Portrait of A Revolutionary Who’s Time Has Come to Reclaim Nigeria for The People
By Comrade Ogbu A. Ameh
It is incumbent on the Nigeria youths of this generation to distill from the thoughts of numerous Thinkers of old on the expectations of any generation of youths in every society of the world. Flowing from these trajectories of thoughts, Frantz Fanon fired the revolutionary salvo when he asserted that;
“Each generation out of relative obscurity discover its mission fulfill it or betray it”. Light is the first source of illumination on the face of Mother Earth, he has knowledge which symbolizes light and he has always always strive to shine the light anywhere he finds himself. He has had his fair share of unpleasant experiences in life leading to mental demoralization, frustration and fear, yet, he did not give up the struggle to be alive. He believes always that there is a seed of greatness planted in him, that he resists the attempts by his social environment to kill.
The Homo sapiens on the face of the earth are subject to the social material realities of their geographical locations and the prevalent production relations of their sovereign states. According to Socrates, “the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance”. The period of making precedes the period of manifestation, it is very crucial in life. if there is no training, there will be no reigning. He had a great deal of training as a student of the school of hard knock. In his childhood and adult life, he had cause to know and experienced hardship, pain, anger, humiliation and revulsion for the cause of his episodic emotions. He found himself in the lower rung of the societal ladder by inheritance that he tried to interrogate the social theories for explanations. He knows what it takes to strive climbing up the ladder called “Social Stratification”.
In his country Nigeria, it is even worse as Merit has died since and buried on the altar of nepotism, bribery and corruption. The citizens stamped for every opportunity, they ramrod, beg, bribe, blackmail, intimidate, disrupt the system violently and kill in the bid to climb up the social ladder. He is an armchair critics watching and observing this state anomie in the system promoted by state actors with primordial sentiments. He does know too well that he has no other power base, but the Pen remains is only weapon. He writes against all forms of injustice, unethical behavior, anti social and criminal acts, religious hypocrisy and fanaticism in vehement fury. Since ages, philosophers asserted that productive thinking is the hardest work on earth; in the same vein, they laid the foundation of today in their time. Ironically, today politicians and their counterparts are allergic to productive thinking but adept in scheming to steal by looting the public till. The Revolutionary does a great deal of productive thinking as a way of life, even when his head bowed to the vagaries of life, yet he sees hope through it into the future. He assumes the role of the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes who live what he preached. He was the torchbearer who walked around the ancient city of Athens with a lantern in his hand looking for an upright man. He may be the modern day upright man Diogenes was searching for in his time.
Today, the city is more populous and complex as a characteristic of capitalism and rapid urban growth. The Diogenes of today cannot go around with a lamp searching for an upright man anymore, but mobilizes to conscientize and build a revolutionary movement. Those walking in his footsteps speaking to authority and power can only pontificate and write. Hence, he for one has decided to mobilize around a mass based populist who is one of them whose focus will be on power and how to reclaim it from the bourgeoisie for the people.
He speaks to his exploit in the struggle for the emancipation and liberation of the masses including the working class. He has written a book titled “In the Struggle” wholly dedicated to his exploit already. He is set to build consensus; identify his targeted messages and building national outreaches towards a robust national mobilization structure. The 8th National Assembly Legislature tried to deepen political participation by passing the bill for” Not Too Young to Run” ( youth inclusion and participation in politics), but the obvious setback is the absence of economic empowerment for a level playing ground.
He realizes that the time for his intervention is now. It is the responsibility of government to make life worth living for the citizens, talking of the Social contract. There has always been poverty in the midst of plenty, but it is alarming today in Nigeria. The innocent poor hapless law abiding citizens are at the brunt of the harsh realities of the underbelly of Capitalism with tinge of negative variance of democracy.
The youth accounts for 70% of the total population of Nigerians today, and most of them are jobless and lacking leadership mentoring. The level of unemployment among this youth demography shows that the country is sitting on a Time Bomb waiting to detonate at the earliest practicable time. He does know too successive governments’ domesticated fabulous development plans by changing the semantics and focus at regular intervals without the political will for implementation. However, the story has always been perambulation without progress as the same things are done and expecting new results. Flowing from this trajectory, he has come to the conclusion that enough is enough, it is time for the people’s revolution from below to reclaim our country.
He has been a bit skeptical about the motives for the state of the nation today. The word motive makes it sound as if there must be one motive for any scenario, thought or action. Sometimes, it does not work like that, for instance, you have a mother slapping her child across its face because it will not stop crying. Why does she do that? You can say; she wants to stop the child from crying her head off, but it is not true, is it? The motive lies much deeper than that. It is bound up with lots of other things; she is tired, she has a headache, she is fed up, she is just plain disillusioned with the duties of motherhood and just anything one can think of goes as assumption.
This concluding analogy explains the state of the nation today as the government and its security apparatchiks are caught in the whirlwind of assumptions of the root cause of gale of insecurity across the country. It is no longer just pertinent at this juncture of our existence as a nation state but an imperative for a people’s Revolution to reclaim political power. The late Sage; Papa Obafemi Awolowo in his time has this to say about Nigeria as a political contraption of the British Colonial power. “Nigeria is not a nation; it is a mare geographical expression. There are no Nigerians in the same sense as there are English”. Nothing can be truer about Nigeria than this, yet the status groups with admixtures of ethno religious cleavages who prefer the status quo would never broach the idea of Restructuring.
When once you ask yourself what lies in the murky depths below what Aristotle called the immediate cause, you begin to have a clear understanding of the motive. Going forward, the foregoing philosophical analogy finds apposite relevance within the context of Nigeria today as a nation. How did we get here at this juncture of our historical existence? What are the motives for these ugly monstrous manifestations of what can best be termed Hobesian Syndrome in our country since the return to democracy?
It is high time that, we as a people across those socially constructed divides that undermine revolutionary struggles gaining traction to form a common front and retake our country unite. This task lies squarely with the leftists and socialist tendencies across the country to mobilize and divert attention from pedestrian ethnic and religious politics devoid of issue based conversation in Nigeria.
Comrade Ogbu A. Ameh is the National Convenor GFCAI
