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By Dr. Kingsley Moghalu
Our biggest problem in our country Nigeria is our inability to have honest and difficult conversations and seek solutions to our challenges of nationhood from that foundation, to face obvious facts and be considerate to the rights of our compatriots beyond tribe and creed. “Us”versus “Them” instead of Live and Let Live.
We admire our problems instead of solving them. We debate inanities — carefully avoiding the REAL issues — with sound and fury signifying nothing. Evil reigns, because powerful people profit from it. Life is so cheap in Nigeria. Norms that would never be accepted in civilized societies with serious aspirations to progress are par for the course in our national space. As the poet John Doone so pithily put it, “one man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind”. That means the death of one man or woman of ANY faith or ethnic or none, or of any ethnic background.
2 February 2025
Certain individuals the equivalent of the ecclesiastical thinkers of Europe’s Dark Ages who believed the earth was flat and not round, have outsize influence on policy. Domination above all, even as we all risk perishing in the process, seems to be the governing thought. This is tunnel vision, leadership failure, is against even enlightened self-interest, and manifests itself in so many ways including our current crisis.
The interesting thing is that the assumptions that have underpinned this self-deception and selfishness in the name of power mongering that has gone on for decades, have shifted. We must wake up and smell the coffee. Anyone who thinks that business as usual will wish our crisis away this time, just doesn’t understand what’s at stake.
There are solutions, of course, and paths to resolution that will advance the greater good for ALL of us. And keep our country and its citizens secure. But those solutions and the pathways don’t lie in our usual patterns of thought and action, nor, if I may venture to say it, in the usual suspects – partisan co-party apparatchiks, ethnic co-travelers, co-religionists etc, traditional lobbyists etc. What is required is far more sophisticated.
This is not the time for hubris and empty braggadocio. It is a time for soul-searching, a time for honest self-appraisal by us as a country. The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. This crisis is too important to waste. The immortal Chinua Achebe, in his inimitable novel Things Fall Apart, told the story of the bird, Nza, which, after a heavy meal and feeling rather giddy with presumed strength, challenged its “chi” (deity) to a wrestling match. The outcome was predictable. Nza was destroyed in the encounter. Pride goes before the fall.
We are face to face, now, with ourselves as a country that has remained unable to make the transition from country to nation. Some, like Achebe, even questioned the “country” status, with his last published book angrily and ominously titled “There Was a Country”. We are face to face with ourselves because we are face to face with the most powerful country in the world. Quo vadis? Afghanistan, or Morocco, Dubai, or Tel Aviv? We must ask, and answer this question.
Small views have collided with real worldviews. Impunity and terror will always, at some point, meet its Waterloo moment. I remember Osama bin Ladin at the height of his menace. 9/11. It took years, but he had attacked the wrong target. Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, he was hunted down for his crimes, and despatched to his Maker. Nigeria should not be so weak a country that rag-tag terrorists on motor bikes can so freely terrorize its territory and citizens without consequence. When politicians in charge of the safety of the homeland are apologizing instead of defending us from death, something is deeply wrong. But the ground WILL shift, again, one day.
The author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about The Tipping Point, that point at which fundamental realizations crystallize and circumstances conspire to create a fundamental change. At that point and afterwards, we ask the question “who moved my cheese?”. We must think outside the box. Wisdom is profitable for direction.
