YES, we are at war! This much we said last week. But the curious and sad thing is that Nigerians don’t seem to know or don’t want to know, and our leaders don’t seem to care. Our security agencies, whose activities are akin to the movement of wavelengths, continue with the aura of “everything is all right” when the trajectory is low, only to chase after those fighting Nigeria when the trajectory shoots up.
When they are at their lowest, it is the law-abiding citizen who gets the short end of their “might.” The real bad guys hold sway in the ungoverned spaces in the bushes and forests of our nation, living lives akin to the Indian Dakus—kidnapping at will and imposing taxes on their victims.
While hungry Nigerian citizens march on the streets, asking the government to allow them to breathe, they are being harassed. Those who have turned our bushes into billion-naira crime dens are being cajoled for a tête-à-tête.
The question confused and frustrated citizens are asking is, “How did we get here?” Yes, how did we get here? “Here” is like a station where going back looks impossible because the bridge is broken and moving on appears daunting because of the overgrowth of brush, bushes, thorns, and wild animals blocking the only path ahead. There is no promise of comfort in staying put, for a mighty flood that would sweep all to Hades is approaching fast.
Our founding fathers, who played a crucial role in birthing our nationhood in 1960, surely experienced great joy on that momentous first day of October when Naval Rating Salaudeen Akano, under the command of Commander Onwurah Zanyanuno Chiazor, lowered the Union Jack, which had served as Nigeria’s flag since 1914, at midnight and raised the Green-White-Green flag instead.
Had there been super intelligence that could “browse” their brains, perhaps in their minds, Nigeria was going to become an El Dorado, the utopian land of milk and honey where there would be abundant peace, harmony, equality, and uninterrupted happiness, in line with the prayer in the second stanza of our National Anthem, “Oh God of creation, direct our noble course, guide our leaders right, help our youth the truth to know…” with the anthem continuing elsewhere with “Help us build a nation where no man is oppressed…”
Now that the utopian country of their dream is our dystopian reality, what is the way out?
Some think the only way is the “hard way,” i.e., through a revolution. Others believe the best way is to change the governance system. This perhaps informs why some are proposing a return to the parliamentary system. Yet others opine that “restructuring” is the right route.
The thing is, those advocating for a revolution are romanticizing the word. They fantasize about the theoretical adventures of great revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, Thomas Sankara, and others who uplifted the thinking of their people, emancipated them from mental slavery, and changed the direction of their countries positively.
Revolution, the type that some find glamorous, is out of the question in Nigeria, because all those mouthing it are not ready, nor are they capable of going through the mill. No man whose thinking is comfort in life can be a revolutionary. Paper revolutionary, yes; active one? No! All those making noise about it are exploiting the gullible, who they view as cannon fodder rather than partners.
The parliamentary system or any other political system, not to mention restructuring, is not the solution as long as people with the current mentality are the drivers.
In our situation, the Goldilocks Solution is the way to go because our situation is desperate, and desperate situations demand desperate remedial actions. The Goldilocks Solution is a moderate manner of doing everything — “just right” — not too extreme, not too lacking, but perfectly balanced.
The term came from the classic children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In that fairy tale, Goldilocks sampled the bears’ porridge, chairs, and beds, rejecting those that were too hot or too cold, too hard or too soft, settling for those she found were “just right.”
Treasury looters alone are too plentiful. If we had hundreds in the 70s and 80s, now we have millions who have soiled their fingers. Some stole in hundreds of thousands, some in millions and tens and hundreds of millions, and others in tens and hundreds of billions. Has the thievery reached the threshold of trillions? But how do you beat that? How do you investigate and prosecute this general crime that almost all Nigerians in privileged positions cannot, in all honesty, claim innocence of?
The way we are, there must be something akin to a general amnesty for ALL criminals because we are starting afresh. This has to be so because different crimes, from the littlest, like picking our pockets, to pocketing our foreign reserves, to murders in cold blood by bandits and murders by files (where budgets for roads, hospitals, and poverty alleviation have disappeared), causing deaths on highways and in hospitals, budget paddings and many more are just too numerous for our security, judicial, and penitentiary sectors to handle. Those sectors, anyway, also have their fair share of criminals.
Just last week, a bandit who sometimes appears on TikTok and even asks citizens to drop their account details for monetary gifts taxed a community ₦30 million because a military commander killed his cows! Despite the commander’s “apology” and promise not to commit such a “sin” against the criminal again, the bandit said the people must pay because the soldier was protecting them.
The governor of Katsina, Dikko Umar Radda, exposed a traditional ruler who accepted ₦700,000 from bandits to facilitate the killing of his people and a security officer who betrayed his colleagues, leading to their deaths at the hands of bandits, and now he has fled to join his real colleagues in the bush.
Let every man who has money stashed anywhere in the world bring it back and invest. No questions asked. Those yahoo boys? Allow what they have pinched as “repatriated funds” and let them be. If those who dipped their hands in the treasury bring out the loot, invest, employ, pay taxes, and sin no more, let their actions be overlooked.
All bandits, insurgents, and terrorists should return to towns and utilize their loot in nation-building. Then, the government should set a time when crimes will start to be punished promptly. From then on, we should not allow any crime, no matter how small or big, committed by whoever, to be left unpunished. It is those crimes that, like drips of water allowed over time, have become the flood threatening to drown us.
We should consider the Goldilocks approach because it is getting too late, and it may be the only way for those responsible to regain control again.
- Dr Gimba is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Neptune Prime. His syndicated column, The Arbiter, appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Mondays.