We and our leaders are guilty

Nigeria’s many problems are neither reducible to the economy nor to insecurity nor to poverty but to lawlessness.

Who then is responsible for this? Who bears the burden of guilt? We bear a collective moral obligation to identify who they are. Some say it’s the leaders, while others say it’s the people.

I live in Epe, Lagos State, and I use the Epe-Ijebu Ode Road regularly. What is disturbing is the utter disregard for the law on that road, as is the case on other roads in Nigeria. It’s a road on which people drive against traffic as if it were normal.

On a Sunday morning, on my way to Mass, a car was not only being driven against traffic, its driver was going on top speed. When I challenged him and asked: “Why are you driving against traffic?” His response was anything but atypical.

“Se ilu oyinbo ni nwon bi yin si ni?” Translation: “Did they give birth to you in the white man’s country?” It was a patently racist response because it portrays the white race as superior to the black race. In concrete terms, good things can only be found in the white man’s country. It is the same logic that makes our football administrators peddle the fallacy that only a foreign coach is good for the national football team.

For this lawless Nigerian, keeping laws is a matter of the white man’s country, we in Blackman’s country are different. In our own country, anything goes. But if I were to ask him whether he would want to japa, surely, his response would have been in the affirmative. A lawless man, living in a land where lawlessness is the law, would not hesitate to joyfully accept the offer to migrate to a country where laws are sacrosanct.

He would jump at the opportunity. Note that he is not President or Governor or Minister or any political office holder. His conduct truncates the thesis that only our leaders are to be held responsible for lawlessness in Nigeria. Yet, the lawlessness he displayed is not peculiar to him. For, while not all Nigerians are lawless, it is difficult to find one who is not.

The Epe office of the almighty Federal Road Safety Corps is not far from the Epe-Ijebu Ode Road. However, while driving against traffic is a regular feature on that highway, its operatives are not found near scenes of infraction. They habitually congregate at the toll gate stopping motorists and collecting tolls. Ironically, I have witnessed, more than once, dangerous driving by officials of the Road Safety Corps.

Ours is a country where, with extremely few exceptions, law enforcement agents are themselves lawless. The police does not obey the law. Military personnel do not obey traffic lights. At our airports, vehicles in the convoys of our ‘honourable’ men and women in government are parked where parking is prohibited. A former political office holder evades arrest aided and abetted by a sitting functionary of state.

Law enforcement agents are functionaries of state. Functionaries of state are instruments in the hands of the state. The state is more powerful than the citizen, as the 1999 Constitution sets up Nigeria. The state is represented by its functionaries. If the state is more powerful than the citizen, the Nigerian state can and does get away with murder. Its functionaries can and do break laws with impunity.

Moreover, Nigeria is a country where the electoral process favours the lawless, and reins of state get into the hands of the lawless. They not only manipulate the electoral process and go scotch free, they are adept at manipulating governmental process. Conduct and outcome of judicial process leaves the populace in confusion. Bewildered citizens are treated to the spectacle of summersaulting priests of the temple of justice delivering contradictory judgments and provoking cacophonous anarchy. One outcome of this anarchy is a state with two parliaments, another is a city with two monarchs.

The judicial anarchy used as means to annul the June 12, 1993 election, taking Nigeria to the precipice, seems to have receded from memory. It was a time when democracy was truncated, lives were lost, progress was retarded. But, rather than learn, preference is shown for the path of dangerous misadventure.

Meanwhile, Nigerians are fed with the sophistry of democracy as work in progress. Indeed, democracy as an ideal is work in progress. But democracy is also an outcome. While it true that, here below, every ideal is work in progress, it is also true that every process points to an outcome. It would therefore be patently deceitful to say that the brigandage in Nigeria is a democratic venture. It cannot be truthfully asserted that the work currently in process is guided by and moving in the direction of democratic values.

The sad reality is that we and our leaders have strayed from the path of civility. We have imbibed a culture of might is right. The noble venture of politics is repeatedly and maliciously misrepresented by high flying students of the school of Machiavelli. It is they who call brigandage politics.

Culpability, however, is not to be solely ascribed to the political elite. We the people must acknowledge our guilt. Nigeria has repeatedly fallen victim of lawlessness of the leaders and lawlessness of the led. Responsibility for lawlessness in Nigeria is to be attributed by way of a differentiation between the proximate and the ultimate. Proximate culpability belongs to the people, while ultimate culpability belongs to the leaders.

The people, through their own ethnocentrically selective indignation, willfully overlook infractions committed by members of the political elite who belong to their ethnic, regional or religious communities. This is not peculiar to one ethnic community. It would be hypocritical to claim not to know that no ethnic, regional or religious community is innocent when it comes to this bizarre sense of indignation. Apart from this selective indignation, the people either allow themselves to be used to subvert the electoral process or look the other way when the process is subverted. Such is their proximate culpability.

But ultimate culpability is that of those who are at the reins of government, the godfathers, the godsons and god-daughters of Nigerian politics, the builders, owners and maintenance officers of undemocratic and anti-people political structures. Their lawlessness threatens security in the land. They control apparatus of state and use them to the detriment of the people, while the same people eulogise their oppressors, especially when the oppressor and the oppressed belong to the same ethnic or religious or regional community.

Consequences of this prolonged disregard for civility now stares us in the face. Our country is bleeding. Nigeria is like a patient whose vital organs are shutting down. Those who are supposed to be battling to keep her alive are either playing draught—they call it strategising—or wining and dining, pretending to be celebrating democracy. Values are reduced to slogans when those who evoke them assault them.

Akinwale is a Dominican Priest and Professor at Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.