Nigerian leadership: our real impostors.
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin
The Nigerian politician is coming. He arrives in motorcades, sirens blaring. Commotion and activity accompany his arrival. He is cheered on by the hungry,the sick,the violated, and the most vulnerable. Welcome sir.
From behind the tinted glasses of his own vehicle he sees the people screaming at him,perhaps trying to pass on yet another story of unbearable hardship and suffering,another story of political exclusion,police brutality or the most common malaise,abject lack of essential resources.
But he can’t hear them,there is too much commotion,too much noise,still this doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what they are saying,or that he doesn’t see their issues depicted by their sorry conditions. He can’t hear them because he doesn’t want to,in his own mind,his constituency comprises of him alone,and his sole aim is to do good by that constituent.
This is the sorry state of affairs in Nigeria. Where a man is applauded for choosing himself over the people. Where mandates and promises mean precisely nothing.
The saddest part to come to terms with is the fact that a vast majority of the politicians responsible for the destruction of our society where not born into wealth and affluence,no,they were born into middle class to poor families. And in their time they oversaw the eradication of one of the classes,and saw to the demotion of the other to the point were we are now the nation that houses the highest numbers of those, I leave you to fit the pieces together.
We have been lied to.
A lie told over and over again to the point where those pretending to be leaders have succeeded in convincing us that they actually are. A brutal lie.
The propagators of this lie have ensured that there is only one divide,and that is the divide between rich and poor,the divide between those who wield influence, and those who must bend to it’s will. The sparse remnants of the middle class are mostly those merely so in mind,but not in the social endowments necessary for the acquisition of their soubriquet.
It is because of this dynamic that nothing ever works.
There are those from the “upper” part of the divide with grand designs for a better country, they quickly become one against a horde of degenerates with sufficient resources to frustrate anyone with designs on readjusting the status quo. It is not a battle for a single individual, but an intellectual revolution birthed by individuals from the poor masses.
Whether we allow our minds to be emancipated enough to carry out an intellectual revolution or not is up to us,but while we wait,one side becomes more difficult to contain,and the other side,less able by the day to muster the effort needed.
Boma Princewill.
AFRICA THISDAY 