments. To worsen matters, I doubt if government has a statistics of the number of jobless youths in Nigeria today, the number of employed, the number of those that will be upturned into the consuming roller-coaster of unemployment this year and what remedial programme it has for this inferno. Ask the ministry of youths if it ever bothers about such statistics.

Even an agricultural programme that would bring relief to the ongoing food crisis and respite from the guns of our youths advancing toward us like a rampaging herd of elephant, would not be a bad idea. I hope the rich and powerful know that when those children being prepared for leadership eventually come back, they will rule over spivs and derelicts? Can someone drag Yar’Adua to the cyber-café to come see the fire that is threatening to burn Shaw’s people? Excuse me while I shed a trickle of tear.

For Marley and Omowura

THE 27th anniversary of the passage of Bob Marley has escaped my pen for two weeks now. This is also the 28th anniversary of the exit of my musical idol, Eegunmongaji Ayinla Omowura. Some mischievous folk said Omowura’s acidic tongue twines him to me! While the former was an incurable believer in Africa, the latter, the son of Gbogbolowo the blacksmith, used his knowledge of a repertoire of Yoruba and deep Egba dialect to celebrate the people that Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth and whom Sembene Ousmane see as people without people. Omowura, Dauda Epo Aka, Odolaye Aremu, Ligali Mukaiba, Yusuff Olatunji, Ayinla Adegeto, Olowonyo, S. Aka Baba Wahidi, etc, explain the world as Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus etc did!

Dying for Nigeria

SCARCELY have we returned the Ifa divination chain into its pouch, so say my people, than its predictions are coming to manifestation. Last week, we agonised at how avoidable man-made calamities seem to have turned us into a God-crazy people. Few days after, forty six Nigerian soldiers just returning from Darfur, on peace-for my Ilu-Abo, Ondo State, village where I am sure I would be buried like a hero.

To escape the wrath on the streets, Nigerians devise ways out. On car stickers that proclaim that the occupants are covered by the blood of Jesus, in talismanic phials and amulets worn on their persons, the underscore is a failed country that has very sparse remedy to make death and calamities strictly acts of God.

My heart bonds with the families of the deceased soldiers. Having been a victim of Nigeria Army’s insouciance for its fallen heroes, I imagine what pains await the soldiers’ families. About ten years ago, in the senseless intervention in the Sierra Leone war, my kid brother soldier of the Sokoto Division was killed. All I got was a terse letter sent by post and no dime paid to his family by the Army.

Pardon my un-patriotism: I won’t want to die for Nigeria. I would rather die for my Ilu-Abo, Ondo State, village where I am sure I would be buried like a hero.

Letter to Farida

ONE interesting bit about the hoopla that attends the appointment of Mrs. Farida Waziri, the new boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is that, of all the dissents to the manner of her emergence, none has declaimed her propensity for continuing in the mould of tough cop, Nuhu Ribadu. When you look at the constitution of our society, where maggot-filled power cabals dictate the tone and tenor of public appointments for their selfish motives, you would realise that scans of Waziri’s leanings are not misplaced after all.

I was however thrilled during the week when a news report credited to her asked that the commune of vain-glorifiers already milling round her should not place newspaper advertorials congratulating her. If eventually Waziri weathers the storm and emerges the new boss of the outfit, she would have to mind further pitfalls.

You may disagree with his modus operandi, Ribadu deserves credit for picking the fight against corruption from the rung and lifting it to a level of envy and reckoning. His passion was such that he even once committed the indecent comparison of likening self to a suicide bomber. His Achilles hill was however that he was a blitz-seeker. He loved his face adorning front pages of newspapers and the klieg of the camera. His little failing was thus that he played into the hands of his passion and emotions.

Another commendable reformer is Dora Akunyili. Millions of Nigerians owe their freedom from killer drugs to the professor. Like Nuhu, or even worse than his, Dora’s prize-tag is her vanities and inanities. It is only Association of Dogs and Goats that hasn’t given the drugs avant-garde awards and titles which, at a conservative estimate, should be more than two thousand now, both home and abroad.

These vanities are tempting but corrosive and destructive. Madam Farida would do well to hop up them. She would also do well to explain to us why ‘villains’ that Ribadu told the Senate in 2006 he had investigated and was ready to charge to court, are still moving about free.