The word pardon carries similar meaning with forgiveness, to the extent of an offender being released without the victim’s sense of recrimination or push for punishment, as a form of compensation. However, the former implicitly connotes an order, while the latter is participatory, concessionary and conciliatory. Both pardon and forgiveness are popular among humans, given the hurting predilections of some and the offensive nature of others. Little wonder that vexatious dealings across the globe have relied on the two words to seek healing and restore desirable peace in interpersonal relationships.
Forgiveness is one of the concepts that enjoy richness of literature, and dwelling on it expansively might be analogous to writing the history of the world. Most sincerely well-thought out Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), like that of the Desmond Tutu-led South African version, thrived on forgiveness, even as the opinion of Mahatma Gandhi has become putative to the effect that “the weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong”. Hurt is both an act of the offender as well as the feeling nursed by the offended. The human agency that suffers hurt is always out to nurse recrimination, and seek revenge at the next available opportunity, until when either emotional or material compensation is dispensed to assuage the hurtful feeling of the victim.
Nigeria democratic transition in 2023 was intriguing, trickery and cantankerous at different levels, particularly within and outside respective political parties. One remarkable trademark for some political office holders that are running out their tenures is the requisition for forgiveness from people they hurt, as they also dispensed forgiveness to people that offended them. Some of them are Abdullahi Ganduje, the outgoing Governor of Kano State, Darius Ishaku, the Governor of Taraba State, and President Muhammodu Buhari. Buhari was quoted to have, during his final Sallah homage as President, paid by residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), pleaded with Nigerians whom he hurt in the course of his almost eight years presidency to forgive him. Buhari at the event similarly thanked the people for tolerating him, stating that he got what he asked for, as democracy made it possible for him to maximise his leadership in the country, after a dint as military Head of State.
The South African TRC copiously offered a peep into the various dynamics of haunting memory, forgiveness, forgetting and reconciliation. Very many literatures that came from the proceedings of the TRC interrogated the notions of individual memory, personal hurt, national forgiveness, compensation and reconciliation. John Kani effectively uses the materials of the TRC in the production of his play, Nothing But the Truth, where he uses the character of Sipho to scathingly criticise the TRC that allowed offenders tell the stories of their aggressions, as victims gave a narrative of their hurt and loss, with the representatives of the government forcing forgiveness out of the offended which they lavished on the offenders for the purpose of a new egalitarian nation. Sipho laments in the text that white offenders got forgiveness, black elites like Nelson Mandela received political compensation, while the lowly victims got nothing. To Sipho and others in his shoes, truths told were skewed to favour the highly placed at the expense of the poor. Little wonder that ordinary South Africans are still recriminating, and vengefully performing revenge on the lowly, as evidenced in the various xenophobic attacks witnessed overtime.
Painfully, the many attempts made by Nigeria towards truth saying, forgiveness and reconciliation have been aborted by self-serving leaders who want the memories of their past evil deeds perpetually buried. Notwithstanding the evasive attitudes of aggressive leaders, efforts have been made to accentuate the idea of forgiveness in order to help people purge themselves of guilt and pain, as well as rise above differences, with the ultimate aim of attaining forgiving the hurts and finding healing. Different days have been adopted as Forgiveness Day, nationally and globally. While a state like Plateau marks forgiveness Day, Forgiveness Day is celebrated on 26 June, but should not be mistaken for Global Forgiveness Day that is observed on July 7. In the United States, National Forgiveness and Happiness Day is marked on October 7. No matter the variegation in the dates, it is obvious that forgiveness is highly desirable in an oppressive and vengeful world.
Although forgiveness is a national and global ingredient for peaceful coexistence, flagrant abuses across socio-political borders and racial cleavages have overshadowed the smokescreen used to stage peace in the face of wars, and stillness at the moment of turmoil. Across national boundaries, deliberate violations are underway, as found in: greed for power as currently playing out in, and ravaging Sudan, fuelled by international conspiracies; political leaders exploiting the helpless citizens; spiritual wolves preying on gullible impoverished sheep; shylock business holders hold helpless traders by the jugular; with victims made of disempowered buyers; kidnappers expand their empires as victimhood gets more pervasive; killer herders wet coveted farmlands with the blood of vulnerable indigenous dwellers, etc.
Unlike the proceedings established by the TRC, PMB, like other Nigerian leaders requesting pardon and dispensing forgiveness, short-circuited the notion of truth. While it is noteworthy that PMB at different times scored his government very high in delivering dividends of democracy to the citizens, particularly in the areas of infrastructural provisions and social security, majority Nigerians got disorientated with the government because of inadvertent and avoidable challenges that characterised the regime. The multiple-barrel feeling of hurts nursed by the people include the issue of insecurity; terrorism and kidnapping, with the ethnic profiling of Fulani herders across the country; anti-graft war of the government was seen by some as ineffective; galloping inflation, recession and weakened naira and economy, caused by shrinking production section, global depression occasioned by COVID-19, Russia invasion of Ukraine and perceived poor economic ideas. More so is the issue of fuel scarcity and the albatross of fuel subsidy; huge local and foreign loans, as well as the attempt to regulate the social media.
No good leader would deliberately inflict injury on his citizens. PMB’s quest for pardon is reflective of average evading Nigerian leaders that are caught between self piety and guilt, but nonetheless desirous of purgation. Apparently signalling the awkward approach to pardon and reconciliation in Nigeria, vengeful Nigerians are everywhere, and poised to take their pound of flesh from real and imagined offenders within their reach. The hurtful memories of the Civil war have continued to haunt the country, as witnessed in the ethno-religious consternations that tainted the 2023 elections. Vengeful unknown ‘avengers’ are steadily killing both notable and common citizens in the Southeast. Kidnappers are constantly on the prowl, with Abuja suburbs reduced to a nest of a sort. Ambrose Owuru staged a laughable revenge by seeking to halt the inauguration of Tinubu on May 29, through the excavation of a redundant memory of the past. Owuru typifies a warped human agency, psychically wounded by aggressors that are constantly reigning in impunity.
Rather than the redundant approaches of Nigerian leaders to hurt, and needless insincere quest for pardon, they should take a cue from the decision of the immediate Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Dominic Raab, who resigned his position because of claims of bullying levelled against him. Even though Raab argued that the report of the investigation that indicted him was flawed, he nonetheless put the nation and the people above his personal integrity to step down. The behaviour of Nigeria leaders to introduce probability to their acts of guilt through the use of the ‘if’ clause is defeatist, self-conceited and a mere attempt to make a fool of hurtful Nigerians, who may be left to be vengeful. PMB might not know how he hurt people, at least inadvertently, he should be reminded of the anglings about nepotism, insecurity, the impoverishment that produced 133 million multidimesionally poor Nigerians, making the nation the poverty capital of the world, etc. It is a fact that PMB got all he asked for as a lucky over-pampered citizen and leader, but the people did not get all he promised them to earn their votes.
The simple way out is for Nigerian leaders to say nothing but the truth about their hurting dispositions, confess their guilt, and remorsefully seek forgiveness, as against pardon, the ordered version, in order to prevent hurtful vengeful Nigerians from seeking revenge. Gandhi might be right, after all, that it is the strong that forgives, even as we are reminded that an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind. Nigerians’ immediate consolation is expected new breath promised in the renewed hope of the incoming government of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. May past governance in Nigeria not be better than the present and future!
