By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The presidency of Nigeria is so highly coveted that even expired players want to grab it “by fire, by force”, as the Pentecostals would say. The presidential wannabes are all over the place with their foot soldiers, intent on commandeering all attention. The ethnic card has been furiously highlighted in the “my turn” game, and one cannot but admit that in a tribal country there must be tribalism.
When the calamitous matter of single faith domination match is thrown into the fire of ethnic monomania in a land that prides itself on diversity and plurality there is bound to be inferno in overdrive. The goings-on in Nigeria today along the ethno-religious divide call to mind the unbearable racial turmoil in the United States that made James Baldwin to write the immortal essay The Fire Next Time.
Baldwin writes these telling words in that essay: “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
Death stalks the Nigerian terrain, and it is crucial to take to mind what Baldwin also writes in The Fire Next Time thusly: “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
Nigerians have never had it so bad economically, educationally, politically etc., and all pointers are in one direction: The Fire This Time. The youths of Nigeria especially are full of voice all over the country, telling anybody who cares to listen that they have nothing to lose, and they are going for broke. Like James Baldwin, these irate youths are asking: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
Most Nigerians are dying of hunger, and the politicians are apparently only interested in hiring hirelings to manufacture Fake News to further their nefarious ways. Suicide has become the national creed while the suicide note is the national anthem of hopelessness.
Beyond lonely suicide, what beckons is mass action. It is incumbent on Nigerians across board to do something fast before a boiling cauldron overwhelms all of us. The clear and present danger is that one oppressed Nigerian can copy the Tunisian who set himself on fire and thus led to the mass action that changed the history of the world.
