NIGERIA A DECOMPOSING NATION?

Is Nigeria Nigeria a decayed nation.

Nigeria is part of that group of African countries that has no real reason to account for its perpetually high poverty rates. No other reason than corruption or incompetence, perhaps. After many attempts to stabilize their economy, macroeconomic reforms in the 1980s finally worked well.
Surprisingly their positive effects on the economy did not trickle down (as the theory would have) to the rest of the population. No, it's a joke: it's not a surprise. The same has happened in many countries, and on the contrary, poverty increased instead.

The only problem with Nigeria, is unprepared, poor and bad leaders. All those who have ruled Nigeria are dealers not leaders. Most of Nigerian politicians, had no day jobs before they entered politics. Politics in Nigeria, has been turned to big business and big business attracts the mafia and other types of criminals. The only political players in Nigeria are those who engage in do or die politics. They are prepared to go to any length to take power, even assassinations, murder, cultism, etc. For this reason no decent person, with good reputation, wants to engage in Nigerian politics. It was confirmed by one of the Senators, Senator Aliu a former AIG and he was in charge of criminal investigation, before venturing into politics. He said it in public that, he had personally investigated a lot of his colleagues, for serious criminal offences when he was a police chief. This mater was swept under the carpet by the Senate and the House of Representatives. We have not heard about it again even till date.

life looks so dreary and gloomy for Nigerians as over eighty per cent of them live in abject poverty. With a leadership that fires the ambers of corruption, official graft and public stealing, Nigeria holds no credible hope of revival from the atrophy that shackles it at present. The state of infrastructural decay is complimented by the penchant to see state resources as free meal for those that adopt guile and sly means to access political positions. Unemployment has reached a bestial height as industrial mortality and investment flight riddle the economic space. Nepotism and pandering to the gods of tribe and tongue have so debased a weak and ineffectual federal structure that it is a case of everyone to his tent. The educational and health sectors experience unceasing rot while the vicious circle of poverty makes its unimpeded rounds across the length and breadth of the country. Sectarian and ethnic mistrust have combined to worsen a security crisis that sows dread and fright through the lengths and corners of the country. Life has become so cheapened that death lurks in every nook and cranny of the government while the government looks on in pitiable helplessness. So helpless that the government, which should effuse hope in the face of this state of dread has been chased to the dark crevices by the forces of Hades. What better way to demonstrate this that our independent celebration, which should be with fanfare and élan has been reduced to a bedroom affair? In the confines of the presidential bedroom, expensive wines would be popped, orgies would be mounted and deep holes would be punched into our national treasury; all in queer celebration of the debasement of a nation through bad leadership.

   

As a child to an adult, nothing has really changed, same rulers, same faces, same people...same government. Nigeria cannot guarantee a fairly stable electricity supply to the extent that what Nigerians get for the massive resources that have been stolen through the power sector is failed promises and darker space. The height of the jarring paradox that Nigeria has become at independence is that at the eve of its fifty second independence anniversary, the country is locked down by a fuel scarcity where petrol sells as high as N200 a liter in some parts of the sixth largest producer of oil in the world. It is so bad that the petroleum sector has become a scammer’s haven where record breaking acts of corruption and financial recklessness are perpetrated within the petroleum sector, which has become the hearth that fuels the massive corruption complex that is at the root of the Nigerian crisis. Fifty two years after independence, no credible electoral system exists to lead the leadership selection process. At best, what exists is a choreographed sham system that is pre-manipulated to turn out and perpetrate the worst in the system as leaders. A hugely corrupt judicial system holds no hope for judicial redemption and the legislature suffers the same rotten complex that has buried our collective hopes for survival in the face of encircling doom.

 

At fifty two, Nigeria continues to wobble and stumble into irrelevance and meaninglessness. Nigeria continues to feed the ravenous tongs of the consuming fire of underdevelopment and backwardness. At fifty two, Nigeria’s hope for redemption has waned, dealt a bad blow by its array of bad leaders who continues ti wax increasingly intransigent by the day. With its leaders growing insensitive to the pitched cry of pains from the millions of trapped citizens, there is every possible indication that Nigeria’s soul is lost and what exists is an empty shell inhabited by trapped citizens who want out of so dysfunctional a nation. At fifty two, Nigeria has irrevocably broken down as it holds no hope for its teeming citizenry. It is a story in debauchery and prodigality. It is a story in wasted opportunities and it is a depiction of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

In the book description of Karl Maier’s award winning book, This House Has Fallen, Amazon posted thus;

 

“This House Has Fallen is a bracing and disturbing report on the state of Africa's most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation. Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria is declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. Though Nigeria is a nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, its per capita income has fallen dramatically in the past two decades. Military coup follows military coup. A bellwether for Africa, it is a country of rising ethnic tensions and falling standards of living, very possibly on the verge of utter collapse — a collapse that could dramatically overshadow even the massacres in Rwanda .A brilliant piece of reportage and travel writing, This House Has Fallen looks into the Nigerian abyss and comes away with insight, profound conclusions, and even some hope”.   

 

This could suffice as an epitaph for Nigeria, a land that held so much promise at birth but which, at fifty two years, has become hell writ large on earth; a dark spot for humanity and a reproach to her citizens; no thanks to its slothful leaders.

 A Nigerian study points out that considering its income per capita only, nothing has changed since 1970. Nevertheless at the same time the country has become richer and richer thanks to the exploitation of its oil resources.
So despite being the 3rd biggest economy in Africa, Nigeria ranks around 160th out of 177 countries on the scale of the Human Development Index (HDI).

Poverty in Nigeria is essentially a rural issue. Therefore experts usually consider access to banking and micro-credit services crucial to help local farmers invest in agriculture, be it for crops, machines, transport vehicles and so forth.
Given the country's high unemployment rate, this means that entrepreneurship is key to reducing poverty in Nigeria and that obstacles to business creation - such as corruption - are barring the country from its right to development.