By Ochereome Nnanna

No matter from what angle you look, what you see of Nigeria is a bleak future unless something drastic is done and pronto. Because of greed and corruption, we are, as former Governor of Cross River State, Mr Donald Duke, put it in a talk he gave at a Save Nigeria Group forum in Abuja recently, “designing a system that would destroy us in the end”.

In that heart-felt talk given ex-tempore and published in the Sunday July 18, 2010 edition of The Guardian, Duke gave an insider’s account of how state governors collude with the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) to rig elections. That angle of his disclosure is a subject for another day. I am more concerned with an issue he raised about how the elite are preparing this country for the failure that has been predicted several times for it.

You will recall that in his 2007 edition of the global threat assessment deposed before the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, former Director of the US National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte noted inter alia: “Nigeria’s fragile democratic transition is in danger of collapsing in the coming months.

The government’s institutional foundations are hollow from decades of neglect and corruption and will continue to make the country susceptible to recurring crises in the coming years.

Abuja has been unable to stem rising lawlessness and insecurity in its oil-producing region, and the Nigerian population is increasingly demoralized from worsening living conditions in the face of much publicized improvements in the country’s macroeconomic indicators. Major political unrest in Nigeria would threaten other countries in the region”.

In addition to institutional weakness, Duke drew our attention to another way by which we are preparing the grounds for the demise of Nigeria. According to him, the elite send their children to the best schools in the world, and when they return to Nigeria they find they cannot fit in. This is in sharp contrast to what obtained in the early days when our first group of educated elite left these shores to school abroad. When they returned they were able to lead their people to independence from colonial rule. They did not come back to as social misfits. So, why do the children of today’s leaders return only to find out they cannot function here?

The answer is very easy. The social ethics of these countries harbouring the best academic institutions in the world are startlingly different from what these children come back to Nigeria to meet. A person travelling out of this country has to make a number of ethical adjustments to avoid getting into trouble as soon as he arrives there. And when he comes back, he also has to readjust or he would seem odd here.

In any case, what are these spoilt children coming back to Nigeria to do? Their greedy, thieving parents have already stashed away enough to take care of them and their children. As Duke pointed out, their parents have already bought mansions for them in major cities around the globe. Why would they come back here only to fall into the hands of kidnappers – children of the downtrodden who seem to be biting back?

Already, the mistakes that the elites of Somalia made, which led their country to implode into the grips of tribal and religious warlords, with its central government at a time functioning from a foreign capital, are exactly the mistakes our own elite are repeating as Duke noted. Somali leaders stole from their countries and bought up choice property abroad and sent their children to the best schools abroad. But when Siad Barre, the last dictator and central ruler of the country died he was buried in Lagos.

The Americans have been warning us to put our house in order quickly and avoid the doom that awaits us because when it hits, we will have nowhere to run, unlike the Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, Ghanaians, Chadians, Nigerienes and Togolese who had a place to run to: Nigeria.

We do not seem to realise the danger we are courting by sending our children to expensive private schools because the public schools have collapsed, rather than join hands to restore the public schooling system to their past glories to enable our children to grow up together. We have abandoned the decrepit public schools to the children of the poor so that when they complete their educational pursuits our well-educated private-schooled children will corner all the juicy opportunities, while the unemployable children of the poor will be their gatemen.

We are only sowing the seeds for a social revolution. If poorly educated children of the poor lead such a revolution, we will wind up with what happened in post-Samuel Doe Liberia, Siad Barre’s Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – failed states controlled by murderous factional warlords.

Sometimes, it is the children of the privileged class that kick over the terraces and lead social revolutions, as we saw in Marxist Russia, Cuba and non-Marxist Ghana. It is a bloody and long-drawn stable-cleansing process, and no one knows who will come out intact. Social revolutions have not worked in Nigeria. They ended up getting mixed up in the ethnic, religious and regional quagmire of Nigeria. Therefore, the revolution, when it comes, is likely to result in the Somalia/Congo/Liberia model due to ethnic and religious complications.

There is no better time than now for Nigerians to search for the right political candidates to repair this country by iron-fisting corruption and re-engineering the system back to normalcy. Let us close our ears to candidates whose agenda is to ride on ethnic and sectional platforms to continue business as usual after 2011. Nigeria will not survive another eight years if drastic change does not come.