I was planning to appeal to all Nigerians, young and old, to give peace a chance in the current struggle for the soul of our nation even before I read the pastoral intervention of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I read with much appreciation the appeal to our common sense by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He said this as a friend of Nigeria and the primate of the Anglican global communion. I was particularly touched when the archbishop mentioned the fact of the potentiality of Nigeria as a global player if only, we run our affairs on the basis of justice, equity and inclusion. He particularly said without justice there can be no peace.
There are about 20 million members of his Anglican communion in Nigeria which is a substantial part of the Anglican Church in the world. These are not just nominal members of this church and unlike in Great Britain, the Anglican Communion in Nigeria is an active one. I should know because I am a baptized and confirmed Anglican communicant in spite of my current membership of the Redeemed Christian Church of God of which the General Overseer Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, has himself been very vociferous and loud about the need for peace in Nigeria. Without peace there can be no development and if there is no development, there would be no jobs and we all know that it is idle hands that are the devils instruments of destruction and destabilization.
What happened in the last few weeks since the shooting in Lekki of demonstrators and the destruction that preceded and followed the unfortunate situation should convince all Nigerians how fragile our post-colonial state is. If we do not learn the simple lesson of our fragility as a country, then we will never learn and our future will be very dicey. It is not only our country that is fragile, our society itself is quite close the state of nature which the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes claimed is nasty brutish and short and in which there can be no civilized way of living. It is because of the awareness of this horrible state of nature that governments are instituted by man. Even a dictatorship, some kind of Leviathan, would be preferable to this state of anarchy that those of us in Lagos and environs saw, experienced and endured some weeks ago. What began as an apparently well-organized protest by young people who justifiably felt they had to make their anger felt about the way a particular special branch of the police treated any overtly successful young person. In their protest they received overwhelmingly support and understanding of their older folks if not countrywide support, at least support in the southern part of the country where the protest was domiciled. It is also not surprising to anybody that the large proportion of the innovative and upwardly mobile young people in Nigeria who don’t depend on government jobs and patronage appear to be concentrated in the Lagos area which for many years has been a crucible of nationalist and progressive feeling which tended to mirror the future of a progressive Nigeria where scant regard will be paid to ethnicity and religion. So the fact that the #End SARS demonstrators were concentrated in the Lagos area and to a certain extent in the Southwest and the southern part of the country generally does not detract from the fact that this was a Nigerian expression of anger against the way they are being ruled.
It must also be said that when one part of Nigeria hurts a little, the whole country suffers from the pain. The destruction of Lagos in the last rampage is going to have a lasting damage on the Nigerian economy since Lagos is pivotal to the growth and development of the Nigerian economy. The way Lagos goes determines the direction of the Nigerian economy. What New York is to the American economy is what Lagos is to the Nigerian economy. In our warped way of looking at national politics divorced from the political economy of Nigeria, some people feel if they destroy or slow down the economy of Lagos, the more politically privileged and advantageous section of the country will benefit and gain at the expense of Lagos. The economy does not work that way. Americans will say the dollar does not discriminate between black and white so it is in Nigeria where the naira is no respecter of tribe or language! It follows therefore that, it is in our overall interest as a nation, if we all build together rather than planning to destroy the most vibrant and viable part of our economy.
I say all this because after the dust of the destruction in Lagos had settled down some people seriously felt that there was an unseen hand determined to bring the economy of Lagos and perhaps that of southwestern Nigeria down. There may not have been any deliberate desire or attempt to do this but sometimes perception can be more important than facts. I personally felt the destruction we witnessed in this part of our country was self-inflicted arising out of petty political jealousy and struggle for political relevance. The way the noise over succession to the presidency and the loud claim to it by all sorts of people suddenly sprang up just after the madness of these last weeks gives one the impression that there is more than meets the eye over the targeting of certain individuals for destruction so as to render them hors de combat even before the contest begins. I personally feel it is totally inappropriate if not immoral to start campaigning for 2023 election when the burial of those killed in the Lagos disturbances had not taken place nor the ashes of the destruction settled down.
With the way things are going will it not be more appropriate for us to bind our wounds first and then seek the face of the Lord for the blood that was shed during the rampage in Lagos and in the Southwest and Edo, Enugu and Rivers states than to begin campaigning for 2023 election?
Weeks after the commotion, policemen have refused to return to their beats. Other security personnel have followed the example of the police. Can anybody blame them? The insensate murder of some policemen in some towns should make us ashamed and should be condemned. The fact that some security people in the past committed extra-judicial murders does not justify meting the same measure to some innocent men in uniform. No one deserves to die by the hands of fellow human beings. Even soldiers who go to war are given orders of restraint unless their lives are in danger. While it is wrong for armed security operatives to kill unarmed individuals, it is equally wrong for any security personnel to be wantonly wasted no matter what cause one is fighting for.
It was apparent to observers that life matters very little to some of us Nigerians and this is why armed robbers or herders and brigands kill almost for fun those not resisting them. Yet many of the perpetrators of these dastardly acts are votaries of one religion or the other. There is no religion from the universal monotheistic ones of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other non-monotheistic religions including traditional African religions that tolerates taking of human lives. It is against the law of God to kill a human being and this is why in almost all parts of the world, capital punishment has been abolished. It stands to reason therefore to think of killers as people suffering from permanent insanity or temporary madness induced by taking hard drugs.
This brings me to the rampant consumption of hallucinogenic drugs by young people in Nigeria. So apart from serious economic problems of unemployment and social immiseration, we also have the health issue of drugs ingestion by the underclass and even some deluded young people who see its consumption as a temporary relief from their depression.
Our problems are legion. We do not need to add to it by state policy of discrimination in employment and appointments based on ethnic and religious considerations. There can be no peace without justice and equity. There is no point for those in government to be appealing for national unity which they say is not negotiable when they themselves do everything through their action of preferences to work against national unity.
I wonder how some people can sleep at night! This is a time for some kind of national moral rearmament to save this country. This is the only country the black man has that possess a chance, all things being equal, to defend black humanity in an increasingly competitive and wicked world. Archbishop Justin Welby made this point also. But do our politicians realize that while we are still here on this side of the heavenly divide, we should help build a future where the labour of our heroes’ past will not be in vain? The foundation of that future must be laid on equity, justice, fairness, inclusion and political realism. There is no point burying our heads in the sand and saying all is well. All is not well. God will not come down from heaven to rule us. He has given us human intelligence and what we require is willpower to face our problems of population explosions, laziness, refusal to face the reality that in order to build a thriving future based on political stability, we have to rejig and restructure the governance architecture of this potentially great country which its temporary rulers have rendered largely unhappy. Those who make change impossible, as President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said, make revolution inevitable.