The parable of the good Nigerian -By Kene Obiezu

Nigeria is being consumed by an army of caterpillars but its peoples` hearts remain as big as ever.

In the days when she held the portfolio of Nigeria`s Information minister, the late Mrs.  Dora Akunyili coined the catchphrase ‘Nigeria: good people, great nation’ as part of an elaborate campaign to rebrand Nigeria.

 To the trailblazer from Anambra state who proved such a nightmare to Nigeria`s multi-billion naira fake drugs industry as the Director-General of NAFDAC, it was an attempt to repair the image of the country both at home and abroad.

She had played a stirring role in bringing the country out of the deep darkness cast by an adumbral cartel as a President Yar`adua lay dying.

In 2014, she lost her battle with ovarian cancer. In 2021, Nigeria consumed her husband as he was returning from receiving a posthumous award in her honour. His body which as a practicing physician had brought so much healing to others was pulverized by the unremitting fire of unknown gunmen in Anambra State. Till this day his killers remain beyond the reach of justice.

Every day, Nigeria is marched to the brink and back by those who barter innocent blood and bait fate, and though the world and his wife knows, helplessness is passed like an heirloom from one Nigerian height to the other.

Vast swaths of the country have been turned turtle by Boko Haram`s hypocritical hysterics against modernity. The devastation wrought and the daunting task the inevitable rebuilding demands is keeping embers of secession burning in some parts of the country.

In Nigeria`s North, what the vampire bats of Boko Haram leave behind, the barracudas of banditry swoop in to mop up. It has become routine for bandits to abduct people for ransom the routes and rituals of the abductions coming to them by rote as Nigeria`s security forces watch on rooted to the spot by a raptorial bureaucracy.

Being a Nigerian has never been harder. If it was just the straitened economic times, Nigerians would have easily braved it, swatting hardship aside like a pesky pest as they have done many times over. But in today`s Nigeria, a post-2015 Nigeria, the weary traveller from Abuja to Kaduna does not only have to carry a stomach lacking food as he journeys. He also has to look nervously into the bushes while his vehicle negotiates potholes on the Abuja- Kaduna highway of blood. Even when he travels through Akwanga, respite is scant.

In the face of all these, who is a good Nigerian? Surrounded by such Sisyphean odds, who has remained a good Nigerian?

It is the internally displaced child who in spite of the squalor of the sprawling IDP camp around him wears his defiant dignity like the very soul of sartorial sublimity.

It is the woman who having survived rape and the rapiers of killers makes her home and hearth in an IDP camp hoping to reunite with her lost husband and children someday.

It is the man who having seen his livelihood liquidated holds his family together in the backbreaking conditions of an IDP camp like a formidable glue.

In the condescending circus of international diplomacy, Nigerians bear the brunt of the sparse follies of a few fellow citizens, the whole providing an attractively soft target for international hypocrisies. Although every country contributes  a criminal or two to the international catalogue of crime, Nigerians get the hardest rows to hoe at the hands of hardnosed countries where external hypocrisies paper over internal hallucinations.

Yet, the good Nigerian lives in Leah Sharibu and the other girls whose towering dignity has the cowards of Boko Haram cowering even after even more than seven years in captivity.

The good Nigerian is the woman voter in Anambra State who refuses to cast the pearls of her vote before the swine of vote-buying. The good Nigerian is the athlete, the artist, the artiste and the advocate who wear their Nigerian-ness like royal robes in spite of its transparency under intrusive international gaze.

The good Nigerian lives in all those who defy debilitating odds and work round the clock to craft a cistern out of the clay of a broken country. The good Nigerian lives in the unemployed youth who in spite of his dire straits summons the steel to spurn the amorous advances of crime. In Nigeria, bribery and corruption hold up the banner of depredation in the mouth of a deprived country. 

For generation after generation of Nigerians, being a Nigerian has been a harrowing journey of   corruption which clothes the country with the rags of retrogression; of insecurity which   sits on its serenity like the boulder of Sisyphus; of bad leadership which bores into every position in the country like a cankerworm.

The Nigerian economy continues to crawl, dragging the survival of entire families aground. It is in the midst of these formidable obstacles that one is called to be a Nigerian; to be faithful, loyal and honest, and to serve Nigeria with all her strength.

Admittedly, it has been extremely difficult to respond to this call to service in any way. For so long, things in Nigeria have not been easy in any way. Not that it was expected to be given the country`s suffocating journey under colonialism and booby-trapped military incursions into politics.

In the face of many daunting challenges, it is time to redefine what being a Nigerian means, reworking mentalities and reshaping the image of the country to comply with the Nigerian dream. Until this is done, the Nigerian identity will remain conflicted, catching many Nigerians in its convoluted web like a giant spider. 

But Nigerians remain good people and it is out of that gold of generational goodness undimmed by the grime of graft that Nigeria`s redemption will come.

Kene Obiezu,

keneobiezu@gmail.com