THE IMPARTIAL OBSERVER
Matters of the Moment
Nigeria’s 48 un-Idyllic years and Dreams Deferred
Hank Eso
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
~~Langston Hughes
However
proper it may seem, saying happy birthday Nigeria on this day will certainly
mean extending a counterfactual and near insincere felicitations. Without being
uncharitable or cynical, and without any intent to debunk the fact that
Nigerians are inexplicably a happy bunch, one wonders what there is to
celebrate, or indeed, be happy about in present day Nigeria.
Our nation has been anything but a happy one. After forty-eight years of independence, we can hardly point to a stretch or blissful period of prosperity, peace and security and renaissance. For a nation some twenty-four months away from her golden year (2010), Nigeria remains diametrically trapped in its prevailing realities – an underdevelopment peonage, convenient inconsistencies, conflicted expectations and unrealized dreams.
Nigeria is a nation in need. Nigeria is a nation challenged. Nigeria is yet to self-actualize. The chasm between what we wish for our country and what prevails has widened immensely. Seemingly unbridgeable gaps between the rich and the economically and politically disenfranchised persist. Despite our immense human and natural resources, we wallow in underdevelopment. Despite being a democracy, we are stagnated and the democracy dividends seem elusive, notwithstanding what the prefects and mathatas of our democracy may espouse. Unsurprisingly, we are a laggard in almost every aspect of the human development index.
Certain realities are incontrovertible. Nigerians have grown skeptical, but more dangerously, because we have remained unchallenged by the national leadership, we wallow in national resignation. This is natural, a leadership that lacks vision and is seemly unwilling to make sacrifices, cannot induce or tempt people to making sacrifices. If not, any Nigerian leader should easily, like John F. Kennedy be able to tell Nigerians to forget the oil boom and the doom it brought. He or she should be able to exhort us courageously, not to ask what Nigeria can do for us, but to ask what sacrifices we can make, to make our country and posterity great.
French philosopher, Voltaire once observed that success is the child of audacity. Since there is hardly any facet of life where as a nation we can claim comparative advantage or overwhelming positive success, it simply means that we collectively lack purposeful drive and audacity.
That Nigerians still plead for the implementation of public policies that would make their lives more meaningful after 48 years of independence, is a deep irony. As Olisa Agbakoba, (SAN) rightly observed recently; “Nigerians just want the basic needs of life and that’s all.” To be the great nation we covet, we have to transcend these basic hobbling problems. At this critical juncture, if one were to ask Nigerians the areas of national concern that require urgent attention in order to raise the country from its present rut, there would be varying but a full stanza of answers:
It’s Corruption, Stupid!
It’s Electoral reform, Stupid!
It’s Employment, Stupid!
It’s Energy, Stupid!
It’s Equity, Stupid!
It’s Fiscal responsibility, Stupid!
It’s Good governance, Stupid!
It’s Healthcare, Stupid!
It’s Constitutional reform, Stupid!
It’s Niger Delta, Stupid!
It’s Security, Stupid!
It’s a Census, Stupid!
It’s Transportation, Stupid!
On the other hand, those within the present government would readily parrot President Umaru Yar’Adua in noting that all we need is the expeditious implementation of his seven-point agenda. Namely, they will retch out the following:
Power and Energy
Food Security and Agriculture
Wealth Creation and Employment
Mass Transportation
Land Reform
Security
Qualitative and Functional Education
One question that sticks to the throat of every attentive Nigerian is: What is the conceptual framework of the President's seven-point agenda? It is quite mocking that since the announcement of the seven-point agenda; neither President Yar’Adua nor his advisers have observed the absence of a critical item -- healthcare. Healthcare delivery has been a topical issue in light of our president’s health issues. Besides the overkill of asking for every aspect of the seven-point agenda to be implemented, which is improbable, we should perhaps ask our president to make a commitment to use the next two years to deliver a fitting birthday present to the nation that is tangible.
The request is a simple one. President Yar’Adua should build a single medical facility anywhere he chooses in the federation, good enough, well equipped, and well staffed that it would compare to the hospitals he has visited in Germany and Saudi Arabia. Alternatively, he could elect to upgrade any existing institution of his choice. University of Ibadan, University of Maiduguri and University of Benin Teaching Hospitals come to mind. Thereafter, he should lead by example, by using that facility for his healthcare needs, even if he has to fly in Nigerian and foreign doctors to attend to him or any other sick Nigerian leader.
What am I driving at? The President
should immediately commit never again to go off to a foreign
hospital for medical attention. As Gen. Muhammadu Buhari once said, we must
remain in Nigeria and salvage it together. Had President Olusegun Obasanjo sunk
in the millions of naira and dollars devoted to the Obasanjo Presidential
library (OOPL) into such a medical center of excellence, he would have served
Nigeria well, left better legacy and still fulfilled his vision of creating
an enduring institution that would be “an evergreen resource for inspiring
the ideals of democracy and good governance.” That he did not do. History
instructs that Yar’Adua should not make the same mistake.
If President Yar’Adua needs a reason why he should do what I am suggesting herein, I offer several. Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon took ill in 2006, and remains in Israel under the care of Israeli doctors even after being in a comma for over two years. When former US President Bill Clinton had a heart bypasses surgery, in September 2004, he did not go abroad and neither did Cuba’s President Fidel Castro leave Cuba when he faced a life-threatening illness. Why then should any Nigerian leader jet off to foreign countries for medical care? They do so simply because they have not put in place a good and solid medical system; on the contrary, they have allowed the existing ones to crumble.
Without being disrespectful, President Yar’Adua ought to understand that any great national healthcare delivery system begins with policy and regulation and a complimentary well-financed professional staffing and infrastructure. This is not presently the case in Nigeria. Ironically, Nigeria is not bereft of great medical minds and professionals. Current estimates indicate that some 25,000 Nigeria physicians reside outside the country. In the United States alone, only American-born professionals and Filipinos top the number of Nigerian-born nurses.
Presently, there is no medical specialty where Nigerians are not in headship positions globally – from nephrology, oncology, cardiology to neurosurgery. Why then is it that a Nigerian president cannot use his illness, unfortunate as it is, to the national advantage by convincing an expert team of Nigerian doctors -- the very best and the brightest – to fly into Abuja on short notice to attend to his medical needs, if so required. As a nation, we can certainly afford such an arrangement. We also do not have to place our sick president under duress of long flights. In the event that we are unwilling to pay, I am sure that a good many Nigerian doctors can undertake the task pro bono, just to give back to a dear country and as a call to national service.
There is also an
inevitable political angle to this matter. It pertains to national pride, honor,
and patriotism. I consider the late General Sani Abacha a true patriot, at least in
one sense. When he was ill -- which was the best-kept secret in Nigeria -- he
refused to go abroad for treatment. He may have done so for other political
reasons, but he never shamed Nigeria in scurrying off abroad to receive the best
medical attention possible. We also never heard of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari going
off abroad for medical attention. As far as one was able to observe, President
Obasanjo, being a tough cookie, never got ill during his term in office.
In contrast, as head of state, Babangida often went off to Germany or France for his radiculopathy treatment. Similarly, his wife, Miriam was treated abroad. We recall that Vice President Atiku Abubakar traveled to England for a mere leg injury. But what takes the cake was how Nigeria was scandalized and faced the biggest shame when Obasanjo’s wife Stella, our first lady of blessed memory, died in a foreign hospital under mysterious and controversial circumstances. Incidentally, we seem to have learned no lessons from all these.
An irreverent but poignant anecdote has it that rich Nigerians live in hell of a country, but when they are ready to die, go off to foreign countries that for them represents paradise and a halfway house to heaven. The anecdote is a testimony to many well-placed Nigerians that are flown abroad mostly at public expense for medical treatment. Unfortunately, most of them go off in firstclass cabins or in private or a presidential jet, but end up returning to Nigeria in caskets placed in the cargo hold of the planes.
In this forty-eight year of our nationhood, our politics, national discourse and indeed governance have been adversely affected the illhealth of President Umaru Yar’Adua. I will pass on the most embarrassing ways those around him dealt with his state of health. Naturally, the president’s health is a serious national security as well as compassionate matter. It has succession and therefore constitutional implications. However, as a nation, we find ourselves trapped in a very ugly and unpalatable situation. It is abundantly shameful that we cannot provide adequate healthcare for our number one citizen. If that is his fate, then, it hardly needs imagining what the fate awaits the other160 million Nigerians, when it comes to providing safe, accessible and affordable healthcare. In addition, it brings to the fore the health disparity between affluent Nigerians and the less privileged.
Long ago, renowned American poet Langston Hughes penned his now politically famous and prescient poem, ‘A Dream Deferred’. In it, Hughes asked many discomforting, yet politically pertinent questions. Most of them seem applicable to present day Nigeria, which when considered as a nation, a political experiment, or mere geographical expression, present as the classic case of a dream deferred. If it ever was, it is no longer in debate that our national dreams and aspirations have been dashed and deferred. So Nigerians can relate to the irony as well as the twinge, when Hughes asked poignantly, ‘What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? … Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?’ In his questions, Hughes unwittingly personified Nigeria’s present realities.
We have variously asked these questions of our nation, our leaders, and of ourselves. Yes, we have watched our nation asphyxiated; our dreams deferred, our hopes whittled and scorched like a sunburnt raisin. Yes, we have watched our resources squandered, our nation fester and our infrastructure rot into decrepit eyesores. Yes, we have collectively borne the burden brought about by a few and the lack of vision and commitment of our past and present leaders to uplift Nigeria to a glorious realm. Moreover, the load had been individually and collectively unbearable—the heavy burden of crumbling education, absence of uninterrupted power supply, insecurity of life and property, skewed wealth generation, benumbing corruption, official profligacy and the impunity against the rule of law. We fearfully wonder when the nation might implode or explode and occasionally, what force has held us together. As the consequences of our parlous state grow worse each day, so does our hope dim.
These realities, dear Mr. President and fellow Nigerians, are everyday fate and are not necessarily cause for celebration. It is in that spirit that we mark today, as million are doing at home and thousands of Nigerians did on the streets of New York last Saturday; not in the prideful celebration of our nationhood after 48 un-idyllic years, but a reaffirmation of our belief in Nigeria, in its potentials, and in the eventual realization of its deferred dreams. We continue to pray for Nigeria, a nation in distress.
Nigeria, We Hail Thee!
With neither anger nor partiality, until next time, keep the law, stay impartial, and observe closely.
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Hank Eso is a columnist for Kwenu.com. His commentaries on Nigerian politics and global issues have appeared in The New Times (Lagos), African Profile International (New York), The Nigerian And Africa Abroad, (New York), African Market News (New Jersey) and in Gamji.com and Nigeriavillagesquare.com
© Hank Eso, Wednesday 1 October 2008
Email: hankeso@aol.com