Who Is Nigeria’s Conscience?

UGOCHUKWU EJINKEONYE

Nigerians are very good at crowning false heroes. Just open a Nigerian newspaper you can find near you and see how many people that are recklessly described on its pages as “credible” politicians, “honest and selfless” Nigerians, or worse, the “conscience of the nation.” You would be shocked to see the number of people that carelessly allow themselves to be associated with such superb qualities even when they are fully aware that by their personal conducts, it might even appear as a generous compliment to dress them up in the very opposites of those terms.

Over the years, these words and phrases have been so callously and horribly subjected to the worst kinds of abuses in Nigeria with hardly anyone making any attempt to intervene. I won’t in the least be surprised to wake up tomorrow and hear that decent people in this country have begun to protest and resist any attempt to also associate them with such grossly devalued terms.

Nigerians appear to be exceptional experts in effectively and perpetually devaluing all that ought to inspire awe and noble feelings. The way we are going, it might shock no one if tomorrow we wake up to hear that some Nigerians felt grievously insulted that their pets were, for instance, nominated for “National Honours.” May be, when that happens, we would quickly rouse ourselves from our long-lasting moral slumber and hurriedly stop this overly revolting annual charade of “honouring” people whose only contribution to their fatherland is, probably, their participation in looting it blind and supervising its devastations.

Especially since former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime, the “National Honours List” has indeed worked extremely hard to distinguish itself as a worthless piece of paper always brimming with people who ought to be in jail or undeserving of even any fool’s respect. And as you look at the haggard and impoverished nature of a country that annually celebrates this long list of “illustrious” and “honest” sons and daughters who are honoured for their “selfless” and “invaluable” services to their fatherland, you cannot help wondering why it is very difficult, if not impossible, to see any positive impact that their so-called “immense contributions to the growth and progress” (and where is the “growth and progress”?) of the their country were able to register on the country and its people. Why is a country with such a very long and intimidating list of “patriotic achievers” and “nation builders” still one of the most backward in the world despite being endowed with enviably abundant natural resources?

The problem is that when we look around and there are no genuine heroes to celebrate, we simply invent one. For instance, today, it can safely be said that Nigeria as a country no longer possesses any “Conscience”. If we had any persons that truly qualified to be described as such, they are long dead and buried. But because we are unwilling accept that very stark reality, we just had to pounce on anyone we find around and proclaim him the “conscience of the nation,” whether he merely represents a debasement of that term or not.

It should be quite clear that anyone seeking to be crowned “Nigeria’s conscience” should be able to rise above partisan and other considerations in his interventions in the country and always stand on the side of the truth and the oppressed. A man who can bend the truth just because at that particular time, insisting on the truth will be very disadvantageous to his friends and associates should feel embarrassed anytime anyone tires to humour him with the underserved title of “the country’s conscience.”

It is not everyday that we produce the likes of Gani Fawehinmi or Chinua Achebe who used the same yardstick for either an Obasanjo or a Jonathan, and if they were still alive today, would do the same for a Buhari. They would not suddenly revise their well-considered and widely circulated opinion on any ruler, not because of some new “evidence” they have suddenly stumbled upon, but merely because the fellow has suddenly banded together with their friends (in a clearly bad, doomed marriage) to capture political power. They would always put the country.

When President Jonathan, for instance, sought to decorate Achebe with a National Honour, the legendary writer rejected it by saying that the situation that made him reject the same “Honour” awarded him by the Obasanjo regime had not changed under Jonathan; and so, he had to reject it again. That was his way of telling those rulers that unless they deployed conscientious efforts to fixNigeria, they lacked the qualification to honour him. He would have told the same thing to Buhari today were he still alive and such an “Honour” extended to him?

Of course, Gani would have done the same too. He was not one to brazenly take sides in a political conflict, offering high-profile support to one party in the conflict even when it was public knowledge that he was at that time being retained as a highly prized consultant in a lucrative pet project of the person he was supporting. He would have hastened to realize that there was something called “conflict of interest,” and that you do not unduly stretch the people’s trust, beyond its malleable limits; just like sleeping on Delilah’s lap and hoping to wake up on Abraham’s bosom.

Somebody who allows himself to be described as “Nigeria’s conscience” cannot afford the luxury of a credibility perennially stained by very close association with people generally perceived as very corrupt among the citizenry. Anybody can occasionally throw front-page-grabbing “bomb shells” (it is not rocket science), but such pronouncements only make sense to informed people if the person who throws them is able to demonstrate that he is not a “situational ideologist,” who only finds his voice when the target is a “safe” one. To him, corruption does not lose its egregious hue when a friend is being accused.

The danger now is that the people have already begun to look a bit too closely and have begun to discover that the king, perhaps, is also unclad like the rest, and that beyond pronouncements delivered with complicated grammar and needless grandiloquence, all they have witnessed so far is a farce unduly stretched, despite the unending “oriki” booming from his praise singers. Well, let’s just tell ourselves the bitter truth: For now, this country has no conscience!

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye, a widely published Nigerian journalist and public intellectual, is a Tuesday columnist with Daily Independent newspaper. Several of his articles can also be found on his blog: www.ugowrite.blogspot.com; He could be reached with: [email protected]; twitter: @ugowrite