Year 2014: 170 million dumb Nigerians BY BAYO OLUWASANMI

Can you see common men and women amid the care and struggle of daily life? Can you see people in the jar of the noisy streets and amid the squalor where want hides? Can you see the wrong that produces inequality?

Can you see the wrong in the midst of abundance that tortures men with want or harries them with fear of want? Can you see the wrong that stunts you physically, degrades you intellectually, and distorts you morally?

How can you cope for so long with rul­ers who have been rejected longest time by God and by the times? For long and especially the last four years, you have succumbed to the variety of forms of ma­nipulative communication at the disposal of your rulers. You have become more in­dulgent of politicians who spin the truth and tell you bare-faced lies.

Your government is working for the few rich. Your country has been transformed into an Orwellian dystopian society. Your rulers use fear to nourish their insatiable appetite for power, control, and money. Propaganda and corruption are being used to dumb you down.

Your police have become militarized. Your country has been turned into a police state in which your government exercises rigid and repressive control over your so­cial, economic, and political life. You no longer have true representation in govern­ment. You lack safety and security and your freedom is threatened not by outside enemy but your own government.

You’re on your knees daily begging your elected government for water to drink, electricity to use, roads to travel on, jobs for the legion of your unemployed sons and daughters, and hospitals to treat the sick. Your pensioners are dying while fighting for their pensions to be paid. You’re satis­fied with crumbs from the looters of your treasury.

How in the world do you tolerate a gov­ernment well known for its crafted decep­tion and free-floating relationship with truth? You seem to agree and enjoy dis­tortion, insinuation, misleads, and blatant lies of your government even when your government lie about the definition of lie. Do you know what happened to the report of National Jamboree nicknamed National Conference? You have been indoctrinated to tailored disinformation of your govern­ment. Why are you easily intimidated by your government and at the same time defend the very people who oppress you? You have jettisoned your dignity and self-respect in accommodating a culture of lie.

Why have you allowed those you em­ployed – your president, your governors, your legislators, and your local government chairmen, turn you into wretched beggars ever known in the history of your nation? Why have you granted – happily I might say – leisure and affluence to your oppres­sors without a protest or a fight? Though you are locked in a death grapple, nothing your rulers offer or are willing to offer miti­gate your suffering.

Never challenged the insidious linking together of special privileges, the unjust outright private ownership of your natu­ral or public resources, monopolies, that produce unfair domination and autocracy. Can’t agree on the definition of corruption and can’t discern lie at the heart of your troubles. Rather, you’re content with the clown civilization foisted on you.

A very powerful few are in possession of your God given resources – the land, the oil, and other riches in addition to other privileges. Yet, without objection you ac­cept the arrangement as being sanctioned by God like Yorubas will say: “Amuwa Olorun ni.”

You have willingly become the wretched of the earth in the midst of plenty. You have relegated yourselves into object of compul­sory charity. You are made to support the tyranny of your rulers by just shut up, ac­cept, and acquiesce and go with the status quo.

You are made to pay for their luxurious and reckless life and in exchange you be­come paupers denied the opportunity and dignity of earning your own decent living.

Despite your galling and destructive liv­ing conditions, you continually yield your sovereignty to the few elected tyrants you put in office. You are scared to death to challenge the great and unjust profiteering of your rulers. They owe you three, six, nine months salaries while donating bil­lions to Jonathan’s campaign. Where is the eruption of your raw rage?

You accept involuntary poverty, and other socio-economic plagues that prevent you from attaining your maximum poten­tial. Degraded, squeezed, and pummeled, you have become the poster child for want and shame.

One wonders: why in a land so bounti­fully blessed with enough and more than enough for all, should there be such pov­erty and inequality? Such heaped wealth interlocked with such deep and debasing want?

Why in the midst of such superabun­dance should strong men vainly look for work? Why should your women faint with hunger? Why should your children spend the morning of life wandering in the streets and scavenging the refuse pit for food?

Your rulers counted on your mental in­dolence. They exploited your apathy to the fullest. You freely and obediently conform to their abuses and political malpractices and other inhuman treatment you’re sub­jected to. You’re tricked, cajoled, ridiculed, battered, and smilingly surrender to the in­justices that toppled ancient Rome.

By the way, where are your Chibok Girls?

For keeping up with the “darkness of er­ror” and for being enchanted with many fallacies and all assorted abuses rained on you by your government to widen your suf­fering and smiling, and for accepting con­fusion and deception of a tyrannical ruling class elected by you – 170 million dumb Nigerians – you’re my people of the year 2014!

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. – Mark Twain [email protected]