WORRIES CALLING

Quality of life? You could start anywhere.

With a new car that won’t start or an old war that won’t end or a naira that won’t stretch or an optimism that won’t revive. Or a lake too dirty to swim in or a plane that is late or a supermarket checkout counter that resembles an exercise line for the catatonic.

Or an electricity bill you can’t understand and the computer you can’t fight or insult or the traffic that boils your bile or “militants” whose progress is too fast or too slow or just right for no one. Or the two way generational guilt a man can feel today, toward the young who get away and the old he puts away, or that vague unspoken feeling that life is cheating us these days, or the single fact that poor old square dad has to hide in the garage to hear his Fela Afrika ‘90 records and what in the hell ever happened to simple nonpolitical, nonissue-oriented, noncrisis-connected, nonecological romance in Nigeria.

Quality of life? You could start anywhere. With a crack by comedian Woody Allen: “not only is there no God but try getting a plumber on weekends.”

Or with the mournful thought of a poet, William Butler Yeats, that dying faiths and decaying philosophies hang like “old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.” Or with the feeling of another poet, Archibald MacLeish, that “someone has written a new equation somewhere and our lives have changed without our changing them.”

Or with the solemn cry of Stewart Udall: “Why do we linger outside the door of distinction, so rich and so slovenly, so friendly and so filled with hate?”

We walk safely among the craters of sleaze but not in the parks of fairness, parity, or rectitude. Technology and change run berserk, headlights hide by day and moral values shred overnight. The unthinkable multiplies until it seems “things fall apart; that the center cannot hold.”

The standard of living rises while the satisfaction of living declines. Hunger haunts our prosperity and minorities circle the conscience of the majority with louder cries. The young mock our past, robbing us of the comfort of our victories in dictatorship and war, and inflation, the ubiquitous pickpocket, keeps lifting the pay raise in our wallets. Protests grow louder and civility becomes a whisper.

The Gross National Product grows grosser in reverse proportion to the gross national tranquility. The planes are faster and the cars are faster but we have fewer unspoiled places to go and more people who want to get there. Problems beget solutions which beget new problems and, in the rising tide of our numbers and the spreading unresponsiveness of our bigness, dust coats the refrains of Chinua Achebe, “The Nigerian compact is altogether with individuals………….Nigeria is nothing but you and me.”

But Nigeria, we seem suddenly to have discovered, is no longer infallible or, as Kayode Oseni notes, immune to history. We are no longer the good guys who win all the spoils and, at home and abroad, we are caught, Oseni says, in the collapse of our pretensions.”

Nigeria, we seem suddenly to have discovered, is no longer infinite in space or resource or hope. There is no next valley of quiet or virgin creek to scrounge. Beauty diminishes and tastelessness and flatness abide in neon lights and urban sprawl. Beer cans now litter the beach of our beginnings.

Each year seems like another year of the locust, another tear in the national psyche, and there is now a special terror, a flashing feeling of here we go again with the words, “We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news…… The presidency and National Assembly condemns in categorical terms the latest acts………..” being another assassination or kidnapping or riot or bomb blast or massacre in the north. Or an accident in those winding slabs of tar or a trigger itchy finger of a caparisoned bloke.

We live with trauma of the present and apocalyptic visions of the future. Every day, it seems, serious experts surround us with doomsday predictions of a shattered economy or ecology, of babies dying from obsolete ailments or techniques, of wells dying or drying up, of a population too vast to feed, of the atmosphere warming up enough to melt political gladiators and drown cities.

Will the Cavalry ever come?

We live in an expanding theater of the absurd and the unreal. Between beers, we watch real men dying on television and, same station, same network, we get a poetic message about the dangers of smoking and a poetic message about the joys of smoking.

Same day, same newspaper, we read that vigilantes rule certain streets of Bayelsa and Lagos, and are actually given contracts to protect pipelines and, a few columns over, a story about good old Nigerian know-how going abroad. Another squeals Nigerian government procured mobile phones will educate the poor villagers of Zamfara and Borno in crop planting and polio eradication. The agricultural extension and health officers won’t do. In Sokoto, an Almajiri is unable to attend “school” because of the hunger pang in his engorged belly and a government official armed with a camcorder covering conventional schools and bitter residents predicts, “Next thing, they will be putting commercials to pass it off as an achievement.”

Elsewhere, a headline screams, “Alembic Bomb Triggered in NNPC without Rolling Heads.” Look son no fear of the alethic.

In Oshogbo, an old lady frightened by all the money talks rushes to the local market to exchange her piggy bank with contents for gold trinkets with pyrites pendants. In Kaduna, a union sues to enjoin choking industries from claiming in an address that its casual workers are contented with the five-thousand Naira monthly stipends. At any moment, talk of contentment may become actionable.

Much of the quality of life in Nigeria today is related to numbers, lopsided numbers. Gertrude stein once wrote, “there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” In Nigeria, two-thirds of the people live on one fiftieth of the land. In Nigeria, current trends persuade experts that we will be 300 million by the year 2050 and, to accommodate the added 100 million, we will have to crowd them in where we are or build the equivalent of a new city of 250,000 every 40 days for 30 years: 20 more Kanos or 100 more Zarias or 1000 more Bamas, (Borno). The mind boggles.

Where we already are we are crammed and cranky. We have less room to live or work or die. Man’s castle is a number in an unending line of numbers on the door of an apartment in the city or a box in a row of boxes in the suburbs. We flee from the cities to the suburbs in Abuja and from the suburbs to the exurbs and the rat race of numbers is never far behind.

Every day it becomes harder to remember the smug satisfaction we once took pictures of those brutish cannibals lining up for skimmed corn meal in Monrovia. Now we God-fearing, black gold dependents are lining up all over Nigeria.

We line up for our pleasure and our pain, for ATM withdrawals, planes, school lunches, money deposits, tax payments, to ply our roads, college registrations, kerosene, premium motor spirit, comedy shows, movies, supermarkets, restaurants and “pure water.” We line up to buy and we line up to pay, to vote, to get into the Army and out of the Army, into debt and out of debt.

We line up, too, in those shanty-roofing-sheets-built bukas, while there are filled tables and after a stiff meal line up for the privilege of paying. We line up our cars, bumper to bumper (or is it fender), for the privilege of working in the cities and the need to escape them.

One man in Lagos carried a carrier pigeon in his car to alert his wife when the freeway traffic will make him late for dinner, because the supposed Bell’s ingenuity is epileptic like her Faraday sister. And for those experiences that used to restore a man’s soul, we line up bumper to bumper (sorry, fender) at the Millennium Park or an ocean beach or a watering hole to quench the acrid burn in our throats. One weekend, last April, it took one hour to get a lukewarm beer in a parlor, while watching United gobbled Swansea.

We save our money to buy cars and in the great rush to cruise the pothole filled roads to give the land an unnatural glut. If you live in Calabar, you have to go deeper and higher up the hills every year for solitude, and if you live in Lagos you have to go farther for a deserted beach, and if you live in Maiduguri, forget it.

Kids sleep together before they are married and marry before they can support themselves and poor old Dad is regarded as oppressively square for asking “when will you find yourself?” Today’s new jet is obsolete tomorrow, today’s new superhighway is a bottleneck tomorrow, today’s new mini is maxi tomorrow, and spiders spin webs over the old injunction to “eat it up, use it up, wear it out.”

 A war to stop the spread of Islamic radicalism, which was credible in Mali, becomes a credibility gap in Borno, liberals exchange pastures with conservatives and yesterday’s interventionist talks isolation today. Teachers close down schools by strikes, transporters leave passengers stranded, security agents stripping liveries in the face of insecurity, priests quit to marry and the Bishop has his troubles with his pastors. Football teams switch franchises, leagues subdivide like amoebae, and widows outnumber widowers.

Candidates for presidents are shouted down and the President cannot travel without screaming pickets. New churches don’t look like churches and flip kids with lapel pins tell us, “God is not dead; He just doesn’t want to get involved.

We have come a long, long way from those days and nights on Ekwensi’s People of the City. Today they would find it more difficult. Victoria Island is now bisected by a busy two-lane highway. Loitering by the young is now prohibited by the unwritten law in northern states after 10 P.M because of a rise in terror.

Will the Cavalry ever come?

We need some great statements about what Nigeria is about and what we can do about it. We need leaders with a large vision of what the nation needs. In a sense we’re almost like the Israelites were when they needed a prophet to come down from the mountain and tell them some hard things and what to do about them.

“But governments have limits,” says a man of government, Labaran Maku. It cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide a meaning to life. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies but it cannot create those energies.

People, we are being told, must find these things themselves. The oratory and literature of the day are, in fact, full reminders of different kinds of people. The minorities are reminded of the progress already made toward more justice and equality. The young and old are reminded of the need to seek such wisdom that each possesses. The majority, silent or otherwise, is reminded that a flag decal is not the limit to patriotism, as Buhari/Idiagbon of old would have us believe.

The independence struggle was led by a minority of intellectuals and scholars and politicians. The occasion we are now witnessing is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew. And the mourners who wait, still mourning the passing of Camelot are reminded that it was JFK who stressed that one man can make a difference.

And the all-out pessimists are reminded that the beginning of the cure is the pain of the illness, that people who become aware of their troubles have thereby taken the first step toward solutions. Progress there is. The government is committed to ending the war against insurgents, or at least the combat. There are talks about disarmament and amnesty. But is there a commitment to parity and fairness? No doubt there are arguments as to method and speed and even intent, but is there the commitment?

Nigeria is no longer the exclusive concern of poets or politicians or old men with plumbum powered radios. More and more people seek to partake in the rebuilding of the nation. More people question the unwritten injunction you must belong to share the “national cake.” More people question the old Nigerian faith to serve our father’s land. More middle aged people have begun to sense a validity in the young who scorn the auxiliary plastic life.

People have made a difference. It was people-individuals before there were groups-who by marching or just answering opinion polls questions began to turn the country around from docile towards gusty. But awareness and commitments, we are constantly reminded, are only beginnings and guarantee nothing.

We will not find a way out of our present troubles, says Rochas Okorocha, until we have the courage to look honestly at evil where evil exists, until we foreswear hypocrisy, until we call injustice and dishonor by their right names.” And until a large number of Nigerians from each sector of opinion - right, left and center - are willing to acknowledge their own special contribution to our troubles, the path to recovery will be like reaching the sun setting in the horizon.

Our salvation will never be handed to us “again.” If we are lucky we will be given a chance to earn it…….Many things are wrong. Many things must be done. There is no middle state for the spirit. It rises to high levels of discipline and decency and purpose – or it sags and rots. We must call for the best or live with the worst.

Change, does not hold still.