MONDAY LINES Our politicians are treading the road to hell 24.Nov.2014 Lasisi Olagunju Somalia is a one-tribe, one-religion country but it has not known peace for the past 22 years. It is a nation of Muslims where praying five times a day is a rare privilege. War is the religion the country has known for over two decades. Leadership failed the country. No government has been effectively on ground there since early 1990s. No school has opened there for over 20 years. The story from that country has consistently been of terrorism, bombs and abductions. I fear for Nigeria each time I think about Somalia and see Nigeria exhibit the kind of ailments that destroyed that country. Last year, the Fund for Peace ranked Nigeria 16th on the Global Failed States index. Somalia came first. It had to. In 2014, the Fund changed the classification, renaming it Global Fragile States index. Even on that one, Nigeria was 17th and Somalia second. War-racked South Sudan beat Somalia to the first position. The indicators are the same over the years and I see Nigeria in each of them. One major indicator for the ranking is massive movement of refugees or internally displaced persons. Does Nigeria not currently boast of millions of refugees in the North-East? Another is sharp or severe economic decline. How many Nigerian states now pay salaries promptly? Progressive deterioration of public service is another. Do we still have a public service in Nigeria? Violation of human rights and the Rule of Law is also an indicator of a state that has failed. And I ask: don’t you see how, from Abuja to everywhere, the Rule of Force and threats of more force daily displace decency? The Fund for Peace listed security apparatus as another indicator. Hunters now assist the Nigerian military to liberate whole states from terrorists. Our police are now so swift that they invade the National Assembly to “enforce order” and teargas rebellious lawmakers! Factionalised elite is another clear indicator of a failed/fragile state. Nigeria’s power elite, for the first time, no longer respect their legendary common interest. They are scattered dangerously in camps threatening war. Lastly, the Fund talked about intervention of external actors. We lack shame here. We beg outsiders to come and help look for abducted schoolgirls, and we abuse those who delay in coming. We have reached the lowest of the low. Nigeria is on the very ground zero. It has never been this bad. No one would ever have dreamt this day would come. No one needs to tell anyone in this country again what it takes to have a failed country. The events of the past one week merely served as the icing on the cake of Nigeria’s descent to the abyss. “The end is near, very near,” a friend posted on Facebook as soon as he watched the House of Representatives shame on television Thursday last week. I asked him what end he was talking about because my Christian compatriots would insist that the wars and rumours of wars never meant the end is here. Muslims would stress that judgment day won’t just come now because Nigerian politicians at all levels have gone mad with power. But is the end truly not around the corner? Ask husbands with missing wives and children in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe and they will confirm the descent of Hades. Optimism would have been a possibility if hope had existed somewhere. Everywhere you turn to, the interest is not in anything but the 2015 elections. No one cares if the house got burnt even before that day of votes and dream victories. From the president to the governors, senators to Reps and state legislators, the only thing that counts for now is the electoral battle ahead. They are too blinded by ambitions to see the brink where they perilously dance. They are lost. But should we allow these drunks to take all of us down with them? “The Road to Hell” is the title of a 2002 article by a Harvard professor, Robert Rotberg. The alarm he raised then still jars our ears. He cried over the sheer growing number of states manifesting failure, especially in Africa. He asked questions and looked at the whys and hows of the failure of the countries that once held a lot of promise. “Destructive decisions by individual leaders have almost always paved the way to state failure,” he noted. “President Mobutu Sese Seko’s three-plus decades of kleptocratic rule sucked Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC) dry until he was deposed in 1997. In Sierra Leone, President Siaka Stevens (1967-85) systematically plundered his tiny country and instrumentalised disorder. President Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-91) did the same in Somalia. These rulers were personally greedy, but as predatory patrimonialists, they also licensed and sponsored the avarice of others, thus preordaining the destruction of their states,” declared the professor who added that “failed states have come to be feared as ‘breeding grounds of instability, mass migration, and murder’, as well as reservoirs and exporters of terror. The existence of these kinds of countries, and the instability that they harbor, not only threatens the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples but endangers world peace.” He was right. Think of the gangrene untreated Boko Haram has become for Nigeria and its neighbours. Now, what has made what you and I know of our Nigeria of today different from these 2002 cases? Look at what our leaders do. Listen to what they say. Observe their dance steps. Read their lips and hips. They are agents of state failure.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:43:05 +0000
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