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After decades of being pressed down and chained to the floor by an octogenarian lgeneration of carnivorous leaders, the youths in Nigeria seem to have finally found their resolve and determination to construct the hard way to their own future by themselves. There is a revolution cooking up in their minds and in their souls, and in their spirits and it has very little to do with Mr Peter Obi, who is running for the office of President. At best Peter Obi is merely an emblem of the coming struggle, a critical prop for the gathering cast.
What is happening is rather the concomitant explosion of years of frustration with a system that has left them holding the can, hungry, jobless and homeless. They are angry with the old men of power, the cult of leadership that has stolen their future, their dreams and their tomorrow. And as in the inimitable words of McFadden and John Whitehead in their rock song “Ain’t No Stopping Us…..” they are on the move already and it doesn’t appear that there is anybody or instrument equipped well enough to stop them until their resolve is well served.
They have realised the potency of the power they carry with their voter’s cards, as Caius Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser opined that “Men At Sometimes Are Masters Of Their Fate. The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not In Our Stars, But In Ourselves, That We Are Underlings…..” They have realised at last, just as Roosevelt did, that “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
The slow trajectory of a collapsing civilization looks set to wind down at last in the wake of the bold affront of the country’s youth. ENDSARS was the test run that made a clear statement about the character of things to come. Peter Obi might become or not become the president of Nigeria in the end, but the revolution is surely and properly on its way. Throughout human history, extreme suffering and deprivation have inexorably spunned rebellion and revolution. Our fat cats who are sitting pretty, even now, in their executive mansions in the cool ambience of opium privilege may wish to take a lesson from the French, the Bolshevik and even the Cuban revolutions and the sad trajectory that is usually the denouement of misgovernance and insensitivity.
For instance,the French revolution witnessed a period of radical political and societal change in France which began in 1787 and lasted for 12 years leading to the ascent of Napoleon Bonapart and redefined the nature of political power, uprooting centuries old institutions of monarchy and feudalism . Major causes were the estate system, absolutism and food shortages. The most notable leader was a 29 years old lawyer named Maximilien Robespaire.
Again, the Russian Revolution struck on November 6 and 7, 1917, when the Bolshevik party leader, Vladimir Lenin, at the age of 47 staged a bloodless coup following uprisings and clashes between the troops and civilian protesters against hunger, starvation, corruption in government and a toothless Duma (the Russian
parliament).
Disproportionate income and living standards between government officials and the lower – class working Cubans and the growing but much despised influence of the United States in the affairs of the country led Fidel Castro, his brother Raul Castro, Che Guevara, Aberdeen Santamaria and others to launch the Cuban Revolution leading to the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista. Their leader, Fidel Castro was 27.
In the three examples above, human suffering, as it is in Nigeria today has been a major cause of the uprisings and revolutions. There comes a time when the people can nolonger go on feeding the fat cats anymore, just as Winston Churchill observed that “the upkeep of aristocracies has been the hardwork of common people throughout all civilizations”. In Nigeria, the politicians, the military brass, the religious leaders, the senior bureaucrats and the government contractors have been sitting on the bread table for way too long and the time for all of them to render account appears to be well nigh here.
Just as Mark Twain, the American writer and humorist asked the question “Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat”. In Peter Obi, the people have found a veritable linchpin, a symbol of their protest, even if Atiku Abubakar, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and their intellectual collaborators like the elitist writer, Sam Omatseye cannot yet read the signs in the horizon.
The caste they represent has not found solutions and clearly cannot find solutions to the rot and decay of the fabric of our nationhood. They have watched Nigeria go to seed and fall apart “like broken China in the sun” and now they are desperate to cling on, if only to protect themselves from their worst fears because they know that the people now know that they are human flesh eaters, killers of the corporate dreams of our now disparate nationhood. They have lied to the people for too long and now that the hood is off, they can see their naked teeth; crimson with the blood of the people and their protruded stomachs; filled with the limbs and the dreams of their fellow countrymen. That is perhaps what Peter Obi represents to them, a mirror showing them their own bestiality. And that is why they fear him with such panting and trepidation.
(Dominic Kidzu writes from Calabar )
