#Reflections

Has ‘tomorrow left us yesterday’?

By Busuyi Mekusi

Confucius opines that we need to “study the past if you would define the future”. Where is our tomorrow? Late Tayo Olafioye, the veritable “Town Crier”, was an outstanding influence on some of us during the short time we plied the trade of teaching and research together, on his return from ‘exile’.
Olafioye’s writings reminiscently amplify various socio-political, economic and cultural conditions and orientations in Nigeria, and across the world. From The Thunder in a Woman, which is a metaphor for consistent Nigerians’ spousal contentions in the Diaspora to A Carnival of Looters, which satirises mindless corruption in Nigeria and Africa, and from The Parliament of Idiots, detailing the idiotic propensities and shenanigans in the lower and upper chambers, to the peroration that Tomorrow Left Us Yesterday. This is not to discountenance his stoking through “Minimum Wage; Maximum Wahala”. Olafioye’s conclusion about our warped configuration is still a source of concern, as we wobble on all fronts, while other nations glide into an assured future.
Tomorrow is a child of the past and present, bellying hopes, aspirations, development, newness (scientific, technological, humanistic, etc.), while the past remains an inevitable teacher, which would not “teach you nonsense”. However rich the past is, people tend not to sufficiently learn from it, as the past seems to always be better than the present, in African climes. This is because in almost an eclectic manner, recession looms larger than progression! This approach also defines the take of Nigerian politicians who would pooh-pooh a government he took advantage of, only to abandon it at the eleventh hour, as currently playing out in Ondo State, where the political turf is dusty! The impeachment notice on the Deputy Governor must be followed up constitutionally, and not merely politically. I hope the illusions of individuals and groups hankering for the seat of the Governor of the State would be cured soon, as there can only be an occupier at a time. Strangely, construction of roads and building of schools are suddenly not as important as “stomach infrastructure”!
It is worrisome that Nigerian political space is still dominated by jackboot politicians and traducers, who gleefully canvass for political patronage and personal enhancement far and above quality deliverables for the majority. The notion of “use and dumb” is very pervasive in Nigeria’s socio-political life. What the orange represents to many is not just the liquid content, but the outer and inner layers that form the fabrics for the fibers, whereas others merely dwell on the juicy constituent and discard the layers. Most fighters and field agitators against military rules in Nigeria merely won the battle against successive despotic governments only to cede the political space to enemies of democracy, who worked hand in glove to undermine the rights of the people, perpetrate organised killings and deplete the treasury. Up until now, a former late maximum Head of State, who was at a time the ‘chosen one’, is still ‘transferring money from his grave’, more than the order of Hushpuppi. Beyond the recent Aljazeera report on Nigerians and the ownership of properties in the United Kingdom, discerning minds know very well that the parlous state of infrastructures in the country is a function of the capital flight of resources allocated to such, to different parts of the world. We are grateful to Ikenna Nweke, a Nigerian PhD student in Japan, whose ‘uncommon honesty’ and contentment in returning a wallet with some cash he found helped us neutralise the putrefaction caused the nation by Hushpuppi and his brigades. Ordinary Nigerians are offended by the attempts made by the two leading political parties in the country to politicise the emotive burden of Hushpuppi’s act, because of the association he had with some highly-placed Hushmongrels and mongers of Nigeria and Nigerians. Are we not all Hushpuppies?
Nigeria’s dodgy past, nay Africa, characterised by political dyfunctionality, ethnic suspicion, regional regression, tribally-inclined domination and hues and cries of marginalisation, should have creatively put us on the path of evaluation and rejuvenation, but it has become a mere template to injure both the present and the future. The opinion of Georg Hegel becomes handy that “we learn from history that we do not learn from history”. Because the lives of Nigerians do not really matter to their leaders, the large-scale killings during the Civil War, the maiming and slaughtering occasioned by the June 12 imbroglio, and politically induced bloodbaths in recent elections, have been consummated by the ravaging massive destructions perpetrated by Boko Haram. The production of agents of destruction has been sustained substantially through the nurturing of social urchins and miscreants; the Agbero in the South, and Almajiri in the North. Some of these socially-constructed misfits have been migrated from the lower rung of the ladder to the topmost top, where they regale the aristocratic splendours their masters denied them for a very long time. The recent exchanges between Gani Adams, the Aare Ona Kankanfo of Yorubaland, and a group sympathetic to Bola Tinubu, reveal how the bad and the ugly get decorated with the toga of ‘the good’. We are made to believe that idiocy pays! Boko Haram is also fast becoming a vignette of trans-border political manipulation and aggression, as the last attack on the helicopter of the UN rekindles the notion of globalised rage.
Tomorrow appears to have left us yesterday, going by the lackluster and unscientific manner COVID-19 is handled in the country. The convoluted approaches of government functionaries continue to enhance lack of believability, and irresponsibility among the people, just as the pandemic continues with the shocking harvests of Nigerians, one of whom was the former Ondo State Inter-ministerial Commander on COVID-19, Dr. Wahab Adegbenro, who characteristically got the encomiums that should have encouraged him for more good works when alive, only after his transition. May Allah rest his soul, and comfort the family, particularly the wife, my dear sister Oluwatoyin. His death, as well as those of others, underscores human vulnerability and mortality! The politics of death and mourning that characterised the demise of Late Senator Ajimobi is uncalled for!
As the quest for a vaccine to tame COVID-19 continues, the Madagascar miracle herbal mixture has apparently failed to help the country arrest the pandemic. Ondo State is in the eye of the storm with a spike, as campaigns for the gubernatorial election are underway, with apprehensions flowing from the possibility of schools’ resumption, which some say could lead to creating multiple epicenters. Congratulations to Arakunrin for his quick recovery! Very urgently, there is the need to liberalise the testing and treatment of COVID-19, with more structures emplaced to checkmate the virus, rather than the politicisation of same as we have it in Kogi and Cross Rivers States. There is need for economic reforms and restitution of illegal acquisition, that we may have our tomorrow back! Adieu, Olu Aboluwoye, as your remains are committed to mother earth today!

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Has ‘tomorrow  left us yesterday’?

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0 Comments

  1. Tunde Awe
    10th Jul 2020 Reply

    Our yesterday was one of hope accompanied with a bright light in the horizon, but today the light has been tainted with leadership incompetence, corruption and outright castration of the nation-state, while our tomorrow is heading steadily into full darkness unless the rot is divinely arrested.
    Personally, I doubt a record of appreciable change in our tomorrow except the attractive attachments to political offices are whittled down to throw up sincere politicians to effect the expected development at all levels of our political life as a nation.
    Nigeria is a case of a lost hope, and the regret of this saddens the heart.

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