Today, Thursday, September 8, in the
Federal Capital Territory, the Federal Government will finally launch
the “Change Begins With Me’’ campaign that will “entrench the values of
accountability, integrity and positive attitudinal change” in Nigerians.
This campaign will be one of the several inelegantly arrayed on the
shelf of Nigeria’s history.
Olusegun Obasanjo, as President,
launched “Heart of Africa” and also formed an elite team tasked with
supervising the project implementation, promoting virtues and urging us
to better behaviour. They took the project to the United Kingdom and the
United
States but neither launch went too well. Obasanjo massively
pumped money into the international media to advertise HOA, positioning
himself as the Face of Nigeria; just what the world needs to see to come
and invest in Nigeria. The programme was eventually dumped after his
tenure expired. Despite the glaring lessons, Nigeria soon embarked on a
similar drive with “Rebranding Nigeria” launched by the late Minister of
Information and Culture, Prof. Dora Akunyili.
Despite armed with a cheap logo and a
feel-good slogan, “Good people, Great nation,” the project never really
took off. Those who conceived it with Akunyili said it was because it
never received adequate support by the government but in reality it
could not have taken off if Nigerians did not invest in it emotionally.
Really, why take another white sepulchre campaign by a country that
consistently fails to uphold its share of the social contract seriously?
With all the benefits of history in
hindsight, Nigeria wants to launch another programme with an agenda that
basically mirrors the Heart of Africa. The Minister of Information, Lai
Mohammed, a man who has degraded the Goebbellian art of political
propaganda with his lack of innovative misrepresentations, thinks
Nigeria will change for the better if her longsuffering citizens improve
their morals.
Mohammed said, “About three to five
years back now, the role models in the society were people of doubtful
character. Money was worshipped; nobody cared where and how one got the
money. These are the misplaced values that we are tackling now.” The
man’s sneakiness seems boundless. By suggesting that Nigerian values
collapsed between 2011 and 2013, he treads the well-worn path of blaming
the government’s immediate predecessor for everything that is wrong
with Nigeria. If he goes back a little further, he would touch the late
President Umaru Yar’Adua. To go back even much farther would hit
Obasanjo and risk his legendary vindictiveness. Mohammed therefore
conveniently abjures history and blames President Muhammadu Buhari’s
administration’s perennial whipping boy – Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.
If Mohammed had consulted a sense of
history, he would have realised that corruption is as old as Nigeria.
Every coup speech ever read in Nigeria alluded to corruption by the
ruling class. That was partly what brought down the First Republic.
Mohammed should read, that is if he hasn’t done that by now, Chinua
Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, the latter book a
sociological treatise on the culture of corruption and how it implicates
the wilfully and unwilfully corrupt. What else is left for him to say
about corruption and its social impact that has not been said in the
past? Does Mohammed imagine that what ails Nigeria can be cured by a
campaign that beats people on the head with empty slogans, media noise,
and mere spectacles? If all the churches and mosques in Nigeria who
deafen our poor ears with noise every day of our Nigerian lives have not
resolved the problem, what good will Mohammed’s campaign do?
Here is another instance of Mohammed’s
disingenuity: He said the campaign would not be the same as Buhari’s
famous WAI (another project with an incoherent manifesto launched some
weeks ago) but they would achieve what Buhari did in 1985 through
persuasion. He said, “In 1983, they used what they had to achieve what
they wanted, which was to correct the decadence in society, tackle
corruption and impunity. However, in the area of enforcement, people
alleged infractions and intimidation.”
To Mohammed, the wanton abuses people
experienced under the jackboot of Buhari was simply a matter of
allegations and its truth basis does not really matter. His argument is
like speaking with the split fang of a snake: it did not happen but if
it did, it was out of necessity for a government eager to straighten the
country. Of course, Mohammed works with Buhari and he cannot be
expected to be critical of his boss but if he would take some time to
read Prof Wole Soyinka’s essay, “The Crimes of Buhari,” he would know
that those cases of “infractions and intimidations” were no mere
allegations.
This is what Mohammed and his fellow
campaigners must note: Change does not begin with the average Nigerian.
No, it begins with those who promised us “change” a year ago. They got
into office and Nigeria turned out to be animal farm where clueless pigs
replaced clueless human. Readers of Animal Farm will recall the iconic
scene at the end where the face of the pigs and that of human were no
longer distinguishable. Those who were kicked out are no worse than
those who replaced them. Rather than own up to their foibles, Mohammed
wants to push the responsibility of changing Nigeria to poor hapless
people. His campaign is an alibi being prepared for their government in
case they end up with an F on their report card.
Change Begins With Me will be their
excuse if they do not achieve what they promised Nigerians. With it,
they can blame their victims – the poor Nigerians who have a poor
attitude which has kept the country poor. Similar campaigns in the past
have failed and this one is not going anywhere either because it is
another shoddy attempt to deny the reality that plagues our Nigerian
existence. The campaign is a diversionary tactic, a propaganda vehicle
for paternalistic pontification by a hypocritical lot. They want to ask
Nigerians to develop the culture of integrity and accountability when
the government from whose body language we take our behavioural cues
lacks similar values. Oh, and the cruel irony of the same Mohammed that
raided a government ministry to fund his international travel now
instructing us on values!
In the past one year, this government
has displayed a lack of coordination, and inconsistency in issuing
policies. That has impacted the economy rather poorly.
Today, in many places in Nigeria, people
are starving and the tension that pervades the land reminds one of the
Sani Abacha years. In the midst of such hopelessness, crimes will rise
and duplicity will increase as people hustle to survive. In that same
period, Mohammed will launch a campaign to teach people to be honest and
accountable. He will distribute posters and other materials that will
eventually become an environmental nuisance to ask people to develop
moral values. He will stage spectacular concerts that are expected to
pierce our consciousness and convert us to good behaviour. All of this,
let us not forget, will gulp money like similar ones in the past.
It is amusing that all the examples of
corruption by Nigerians which Mohammed and co stated that they want to
erase through attitudinal change are symptoms of the culture of poverty
and underdevelopment. Their failure to see it for what it is means that a
solution will not be fashioned soon.
Mohammed is actually right that
Nigeria’s problems do not begin and end with its elite but having
travelled on this same campaign route at least twice, we can recognise
fatuous nonsense from afar. If such an initiative will exist, it should
be at the behest of a private organisation, not a floundering
government.
No, change does not begin with Nigerians
and we will not let them shift that responsibility to us. If they want
change, let them start with themselves and their tribe of rulers!
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