Bitter Pills
Nigeria: The Shame of Hopelessness
By Des Wilson
Everything is all stirred up here at home and I am living on Hope and Faith, which, by the way, make a pretty good diet when the mind will receive them.
-Edwin Arlington Robinson (Untriangulated Stars)
I am particularly saddened by the fact that our politicians have made a dreadful and a detestable mess of what social scientists like the late Professors Essien Udom and Billy Dudley of the University of Ibadan would have sworn their hearts out in proving that what we practise here is not politics but a variant of some zany, atavistic avocation wrapped in a divine enigma. Some call it politrics, while others call it monetics.
But elsewhere, politics is seen as involving the ideas and activities involved in getting power in a country, group or society by any of the means which guile may make right in a particular polity, or area of our world. And a polity is any formally organised political unit which has been put together in a particular way to form its own form of government. In such organised structures, there is usually a set of plans or actions agreed on by the constituents who form a government, political party, business or whatever group may be put together by the leaders and people who make up the polity.
In spite of what the experts say, Nigerian politics seems to be different from what people elsewhere know politics to be, just the same way democracy in Nigeria means something close to a tragicomedy where sometimes you do not know whether to laugh or cry over the missteps of schizophreniacs masquerading as leaders. But usually an interesting entrance does not often lead to a predictable denouement. But largely, politics here seems to be run by people who can be best described as ‘lying machines’. It is not that those they lie to, do not know they are being lied to, but that these pathological liars are themselves surprised that some of the citizens believe their lies and are willing to respond positively at the polls.
Nigerian politicians, therefore, feed on the gullibility, ignorance, the lack of emotional intelligence, ethnic sentiments, and even the miasma of irreligiousity branded in their distorted faiths.
Some of those politicians that have had the benefit of some education, and managed to have some certificate as inattentive or absentee students, pay indigent but intelligent classmates of theirs to attend classes on their behalf, copy notes, do assignments and sometimes write examinations for them, by having two sets of answer booklets and continuation sheets. These are some of the noisiest in public places. These half-baked graduates are more dangerous than stack illiterates.
These are the folks Alexander Pope warns us against in his An Essay on Criticism. In it, Pope tells us that a little learning is a dangerous thing and urges us to ‘drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring/There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain/And drinking largely sobers us again’.
Ironically, these are the folks that should bring us hope, but regrettably we are mirred in hopelessness and shame as we have become the object of ridicule around the world. In spite of our long and intimidating credentials as Africans that have been at the forefront of seeking knowledge and truth, we have remained stranded at a point spinning like a top in an unending show of shame.
It is near impossible to have truth come out of the lips of politicians even when they have thrown their hats in the ring as a response to the call for good men to be part of our political culture. This is why it is difficult to have true and sound opinions from them. These are the politicians who promise their voters deep sea ports in a desert – whether they are legislators or belong to the executive arm. We now have a situation where the blind are trying to lead the blind since many of the voters don’t know the difference between a law maker and a member of the executive arm.
