Hard Days Are Here
“Nigerians, let’s face it, like easy answers and easy money … Nobody really wants to work hard but the hard days are here, and nobody knows what to do.”
Applications for employment have take on a note of entreaty for survival. “Please save me and my family from starvation,” writes a man from Ibadan who wanted a job. “I have been withut a job for three years, and I will accept any salary,” he pleads, “and please give me a job.” Yo may not have received a letter like that. But you should have seen something like it: the loss of self-confidence and self-seteem. Look at the faces around you. Look at the shoulders. What do you see? Blank faces staring at no one nor at anywhere. Bent shoulders betraying the beginning of lunches. Look at the gait. People are wandering rather than walking. What’s the matter? What happened? Depression, that’s what. But we were all wraned, weren’t we? Weren’t we given an early warning? Remember Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s cry at the beginning of the nation’s economic drift when he wailed to Shehu Shagari to stop what he saw as the wilting of the nation’s economy. But nobody was listening, and those who listened didn’t belive the sage from Ikenne. Awolowo’s voice was written off then as the ranting of s discotented old man in the advanced stage of senility. Emmanuel Edozien, a whole professor of economics whose main calling at the time was that of chief adviser on economic matters to Shagari, said the old chief did not know what he was talking about.
Edozien, surely since then, has lived to regret that statement. He is haunted by it, and would not like the unseemly matter brought up again. His must be like Jerome Udoji’s situation who now carries around his neck the epithet of the man who aided Yakubu Gowon in planting the tree that pulled down, finally, the nation’s economy. To be sure, Udoji has said a million times that his report was bastardised by Gowon and his aides, and that he did not recommend the mortgaging of the nation’s future to buy Gowon a few months’ stay in office. And to be sure, Edozien will soon come up to say that he was misunderstood at that time, that he was not exactly rebutting the old man of commerce, who is also an Ijebu man, meaning that Awolowo was born an economist. But no matter. He did say that Awolowo got all wrong. And before the ink could have dried on the paper on which Edozien issued that statement, the economy began to unravel. By that time many Nigerians had joined in the cry. But many had hoped that Shagari would be voted out by an electorate that clearly saw that the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) government was speedily killing the economy. Then, of course, the election came and nobody thinking can now say that he understands what happened in those stormy days.
I remember writing a series called “A Clarion to Arms” in which I listed the malfeasances pf the Shagari regime. A part from the political crimes of that regime, I painted a picture of a confused government. Shagari read those pieces, and instead of reflecting on them, sent Charles Igoh, his chief press secretary, to my house to challenge me to document his malfeasances. I thought that was a queer way to looking at serious issues. I thought that the ex-president should have taken in the whole situation at a glance and reached the natural conclusion, in the higher interest of the nation, that he could not run the affairs of the nation. He did not do that. What he did was to put himself forward for re-election and to rig himself back into office. The result was the militzry coup, and the fallout is the depression that has now brought the nation right down to its knees. It couldn’t be said that highly-place people in the Shagari administration did not see the handwriting on the wall. Forget the dutiful assignment of Edozien to defend the obviously indefensible. The man who first used the words oil doom to my hearing was ex-Vice-President Alex Ekwueme. One afternoon at the State House during the briefing of the press, Ekwueme talking about the down-turn in the oil market: “The oil boom, “he said,” had turned into oil boom.” It sounded funny then, but nobody realized how profound the statement was. So now those Nigerians who walked tall, buoyed by the oil boom, now go about with hunch, pressed down by the oil doom. The thought that Nigeria was rich because the oil was gushing will not occur to anyone thinking.
The reality is here, and it is apparent to all, even the idle rich and abject poor, that this nation is indeed poor. Oh yes, we are potentially rich. That is it. We are not practically rich. Only a few people got their finger bandaged in the wealth of the oil. The majority are now hungry and wanting. So what to do? It is time, isn’t it, when we must rise as one and find answers to the economic survival of this nation. Take a bus, if you don’t have a car, travel east from Lagos. See the dense and green vegetable. That is wealth: timber, palm trees, and rubbers and cocoa. Plant, if you prefer, endless expanse of orange groves in them. In the space in between, cultivate cassava and yam, and feed the southern half of the country. No, don’t fly, but take a train, and head north. Stop at Kwara and parts of Benue State and plant sugar cane. Also plant corn and other grains that the climate there will bless. Go further north, and in Gongola and Plateau, plant tomatoes and coffee and tea. Then move eastward, and plant beans, sorghum and millet and whatever it is that the climate there will support. Oh, I forget rice. Plant rice from the River Niger to the swamps of Sokoto State. See, Nigeria can grow any crop, at least enough crops tp feed the nation, and give us as well groundnuts and cotton and ginfer. Then what’s the problem?
The problem is lack of will, lack of resolve. Nigerians, let’s face it, like easy answers and easy money. Nigerians will rather take their briefing and look for the easy contract or the import licences to bring in general goods that will turn then into millionaires overnight. Nobody really wants to work hard. Now that oil is drying up, and that’s the truth, many people are afraid of hard work that must follow if this country is to find a way. And in the middle of the indecision, people are suffering. The hard days are here, and nobody knows what to do. People are feeling sorry for themselves, for most people have forgotten the meaning of hard work.
©Newswatch, February 11, 1985
(Pp.255-257)
