May our birthday not double as our death-day. I make that invocation in respect of my country, Nigeria, even though we are perennially stalked by death in the form of floods, Boko Haram, bandits and sundry agents of death. Annually, on October 1, I insist that the world pauses to take a deep breath and acknowledge that an entity named Nigeria impinges on its consciousness. That’s the least I can ask for.

Wasted Generation

When, in 1984, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka wrote off his generation as “wasted”, quite a number of public commentators felt that he was being too harsh on his generation and that there were so many things to celebrate about the first set of high flying post-Independence Nigerian graduates and freshly minted members of the social elite. At that time, the entity called Nigeria was only 24 years old as an independent African nation.

His reasons were quite understandable: “I compare today with dreams and aspirations we had when we all rushed home after studies abroad. We considered ourselves the renaissance people that were going to lift the continent to world standards, competitors anywhere. It hasn’t happened.”

Soyinka’s frustration with how the achievements of his generation had fallen short of their dreams for Nigeria was further underlined as he elucidated: “After a quarter of a century of witnessing and occasionally participating in varied aspects of social struggle in all their shifting tempi, dimensions, pragmatic and sometimes even ideologically oriented goals, I feel at this moment that I can only describe my generation as the wasted generation, frustrated by forces which are readily recognisable, which can be understood and analysed but which nevertheless have succeeded in defying whatever weapons such ‘understanding’ has been able to muster towards their defeats.”

In the inexorable slide of Nigeria’s First Republic into the abyss of military autocracy and internecine war, politicians on all sides of the divide were casting lots as to what the future held for them. Those in government swore that Nigeria had never had it so good, even as the Western Region was in flames; and opposition elements averred that Nigeria had become a synonym for hell on earth. It was left to the Soyinkas of the time to be the conscience of the nation. And what a price they paid!

Sad to say, my own generation feels exactly the same way. In fact, we consider Soyinka’s generation as accomplished. The standards the older generation set for itself were so high and the opportunities available to it so many that when we came along, we could only scramble for what the older generation would have felt was infra dig, in terms of socio-political struggle and intellectual attainment.

Many of us grew up under the tutelage of the Soyinkas whom we adored and whose exploits helped to fire our imagination. Those of us who were student activists dedicated our youth to the struggle believing that we were part of a movement dedicated to helping Nigeria and the African continent to realise their twin destinies as the giant of Africa and the most resource-blessed continent in the world, respectively.

Dreams

At great risk, we spat in the fact of jackboot idiocy in the form of military dictators and their acolytes. We dreamt dreams, hoping that those aspirations would come to fruition sometime in the future to the glory of the fatherland. With hindsight now, those were our years of innocence. We were naive. We truly believed that if you worked for the good of the society and did good things based on good plans, the end result would be goodness and happiness all round.

We were wrong. Even the society on whose behalf we were supposed to be exerting ourselves was not as innocent as we imagined. For many of us, it hurt when we discovered that the society was not as innocent as we had thought.

The military had the yam and the knife; they sliced as they wished. They ate up the years that our generation would have held the reins of power. They stained the polity with their warped definitions of propriety, spreading their poison through a generous democratisation of corruption. Now, the whole society was tainted. The erstwhile “corrective” regime which came to set things right and reform the polity had itself become the problem, forming a coalition with the old political guards and luring new entrants into the politics of sleaze and self-aggrandisement.

The new political order being operated is fashioned after the image and likeness of its regimented inventors. It waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck. No prize for guessing what it is.

Every four years, we pretend to choose new leaders or renew the tenancy of old ones. It’s a game of self-deceit in which we have all become adept. We demand a bribe from a candidate and then proceed to permit him to rig the ballot in our neck of the woods. Nothing goes for nothing. It’s an unspoken agreement. The politician knows he doesn’t owe the people anything. He had paid his dues during the campaigns.

The idealistic student activist of yore is a bundle of frustration. Viewed with suspicion by the political class and shunned by the younger generation for his “old school ideas”, he is angry that he can’t seem to fit into any grouping and may as well not be in existence as far as any kind of influence was concerned. He is alive but invisible. In a way, he’s relieved that he doesn’t have to live a lie. He can go to bed with a clean conscience. But then, so what!

Because time waits for no one, the principled Turk of yesteryear suddenly finds that he is not immortal. Tick says the clock; what you have to do, do quick! He can’t help noticing that many of the people he had looked up to in the past were fading away and that his own generation was fast racing towards the exit door of both irrelevance and death. He tries not to panic, but he knows that statistically, his generation is on its way out. It is not given to every man to live up to the 90s like the Soyinkas and the Anyaokus. He had better infuse whatever good he wanted to impart in the younger generation quickly through whatever means before he became a memory.

Time Running Out

And that is the challenge. Old age creeps in on him while he still has so many tasks undone. From the corner of his eye he notices that his country, Nigeria, is also greying at the temples. Sixty-four is a respectable, grandfatherly age. But Naija is still taking tentative steps and not yet living up to its billing as an adult.

Nations become strong and influential based on the sacrifices made by their citizens to position them for greatness. There is no international gold medal for graft. Those who drowned in River Tiber in order to save Rome can look back today from the heavens at the ancient city they saved from capture and beat their chests in self-congratulation.

Nigeria, socially dislocated and economically prostrate, is marking her 64th birthday in doleful circumstances. It can be truthfully said that Nigerians have never had it so rough, as far as the hard times are concerned. But we all live on a diet of hope, a promise that there is light at the end of this dark tunnel. As Robert Green Ingersoll declares, “Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.”

It is that promise of hope that I hold aloft today as the only worthwhile gift to compatriots of all generations, wasted and yet-to-be-wasted, whether true nationalists or treasonous patriots; unwavering ‘abobakus’ or loyalist Judases. May your generations witness better days soaked in prosperity in the many decades ahead. May your reality be more glorious than ours.

Happy birthday, Nigeria!