The NASS, Nigeria And Nationhood

In the main, Nigerians see the Senate as a place of rascality and the Senators themselves as goblins preying on the delicate entrails of a dying nation.

Whilst this reading of the Nigerian Senate and the Senators is largely accurate, the truth is that what is happening at the NASS is a symptom of the failure of the Nigerian society; it is a failure of our socialization process, absence of core national values and our inability after nearly sixty years of independence, to fashion an acceptable modus vivendi for everyone.

Nigerians have been literally sleeping on duty and have been living in denial too. There are issues that need to be addressed and resolved but people pretend they are not real issues.

When people talk about restructuring, it is dismissed with a wave of the hand but the truth is there are grievances, justified and unjustified that need to be addressed and until we do this, we will keep moving around in circles.

Do Nigerians really think it’s about Saraki and the other bad guys at the NASS? Get rid of them or scrap the NASS as many are recommending and you’d have another set of bad guys replacing them or perpetrating mischief elsewhere. What about the goons in the executive branch of government and the Civil Service? They are not a problem?

The truth is, Nigeria is a mess precisely because THERE IS NO NIGERIA. There are no overarching national ethos or core values subscribed to by everyone like the Japanese or Germans for instance. After nearly six decades of independence, we still have Igbos, Ibibios, Efiks, Bini, Hausa Fulani, Yoruba etc. but no Nigerians. That’s why there’s so much confusion in the land.

We need to fix it because it is the real big picture we should be training our gaze on and not the NASS, malodorous as it may be. People loot Nigeria blind because they owe no allegiance to it; to them Nigeria is just a spatial phenomenon, an idea that’s yet to come to fruition. What we need to do is bring Nigeria into existence and give it concrete form and shape in the minds of Nigerians.

Anything else is mere shadow boxing!