A Year To Savour -By Kene Obiezu

2022 with its many distinct challenges has suffered the dictatorship of time. Finally swept away as if never happened, time that great tyrant has ushered in 2023 and what a year it promises to be for Nigerians.

Nigerians would most likely remember 2022 for the excitement generated by  an approaching election. Nigerians would also most likely remember the different difficult challenges.

To have 133 million poor with many of its concentrates in the rural areas is no joke. Dozens of kidnap victims spending six months in  captivity after a railway became a road to hell is no joke either. The countless people who died in Southern Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina and other states as bandits and terrorists ran riot will never  be anyone’s joke no matter how grim.

How about the other issues which stalked Nigerians like a ghost this year? ASUU downed tools for eight months to leave hapless undergraduate students lost at home. Many Nigerian professionals left the country to worsen an already calamitous brain drain. The Super Eagles failed to take Nigeria to the World Cup.

It would appear a litany of lamentation. Africa’s largest country has known tremendous turmoil. As the grave and the farcical compete for space ahead of the elections, there is every reason for optimism.

Nigerians can look with hope to the end of President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years  in office, and the chapter of incompetence and inertia it will slam shut. Perhaps, someday, with the benefit of hindsight, Nigerians would look with nostalgia at his time in office. But for now, his  remains eight  years of waste and wanderlust.

For Nigerians, the most forceful promise  about 2023 is the promise of change. Nigeria’s constitutional democracy dictates that there will be a change of guard at different levels in May, 2023.

Change brings uncertainty but also a welcome breath of fresh air. And God knows that  Nigeria could do with some fresh air right on. The  corridors of power in Nigeria right now can do with a draught of fresh air wafting through it.

But who will it be? Nigerian politicians are almost always cut from the same cloth of the painfully clueless and the  embarrassingly shameless. Because the system in place here is a tragic failure which spawns failure, those who find themselves in public office soon surrender without any fight and turn out to be horrendous failures themselves.

A country where an erstwhile accountant-general is being grilled for fraud running into billions of naira should know that it’s days as such a country is numbered.

Yet, Nigeria continues to trudge on. It is a country that has always somehow managed to trudge on in spite of the mammoth odds put in its way by the folly of many. This folly finds a lot of hosts among those who would be leaders of the country. If this be so, the struggles in the halls of power are  understandable.

Who does the cap fit? Between a whistle-clean but tough-as-nails politician who brings a measure of rare dignity to playing politics, and two wily old political warhorses burdened with various baggage but full of tricks and surrounded by tricksters, who will occupy Aso Rock come May?

Nigerians must move from merely holding their breath to actively participating in the elections. By now, the political cost of nonchalance, docility and aloofness is well documented such that those who are left with any sliver of common sense whatsoever know that to sit and do nothing is infinitely more dangerous than getting involved even if getting involved means making the wrong choices.

2023 promises to be an intriguing year. Nigerians when they finally see the back of President Muhammadu Buhari and a tumultuous period in the country’s history could  do with an improvement in their welfare and security. Nigeria could do with a reduction in the number of totally avoidable deaths. Nigerians could do with a country where joy will again be found in merely living comfortably.

It is also a year of settling accounts. In everyday life, Nigerians must continue to give a good account of themselves. When the elections finally come around, Nigerians must also give a good account of themselves by demanding proper accounts from all those who have recently been saddled with the task of serving the country in different capacities.

It is year of great promise for Nigeria. Nigerians must unite and work furiously and forcefully to ensure that the promise of a great year does not easily fizzle out.

Kene Obiezu,

Twitter:@kenobiezu