How Did We Get Here?

It was an easy Sunday morning, following a tensed Saturday night, after Professor Jega, INEC chair, had announced the postponement of the Nigeria's general elections. Here in Jos, the wind rustles the earth slowly, softly as if in solidarity with the silence church goers and Nigerians carried after the announcement. The day the decision was to be made had been dragged long by meeting after meeting, and after several consultations, as Jega said, the chair finally announced at about midnight the resolution of the commission to shift the election, a decision which hardened the hearts of Nigerians. Largely, it is less about the shift and more about how the sense of a fizzling future is creating a kind of dementia of despair.

Four years ago, after the general elections brought President Jonathan to power, which sparked series of violence in some northern parts of the country, the government assured us that serious measures will be introduced to forestall a re-occurrence. In the intervening years, the country witnessed raging attacks from a terrorist group that seemed to have grown into fierce hulks. These attacks dragged on for so long that it is now determining the fate of our country's general elections, albeit the fear of post-election violence still rages.

'How did we get here?' A friend told me with a wearied voice over the phone after Jega's speech. 'Where?' I asked trying to play dumb. 'Guy, this state of despondency and utter fear. I'm more pained by the current state of the country than the shift. Isn't the mess we're in today the forewarning of an impending misfortune?' It is, I thought. He hung up with a very long hiss. And I wondered why it took us this long to realize our gradual transitioning into this state of despair.

We got here because of our gullibility. Ours is a kind of people who believe so much in our institutions that we throw our own conscious minds to the wind. We anticipate to know, and stay informed, from the information our politicians, pastors, imams, the media and teachers are feeding us with. That which is self-enlightening has been so relegated to the reserve because we prefer to be spoon-fed. And so when a strange thing happens, like the postponement of a general election, we turn to our spring of information to feed us on the implication of that, just like we have cheaply believed the reasons stated for the shift.

We got here because of the way we moved here. It is good, someone once said, after I complained that we moved on too fast following the occurrence of any tragedy. Don't you know, he gave his reasons, that moving too fast shows that we are not deterred by the current state of a situation? We are resilient, he concluded. And I imagined his resilience, the type he and I have constantly seen, which meant recovering too fast only to be befallen by another tragedy just before we're done ascertaining the level of our initial ruins. We have been leaving in denial, which we learned to live in by the pacifying words we hear everyday. So we move on immediately a tragedy occurs before asking questions. We move on because it never befell us. And now we wonder in great dismay that it's over five years since we've been battling terrorism. Northeast had seemed so far-flung, like a miserable desert on a desolate land that its footage and pictures on the TV is like something from war-torn Somalia. We have forgotten that we lose a part of us each time a bomb goes up in Borno or Damaturu.

Those little lost parts of us have now summed up into a whole, deciding our fate as a collective people. Five years ago who would have thought that four states, barely a quarter of the entire states in the country, will be used as a major reason why we won't be holding elections as scheduled. We gave up thinking because our government said they were on top of the situation, because all we have often done, just like our clergies urge us to do, is to pray for the repose of the lost souls.

As the Sunday gradually winds to an end, I imagine a very busy week advanced by debates regarding INEC's decision. But I hope that this critical decision will mark our desire to begin the process of knowing every little step we take. Not only the type of knowledge that we sought from politicians, clergies or institutions, but also the type which will inform us about us and about our future.

@olaomojarabi