APC, PDP there is a country to run

As thousands of delegates of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) converged in Abuja from all the nooks and crannies of the country for the party’s presidential primaries, large swathes of the federal capital city had been without power and fuel for weeks on end.

Just a few days before the convention terrorists had attacked a church in Owo, Ondo state killing scores of worshippers and wounding many more. In the same city of Abuja where the APC was holding its controversy laden presidential primaries, armed men raided the sprawling middle class residential area of Gwarimpa, robbed and kidnapped residents unchallenged by security and law enforcement forces.

Elsewhere in the bad lands of Kaduna state, scores of kidnapped passengers of the train bombing incident which occurred over a couple of months ago have been in captivity; almost forgotten and left to their own fate by the authorities. Our universities and tertiary institutions, the incubators of our future leaders and nation leaders have been shut now for months leaving millions of students at home without any indication that they will reopen anytime soon for academic activities to resume.

Do our leaders care? Does it bother them that much of the country is reeling from a litany of needs just to survive the desperate and debilitating state of existence they have subjected us to?

A few hours after the massacre in Ondo, President Buhari hosted APC governors to a sumptuous dinner at Aso Villa as part of preparations for the party’s presidential primaries. As usual the president had issued a characteristically bland statement condemning the incident and offering meaningless platitudes to the victims.

Indeed since the political season got into the full swing, the token and largely shambolic attention our governments at all levels pay to issues of governance has been shunted aside. Instead our government functionaries have turned their full attention to issues of their own political relevance and convenience in the race to the 2023 elections. Nothing else but their electoral calculations matter. State governors that hardly pay salaries and emoluments have criss-crossed the country in chartered planes selling their political messages. Government officials who have the responsibility to attend to some of the aforementioned ills bedevilling the country have literarily abandoned everything and turned their attention to political matters.

In the middle of tasking existential issues that threaten the well-being of Nigerians and indeed the country itself, much of it is the result of our dysfunctional leaders, we are being told that our major problems as a country are who among our political figures should rule over us. And even when they clearly do not and have not demonstrated enough political will to get to grips with the challenges that confront the country, the issues of public discourse are not of their failures and the necessary remedies but of how they could still be relevant in our public and political space.

In their continuing wilful neglect to face off to the challenges of the country, they are encouraged incredibly by the very victims of their misgovernance. We seem to have bought into their simplistic and self- serving narrative of ethnic and religious differences and representation as the template for political relevance rather than competence, ability and visioning. We have submitted to the narrative that we are doomed to mental incapacitation, limited thinking and ability to challenge our existential issues as a country in the comity of nations.

Under such a state of mental rut and atomisation, we generate leaders who do not think beyond what they can personally amass mostly at the expense of the country.
It is indeed no wonder that the country is where it is; rudderless, adrift and in clear and existential danger of slipping over the abyss.
The danger in all of this is that our elite have worked themselves into complacently thinking that they can continue in their ways of neglecting to do the needful in terms of facing off to the challenges of nation building. It is a dangerously deceptive luxury which has a way of coming back to haunt its purveyors.

A situation such as we are now in where the rest of the people lie prostrate from all kinds of afflictions and the leaders appear content to wallow in their gilded luxury unconcerned and uncaring and is a setting for systemic collapse. Leadership elite of many nations who allow themselves such dubious luxury in the face of glaring socio-economic contradictions have been swept by the tide of discontent when it boils over.

Nigeria is at present on the dangerous trajectory towards a systemic collapse of the fragile fabric that has held it together. It is not just about the debilitating state of existence that majority of Nigerians are now compelled to live in. It is more of the fact that the leaders of the country living in dubious and unjustified self-entitlement do not seem to realise the danger they themselves are in by neglecting to devise ways of facing the existential challenges of the country.

We are inexorably getting into the stage where the wilful negligence and failure by the leaders to run this country properly will exact its toll on all of us the leaders and the led. We are already seeing the signs in the widening ungovernable areas of the country where the normal organs and institutions of the state are increasingly being replaced by non-state actors. We are also seeing a situation where the legitimacy and relevance of the state and its functionaries are being questioned by actions of groups.

All these developments are like cancer to the body of the state and when it becomes a tumour it becomes near impossible to treat and heal.
To the Nigerian leadership of both the APC and PDP for both their sakes and that of our nation they had better woken up to this looming danger.