Nigerians have been leaking patriotism for decades now. A trail of this hemorrhage of patriotism has followed those who have fled the country whether through the airports or while braving the arid dangers of the Sahara desert. It is not patriotism that has kept many of those who have stayed back. Many are either stuck or have their proboscis too sunk in the body of Nigeria’s corruption that to live will be to lose all.
They can afford it: the president, the legislature, the judiciary can all afford to nibble at nostalgia and why not, even the worst times reserve respite for a select few. In Nigeria, this circle of select few which has continued to shrink has some powerful people.
In many ways, this administration has been at once a harsh departure from the past and somehow a stark return to it. While the prices of goods and services have made a clean break from the past to leave Nigerians gasping for the good old days, the return of the old national anthem as with a predilection for wasteful government spending harshly remind Nigerians of days they would rather forget.
If only the National Assembly can devote a modicum of the energy and efficiency it shows on petty issues to more pressing ones, Nigeria will be in a better place.
If a quarter of the urgency it showed while approving the return of the old national anthem can be applied say to the plight of internally displaced individuals in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country would be in a better place. But it appears that would be expecting too much from an institution with an entrenched history of self-service and a narco- narcissism fueled by the intoxicating drug of survival.
At a table prepared for the starving, it is an aberration to demand choice in the absence of any menu. To achieve that would be to ask those who must eat to live by eating what is not there. That is what the government is forcing Nigerians to do.
In a country where life is increasingly crushed by a rising dictatorship of survival by scraping, of what use is the sound of the past, of an anthem that is an apology for its colonial composers, their legacy, their colonial heritage, and a dirge for a stillborn country?
If the cursed folds of colonialism are to be rolled away by the liberation that language brings, can such a language that liberates come from the lips of colonialists?
Most times in Nigeria, the answers are known, but the questions are not. If the anthem is the answer to anything, what are the questions facing Nigerians? Surely, the men who line Nigeria’s legislature should have an idea, but especially of the fact that those questions are existential.
Nigerians have been leaking patriotism for decades now. A trail of this hemorrhage of patriotism has followed those who have fled the country whether through the airports or while braving the arid dangers of the Sahara desert. It is not patriotism that has kept many of those who have stayed back. Many are either stuck or have their proboscis too sunk in the body of Nigeria’s corruption that to live will be to lose all.
The language of the old national anthem may pulse with love and longing for the Nigerian homeland. Its lines may be piercing with the promise of a great country. But it is very much a relic from the past. It bustles with a story of when a newly independent country promised a break from its colonial past and a sprint into a brilliant future. With the military coups of 1966 and the devastating civil war of 1967-1970,the promise was prematurely extinguished. Every attempt to exhume it since has fizzled into failure.
In a country, that can only find closure by grieving its dead dreams, the old national anthem is severely dislocated in present day Nigeria, its displacement a plaintive anthem for all those driven from their homes by insecurity; those who have driven themselves across Nigeria’s borders to escape crushing conditions.
It is no surprise that the anthem holds such appeal for Nigerians of a particular generation. While they may argue that they could relate to it while growing up, the displacement it so forcefully evokes is more familiar to millennial Nigerians, especially in the recognition that some of those pushing for it have made hefty contributions to the displacement that is so palpable in the country.
Like every other country, Nigeria is made of songs and stories, of myths and music. The music which makes Nigeria is a collective of its national anthem and other anthems composed for national occasions. It is also made up of protest songs raised at various times against conditions rejected by Nigerians like the songs of the protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate shortly before they were massacred in 2020.
The music which makes up Nigeria is also composed of the expressed alarms of Nigerians at the rising cost of living in Nigeria. Rather than committing to a nostalgic journey to the past that has left Nigerians angry at the misplacement of priorities, the legislature, and the executive should have committed to curbing the rising cost of living.
If it is the magical thinking of those who rule Nigeria now that the country’s myriad problems can be resolved by a quick hop to a past many Nigerians are divorced from, then the country’s problems are even more serious than first feared.
Nigerians want a country they can associate with and adore; a country where the basics are in place. When such a country is in place, Nigerians would have no problems belting out any national anthem, unafraid of the hollowness that lies dredge up or the nonchalance of those who can afford to nibble at nostalgia while many of their fellow citizens cannot afford to buy noodles.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
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