Written by: Lasisi Olagunju
Last Thursday was October 1. Apart from the closeup smiles of President Muhammadu Buhari and Senate President Bukola Saraki, can you really remember any other event of significance of the day? The appalling low is the picture of today’s Nigeria. The country’s first generation of leaders battled to give Nigeria that date as Independence Day. They would be alarmed at the lack of space for history in our national consciousness. Even governors degraded the date in their states. Some said, officially that there was nothing to celebrate. They would rather venerate May 29, a date on which the ordinary Nigerian had his oppressors exchange batons.
You know the story of October 1 and Nigeria. Can you remember that of May 29, which has been made to suppliant Nigeria’s day of freedom? If there are issues of togetherness today, May 29 kickstarted the woes of Nigeria. Check that date in 1966. If innocent blood continues to flow in northern Nigeria, is the root not right there in the wombs of May 29, 1966? Was it not on that day that 30,000 human beings were slaughtered in the north, setting the stage for the subsequent 30-month civil war? But Nigeria has chosen that date, instead of the customary positive October 1, as our Democracy Day.
What really is in a date? Are you satisfied with the life you’ve been living under the shadows of May 29 and its Angels? I feel like asking what actually was going on in the minds of General Abdulsalami Abubakar and his men when they picked May 29, 1999 as the military’s exit date from the governance of Nigeria: What significance recommended that date to the military apart from the debit it posted in 1966 to the balance sheet of our national unity?
Governors ignored October 1 last week. We were all asked to stay at home, like some war-ravaged community of the afflicted. And did our kids miss anything by not celebrating October 1, 2015? We used to look forward to the pomp of October 1. As school kids, we would practise march past, compete in-house for space to represent our schools at the main Independence anniversary event. For school kids, it was a date you looked forward to to celebrate the togetherness of our nation. At our school level, we used it as our day of freedom. It used to be the most important day in our country. It was a date that reminded us that the nation once had leaders who wrenched our collective destiny from the vice grip of foreign predators and destroyers.
But October 1 is no more. The military killed its beauty and its essence. Even the only activity the Federal Government used to give the date, Guard of Honour, has been subjected to the exclusivity of the. Presidential Villa and to the whim of whatever recluse inhabits the hole. You have to be really powerful and a member of the club of our rulers to witness and be part of the celebrations. That is the new Nigeria.
What is it really with Nigeria? We are never clear about the sanctity and sacredness of anything. There is nothing we cannot shift. We shift values and redefine beauty. The way we have degraded our Independence Day is exactly the way we have taken down everything good in our history.
And things are getting worse. They are not getting better. There cannot be redemption where the flow of the national stream is focused on the arid. The desert takes, so says Ayi Kwei Armah. The desert does not give, it takes, it sucks vitality from the fecundity of the forest. We have poisoned everywhere and everything. And we think we can build survival on our current mound of waste and wishful forgetfulness. No.
I spoke about the closeup smiles (or was it laughter) we all saw between Buhari and Saraki at the October 1 event in the Villa. I tried to read that photo just as you did. What did I see? Or maybe I should ask you what you saw? Can you look again at that photo? Hausa-Fulani Buhari said something into the ears of the Yoruba-Fulani man from Ilorin and Sai Bukky laughed from the bottom of his heart! What did the president tell this man who was in his first open interaction with Buhari since the combustible elections into their respective offices?
If you take Nigeria so seriously as to take sides in the war of thrones going on across mafia camps in the country, when you read that October 1 photo correctly and very well, you will sit back and reassess your own mental balance. When you read the faces and the lips, and the smiles and you notice their uniform, deliberate, flowing white babanriga, you should know that something is happening as usual. Whatever is happening or will happen, if I were you, I would know it won’t put food on my table nor will it make your unwilling governor pay your unpaid salaries. If I were you, I would learn to mind my business and seek deliverance from the ignorance of the moment.
If I were you, I would put May 29 and April 1 on the same pedestal. They smell just the same.
