Prof.
PatUtomi
Presidential candidate for
2007
Lagos, Nigeria.
Daring to hope
I
was led to that characterisation of why I was involved because of how
widespread I found the mood of people not even being willing to hope
that things could get better in Nigeria, as I traveled around. Many were
particularly pessimistic because they thought some evil cabal with its
stranglehold on their lives were there to prevent the will of the people
from being realised. I found that same sad spirit the day before
Christmas. This was distressful because the message of Christmas is a
message of hope. Hope is the reason for the season
Daring to hope by Pat Utomi
O
N the eve of Christmas I visited the
offices of ThisDay Newspapers to express my condolences following the
violent demise of the Chairman of the editorial board, Godwin Agbroko,
who fell to bullets of assailants yet unknown. That day I could feel
despair so thick you could reach out and grab it. One of the editors,
himself a very recent lucky survivor, along with his wife, of
abduction by armed robbers, said a friend who had emigrated from
Nigeria for such reasons as questionable security of life and property
called to ask what he was still doing in "that" country. Ironically,
it was the fifth anniversary of the murder of the then chief law
officer of the land, Chief Bola Ige, and no one knew or seemed to care
who had committed so dastardly an act. The mood led to a rush of
nostalgia captured by a speech I had given just a week before in
Kaduna as I accepted the nomination of the ADC to contest the 2007
presidential elections.
I had indicated, in that address, that the essence
of my candidacy was that I was a Merchant of Hope seeking to raise an
army of angels of hope to guide a depressed nation down the path of
new vistas. I had lamented the waning of hope in what was once a
country of great promise, which now had most indicators of human
progress southbound, and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness had
become the pervasive common denominator. I also offered a pragmatic
and easy to execute strategy to a vision of a new Nigeria we have
passionately espoused for some time now.
I was led to that characterisation of why I was
involved because of how widespread I found the mood of people not even
being willing to hope that things could get better in Nigeria, as I
traveled around. Many were particularly pessimistic because they
thought some evil cabal with its stranglehold on their lives were
there to prevent the will of the people from being realised. I found
that same sad spirit the day before Christmas. This was distressful
because the message of Christmas is a message of hope. Hope is the
reason for the season. It is about God intervening directly in human
history to construct a new economy of salvation. Just as the iniquity
of leadership in ancient Israel resulted in the dispersal that of
Nigeria has produced a Diaspora that has sucked out of the land most
of its middle class and most of the talent required for nation
building. Not to dare to hope is sacrilege, literally speaking. Not to
have hope in this season of hope is to lose it all. But I could see
why hope was in short supply.
Sure, it is hard to be hopeful when military rule
has failed you, politicians are proving to be worse as they squabble
over personal privileges in the face of atrocious poverty that is
preventable; one child dying every 30 seconds from so eliminable a
disease as Malaria; and travel that should take three hours sometimes
taking a whole day on roads that enormous amounts of money have been
appropriated for. Of course it is easy in such times to accept the
usual jokes as Nigeria being best guesstimate of the way Hell is. To
lose hope is to lose it all so we must not wave hope goodbye. We must
continue to search for servant leaders who will redeem us from the
bondage of the Nigerian condition. I was still weighed down by the
sense of helplessness I felt during the visit to the Newspaper and my
admonition that such disposition in people who are partly responsible
because they either help perpetuate the old order, being too
intellectually lazy to forge a problem solving culture or allow
themselves to connive in sabotaging the future for a mesh of pottage.
When I unwrapped my Christmas presents one of them, from one of my
children, was Barak Obama's book The Audacity of Hope.
Having invested so much passion in trying to awaken
the Nigerian middle class and its emergent new rich to the imperative
of developing a sense of mission aimed at reclaiming the failed
promise of Nigeria, my so called Nehemiah complex, the African
American Senator's thoughts on reclaiming the American dream was
understandable elixir. How can we rebuild the falling walls of
Nigeria, not fallen house, as Karl Meier, sees it, in his book, This
House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria. This passion, if not obsession,
for restoring the dignity of the Nigerian is the reason I have
abandoned my comfort zone to seek a paradigm shift in the motivation
for public life in Nigeria. But where are those by whose education,
exposure and experience are best suited to understanding the desperate
need for change and who should be the leaders of the effort.
One of the great learning points of my numerous
travels to the nooks, crannies, lungwus, koros of Nigeria these past
six months is how much more ready those who know less are for the
struggle than those who will profit the most from a Nigerian
transformation, the middle class and emergent business elite. The
ordinary people we accuse of selling their votes for N500 are actually
more ready to throw off the yoke of servitude and lack of progress
than the banker who thinks the economic rent he extracts today secures
him from the vagaries of Nigeria's inchoate economy. He forgets where
yesterday's bank MDs of note, are today.
Indeed, one of the academic fruits of my foray into
the uncharted terrain of partisan politics in Nigeria is the finding
of material enabling me to write a companion volume to one of my
favorite texts as a graduate student in the late 1970s. Ted Gurr's Why
Men Rebel fascinated me as a study of how people rise against their
oppressors but what I have found as participant observer in a group I
could be said to belong to, is a classic theoretical explanation of
how men are enslaved. We are our own worst enemy: our greed; our
unwarranted fears; our selfishness and our short-sightedness is why
Nigeria lies prostrate, and men enslaved with the loss of their
dignity, and even when they appear to prosper, in terms of their bank
accounts and the cathedrals of domicile they call homes, the man in
them is so crushed by the uncertainties in the protection of their
gains that they lack self worth in spite of their net worth. They are
the first to seek distance from the struggle but in the end they will
be the most pathetic victims of a system that is so unsustainable its
collapse is a matter of when.
Acutely sensitive to all this I dare to hope. I
dare because I know that the man dies in he who has lost hope. I dare
to hope with an audaciousness that even a Barak Obama can never begin
to imagine because I am a man of faith and this season is my season
because I truly believe that he came that we may have life and have it
to the full. I believe because I saw the years of promise when Nigeria
looked like all was northbound into blue skies, then the men of power
over purpose came and corruption ensnared our souls and we went
southbound, our mouths filled with sand. The proverb is so true when
it says (20:17) that bread of deceit is sweet to a man but afterward
his mouth shall be filled with gravel.
Those of us who have given up, believing they do
not matter and their votes do not count, can still redeem themselves
in the spirit of the season of Christmas. What they need to do is
ensure they take advantage of the extension of voters registration and
seek out the registration point no mater how obscure they are. If they
do want some 'indulgences' they should go on to evangelise the process
to their friends. Imams and pastors should preach it loud. If all were
registered to vote and were to carefully scrutinise the character of
candidates, available records of their commitment and competence and
vote our conscience, leaving the rest to God, a revolution we may be
taking for granted, could be under way. Just do your part, let the
young defend the votes, and then relax and imagine the possibilities.
I dare to hope, and there is enough charity in me towards the majority
of our people that I believe that most can claim the audacity in our
hope for the common good and transform this nation to the land of the
promise of the 1960s.
It is in this dream for a better tomorrow for the
youth of this land that I stake so much, that history may remember
that there were those who dared to hope, and their audacity redeemed
the land. It is believing in those immortal words of Margaret Mead
about never doubting what a few committed people can do to change
history, drives me on. It is the same passion that brought an
Independent candidate to the Presidency in Benin, which leads us to
building new structures. We trust it will provide a vehicle to make
change happen in Nigeria.
