Resilience has limits

Also published in Daily Trust

With their sense of resilience, creativity and self-motivation, majority of Nigerians have been able to, some extent, cope with the challenges and resiliently endure the leadership-inflicted misery imposed upon them by the country’s successive military and civilian regimes over the decades. As a matter of fact, many of them have been able to achieve various degrees of success in different fields of human endeavour, in spite of the overwhelming impediments.

In other words, an average Nigerian creatively devises means to endure and survive the impact of the systemic deterioration and failure, while, in the meantime, he consciously or unconsciously lowers the bar of his expectations in the system, which is, in any case, the most realistic attitude under these peculiar circumstances, for it, at least, spares him the trouble of further disappointment.

Besides, his growing desperation to secure basic services, which should ordinarily be provided by the government and which are actually taken for granted elsewhere, is a clear indication of how he understandably lost confidence in the system, despite the repeated reassurances and promises to tackle the situation by the successive local, state and federal governments.

For instance, he struggles, with his limited means, to provide himself and his family, services as basic as security, electricity and water supply, standard health services and education, among many others, which, in any case, are not easy under the unbearable prevailing economic hardship in the country. After all, even the microscopic few who can fairly afford it hardly enjoy it in real sense, due to the sense frustration associated with the exorbitant costs they incur.

Nevertheless and despite the attendant implications of this situation on the country’s socio-economic and political stability, things have continued to move somehow manageably. However, the phenomenal explosion of security situation in the country over the past few years, which increasingly exposes millions of ordinary Nigerians to an unprecedented state of insecurity particularly in the northeast has obviously pushed their resilience to the limit, and indeed exhausted their ability to cope with it.

For decades, Nigerians have lived with the menace of many life-threatening security challenges, which are however relatively less serious, compared with what they go through today. In their desperate efforts to fill the vacuum created by the successive governments’ failure to provide adequate security in the country, many Nigerians have, with their meagre means, taken security precautions and measures to secure themselves and/or supplement the little security provided by the government.

And even though crimes like armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom have always persisted anyway, the situation never escalated to the extent of posing existential threats to communities, region and potentially to the country at large, as witnessed nowadays.

However, what Nigeria goes through today in terms of the alarming deterioration of security situation, is obviously too much to withstand let alone prevent or tackle by the increasingly vulnerable average Nigerians. No matter how resilient they are the large-scale, well-coordinated and highly organized attacks that target them indiscriminately are simply beyond their capabilities to repel or avoid.

Unfortunately however, with its self-inflicted and unjustifiable helplessness and sheer insensitivity, government seems to have abandoned them to their fate anyway. This is particularly clear in its embarrassing failure to stop the escalating wave of killings, displacement of communities and indiscriminate destruction of public and private properties particularly in the northeast of the country.

Besides, the mass abduction of more than two hundred school girls in Chibok, Borno state on 14 April 2014 was particularly embarrassing in view of the security operatives’ failure to trace the whereabouts of the abducted girls, let alone free them. By the way, this incident has particularly exposed government’s indifference to the plight of Nigerians especially those in the northeast who have been languishing in-between terrorists’ atrocities and government’s reluctance to come to their rescue.

Though, this incident is extremely serious by all standards, and is perhaps unprecedented, yet it unfortunately fails to attract appropriate global attention sufficient enough to prompt the international community to act. This is particularly unfortunate when viewed against the backdrop of the incident of the mysterious missing of the Malaysian passenger airline, which went missing on 8th March 2014 and which attracted huge amount of media coverage, and indeed attracted what was rightly described as the largest ever search and rescue operation by the world’s leading countries who have deployed their most advanced high-tech technological capabilities to find the missing plane, even after it appeared clearly that there was no single survivor among the passengers and the crew.

Interestingly, knowing how Nigeria is viewed, or rather disdained by the international community, and indeed how almost nobody takes it serious due to its persistent dismal performance in good governance, I am not that naïve to expect huge international concern over its predicaments. Yet, I never expected that the show of indifference would be that ridiculously insensitive, either.

In any case, Nigerians as represented by the leadership are solely responsible for this situation; for it is obvious that, one attracts recognition and respect according to the extent he values and pursues respects, which is determined by his attitude. Nigeria’s performance in this respect is obviously poor. For instance, in addition to its leaders’ unwillingness to check the deteriorating security condition in the land, they are also too apathetic to pretend to be considerably sympathetic.

For instance, the widely and rightly condemned political rally led by President Jonathan in Kano in the aftermath of the bloody Nyanya bomb attack on 14th April 2014, which killed many people was a clear indication of how far Nigerian leaders could go in demonstrating their sense of apathy.

Incidentally, barely two days after the attack, a ferry carrying hundreds of people, mostly students in South Korea had an accident and capsized where many people died. In the aftermath of the accident and out of his sense of responsibility, and even though he was not responsible for the accident, the country’s prime minister resigned.

Anyway, having been pushed to the limit, Nigerians are apparently at crossroad, and only God knows what will come out of this quagmire. Yet, whatever it is it will not spare those responsible for creating or allowing this situation to persist.