As Nigeria continues waiting for Godot

Look around, chances are that you would be assaulted everywhere by the glitz and banality of conspicuous consumption even in the midst of human squalour and overwhelming deprivation. These take the forms of pharaohnic size mansions and outlandish gleaming cars to boisterous revelries that cause the closure of entire neighbourhoods in the name of house warming or traditional marriage ceremonies.
The irony is that such debaucheries are taking place in an economy that is not only depressed but also in a country where more that 80 percent of the population live on less that $2 per day.
More sobering is that Nigeria has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world with estimates putting the figure at an alarming 70 percent of the youth population. According to a recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, the country has one of the highest infant and maternal deaths in the world, even as one in every Nigerian child dies before reaching the age of five years, while 30 of every 1,000 pregnant mothers die at childbirth. Painful is that most of these deaths and diseases are preventable. For example, polio, which is prevalent in some parts of the country, is preventable through immunisation of children at birth.
Malaria, whopping cough, tuberculosis, measles and even river blindness can be eradicated through simple hygiene and making the environment conducive for human habitation. The grisly reality is that Nigeria falls short on every Human Development Index (HDI) ranging from education to life expectancy. For example, the average life of a Nigerian male is 43 years, while that of the female is 48 years and these are among the lowest in the world. Compare this with an American male and female at 72 and 80 years respectively.
For Japan, it stands at 80 and 90 years for male and female respectively. Every conclusion points to the fact that life in Nigeria is nasty, brutish and short.  Those in this infamous league with Nigeria include Chad, Niger, Sudan, South Sudan Eritrea and Somalia, even when the latter has no functioning government in the past 26 years.
That Nigeria has remained a child at 56 years old is due the benign indifference of the leaders to the plight of the masses. Paradoxically, even in such midst of chaos and squalor, the few rich are turning Nigeria to a  “Sodom” of debauchery and licentious lifestyles. Surprising is that both the spiritual and temporal leaders are together in this business of impoverishing the people through mindless exploitation. The failure of the Nigerian state is evident everywhere, ranging from crumbling roads, lack of electricity, potable water, health and educational facilities, even against the predicted population of 300 million by 2030.
In this Hobbesian state, an enlightened form of “Voodooism” in the cloak of new religion and ideology has taken over the land. Unsurprising, this state of anomie is being propped up by a detached Executive (Presidency) and an army of prosperity preachers that is always in the habit of promising abundant good times, even in the face of increasing despair.
As factories and industries close down and retrench their workers due to the biting economic recession, the abandoned buildings are converted to places of worship by all manner of bible wielding persons in designer suits with eye on the financial returns.  Increasingly, Nigerians are turning to places that are more esoteric and engaging in all manner of bestialities like ritual killing and kidnapping for ransom to find solution to their problems, which of course are ephemeral. Nigeria has become ancient Rome that burnt while her leaders are fiddling.

Even as the government is enamoured of this pathetic state of affairs, Nigerians both individually and collectively have become oblivious to this dysfunctional state of affairs. They see the country’s problems as spiritually ordained rather than a function of ineptitude and incompetence on the part of the leaders who lack focus, vision and intellectual capacity to lead them out of the present quagmire.
With such mindset, they no more hold their leaders to account.  Timidly, everyone continues waiting for miracles to end our collective and personal woes, while those entrusted with making the system work continue employing propaganda to hoodwink the unwary.
In the play “Waiting for Godot”, two characters, Estragon and Vladmir rather than engage in meaningful enterprise for a living decided to wait for a mythical Godot in the expectation that he would bring them all the good things of life. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing play games, exercise, swap hats and even contemplate suicide. At the end of the day, they were impoverished and disappointed for the Father Christmas failed to arrive. Nigerians would fall into this trap if we continue to wait for a mythical Deux Machina.