Sixty and four questions on our 64th Independence Day

I know you might be reluctant, but have you reflected upon Independence Day? Have you given thanks for witnessing it? Thanks that you have survived to witness it? That all the things that could have swallowed you in this country haven’t yet managed to do so?

When you think of Independence Day now, in this time, in this clime, what exactly do you feel? Hope? Excitement? Despair? Or rage? What exactly is making you feel the way you feel when you think about the things you think about? Who do you think is responsible for the way you feel? For your present circumstance? For the circumstances your country—that country of promises—is in right now? How have your sentiments about your country changed between the previous Independence Day and this one?

How many times have your hopes crescendoed and crashed? Rising like waves on the ocean and falling flat, like a rain-drenched adobe wall? Do you remember what it felt like after the civil war ended with “no victor, no vanquished”? Or when General Murtala Muhammed ended Gowon’s long, torpid reign that was heading nowhere? Or when Shagari took over with democracy tucked in the wings of his white babban riga? Or when General Buhari toppled Shagari to “end corruption” just as Nzeogwu had done to Balewa before him? Or June 12 before the bust? Or was it when Abacha died and you thought God, kind as ever, had given us, children of this country, the chance to start anew?

How often have you felt like we were at the cusp of finally taking off, as a country, as a people, soaring as everyone believes we are capable of, only for that moment to fade? For that hope to deflate? Do we even celebrate Independence Day now? Or do we just mark it or observe it? Have you noticed how we have slowly, over decades, moved away from celebrating “our heroes past” to dreading our villains present? Have you asked yourself how we moved from venerating figures like Macaulay, Zik, Awo and Sardauna to deferring to figures like Shekau, Turji, Nnamdi Kanu and Ekpa?

Who do we blame for this? How far back does this blame go? All the way back to the British who sucked us dry and then cobbled together this country from disparate tribes for the good of their colonial enterprise? Our “founding fathers” who failed to forge a nation from a patchwork country? Our military adventurers whose intervention threw us further off course? Whose years of oppression have damaged our psyche? Or our politicians who in decades have failed to rescue us? Who make promises they never intend to fulfill? Who make policies that impoverish rather than enrich us? Who care little when we are abducted, massacred or dispossessed? Who make us die to vote for them, only to abandon those who survive elections to the vagaries of a rudderless ship? Or our civil servants? Those who hide files and pad budgets?

When your children ask you who is to blame do you include yourself in the list? Do you tell them about the times you bribed that policeman at the junction when he stopped you for driving without a headlight and he used that money to drink ogogoro which made him tipsy the time he pulled a trigger and killed that student who was travelling to see his sick mother who would later die from the shock of what that gunshot so far from her, yet so close to her heart, caused?

Do you tell them of the time you took that file and tucked it under the rug, and demanded that jobseeker sells his father’s farmland to grease your palms before you gave him the job he was qualified for? Or that time you gave that job to those who knew nothing about it but had the money to bribe you? Or the time you failed that girl and ruined her life because she would not pleasure you and gave a good grade to that girl, who is your daughter’s age mate, who knew nothing about what you taught her but knew things about pleasuring you? Or that time, in the witching hour, when you dug potholes in that freshly laid asphalt so that traffic would build up, so you could sell biscuits and Gala to motorists who had to slow down to navigate those potholes? Or that time you defended that corrupt public officer just because he or she was your tribe’s person? Or that time you betrayed your country when you gave your vote to that corrupt politician in exchange for a loaf of bread? Or that time you sold bullets to terrorists and bandits and informed them of who and who to abduct in your villages and towns?

Do I need to ask more?

So now when your children ask about Independence Day and the failed dream that your country is, would you tell them of the rose-tinted-promises of those early days, or those days after in which you were born to catch the twilight of those promises as they died? Or would you fill their heads with the despair your country has unloaded on you far too often? Would you tell them the truth about the part you played in ruining that dream? Would you show them where your chisel and hammer dented it? Where your digger carved it? Where your wrecking ball smashed it?

Or would you tell them of a hope that is increasingly hard to sustain? Or just point them to the markets, to the despairing faces of the traders in whose eyes reality, beyond the rhetoric of electioneering slogans, stare back, bleak and cold?

And you, sir, who hold power in this country, do you recognise where your mallet has chipped and cracked the walls? How your strikes have killed dreams and hopes? How your proclamations or the strokes of your pen on a piece of paper have broken, maimed and despaired a country and its people? When you ask yourself if you have done right by this country, between you and your conscience, would you be pleased by the answer you would give? Would you honestly be pleased with your answer?