“Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying out that ideal into practice”–   Arnold Toynbee

The state of our nation today calls for an honest and critical self-appraisal. We have become so accustomed to laying every blame or fault at the doorstep of the government, that we have refused to acknowledge our own complicity in the tragedy of betrayed hopes and aborted prospects that is the common story of Nigeria today. The bricks and stones with which nations are made are human ingenuity, perseverance, labour, intellectual capacities and the sacrifice of blood and treasure. In all these, the centrality of the people is never in doubt or in question. The people, therefore, make up the nation, and without it, the spring that animates the creation and sustenance of the nation will never be coiled or collected, to become the lever for the existence of that community.

In Nigeria’s case, it is a matter of opinion if at all this construct applies to the making of this variegated nation of different peoples whose diverse fortunes and interests are yet to be welded into one composite material of solace and comfort for everyone inhabiting its ample space. Surveying the Nigerian social, intellectual, cultural and political landscapes today, presents a spectacle that is “alike barren of instruction and of amusement”, as noted by the great historian, Edward Gibbon, in his reflections on the later Roman Empire. It has been likewise with Nigeria today and for several years past, where little by way of instruction or amusement can be derived from its convoluted politics and governance, or its lamentable self-abnegation. The lethargic mindset and apathy of Nigerians themselves must account for this state of anomie and inconsequential existence on the periphery of relevance and greatness.

It might be fatalism. It could be indifference. It is perhaps ignorance. Whatever it is, the state of mental and attitudinal lethargy of the Nigerian masses leaves one bewildered and sometimes angry about their indifference to their abject hopelessness. I do not want to use the word “fate” with regards to their state of being, which has nothing to do with preordination or anything like that. I think it has everything to do with their own state of mind and the way they see the fleeting uselessness of their being, about which they believe there is nothing that they could do. A people so incapable of conceiving or executing any plans of national greatness deserves to be where it finds itself. This is the sorry and lamentable story of Nigerians today. A people with precarious temperaments and a blurred vision of its honour and future as we are, deserves nothing more, and nothing less, than its present condition of malaise, stagnation and disorder. This is the sorry tale of the inert mass, living in the squalor of captive indolence.

Our prejudices are capricious and detrimental to ourselves only and to no one else; and contrary to everything that is useful and rational. We have no motivation to do great things or achieve grand objectives other than the mere act of living from this day to the next. We are incapable of rising up to any occasion even of the most trifling nature to salvage our country and improve our conditions. We are visionless and bereft of any guiding light to take us out of a cul-de-sac of our own making. Both our senses of indignation and resignation are contrived and artificial, conditioned by circumstances of ignorance, malice and indifference to our interests. By our lethargy and indolence, we have contributed to our own oppression. We look at the present with the eyes of the past, and the future with no eyes at all. We have allowed ourselves to be divided, grouped and clustered around tribal, ethnic and religious identities that have no bearing whatsoever upon our collective advancement or self-improvement.

Rather, we have become the instruments by which at any given moment or excuse, our country can be broken up, crushed and torn to pieces by our own hands. We have become an incendiary mob to be used as torches of mayhem to burn down every edifice of reason and rationality through our attachment to momentary and fleeting benefits. For a handful of decrepit currency rudely and ungraciously thrust into our outstretched hands, we are ready to execute the most heinous of atrocities, including the breaking of law and order and trampling on the rights and privileges of fellow citizens. The powers of destruction are more active in unsettled and chaotic times than those of improvement, according to Edward Gibbon, and so it has been with Nigeria for quite sometime now.

For every brick placed on the national edifice, ten others will have been pulled down by the powers of destruction, thus rendering impossible the construction of a nation that is founded on sound principles and rational precepts. From our waking moments to the time we go back again to sleep, from the moments of our birth till our death, we Nigerians are confronted by self-inflicted miseries for which we should fully bear the responsibility. We are faced with challenges that ordinarily should make other people cringe and recoil with horror, indignation, frustration and outrage. In our own case, however, because of our recklessness and indifference towards life, we seem to relish such adversities and even contribute to their perpetuation by not showing any inclination to mend our ways and do away with the entrenched fatalism that is dragging us down into the morass of hopelessness and retardation.

Everything that we do seem halfhearted, tentative, casual, furtive and indifferent in conception and execution. The most important undertaking in any society which is how it is organised and governed, is conducted lackadaisically with unserious abandon by us, with more rhetoric than substance in execution. We are a people of vague enthusiasm, as John Buchan would say, with little more than an infantile attachment to the values and ideals that conduce towards the greatness of a people. Our democratic practices are shallow and contrarian in many ways, deviating from the accepted norms that obtain in other lands and climes. All that our so-called democratic order evokes, is “an empty rhetoric, a tissue of desiccated phrases”, as piquantly noted by Mr. John Buchan in another context which could apply to the Nigerian condition as well.

In our insignificance and through our indolence or insouciance, we have become a metaphor and a stereotype, a mimicry, a hollow effigy and an obsolete notion, an empty symbolism and the fragmented archetype of unconscious and subjective idea of aborted greatness, a diminished substance, a discarded remnant of hope, a disjecta membra, an abandoned project, an after thought, a featureless and futureless mass of congealed matter insubstantial in its density, merely waiting to whither away and disappear into nothingness. Our myriads numbering in the hundreds of millions amount to nothing. 

Being featureless and futureless, have become habituated to disorder, disobedience, intolerance, rowdiness, lawlessness and to every conceivable acts that are contrary to good manners and good taste, and opposed to every sentiment of law and order, and the accepted norms of civilized behaviour. We run after shiny trinkets, beads and mirrors, while the real objects of utility and substance elude us all the time. We are a people that are “devoted to pleasure, but destitute of taste”, as Edward Gibbon wrote, in a different context. 

Education, production, nation-building, fostering unity, creating something new and different and staking our claim to be respected and admired, are all not within our immediate or longer term gaze or purview, but only those inconsequential and trifling things of life attract and capture our childish attention.

We are generally fond of disrespecting established institutions of the state and government thereby exhibiting tendencies that are contrary to what should be expected from the citizens of a nation founded on laws and held together by manners and norms of civilized conduct. There should not be a concluding sentence or paragraph to this essay, since the subject is so melancholic and desolate, that it does not deserve to be gifted with an ending of either hope or promise, but left in suspension just as our fates are always betrayed and aborted, held in abeyance and encapsulated in the indefinite presence of nothingness, living in a present without a future. But charity even to the most worthless should be given unstintingly, and so I give the passages below as a postscript to our non-discrete existence to lament our hopeless condition: “Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile:, In vain with lavish kindness, The gifts of God are strown; The heathen in his blindness Bows to the alter of wood and stone”, (Bishop Reginal Heber, 1821)