The Moses generation saw the past, lived in it, are beneficiaries of it, knows what it’s like when the state functions as it should, can envision the future better than the one we’ve accepted and are by the fact of our silent acquiescence, legitimizing.
The critical thing about Moses in the story of the emancipation of the nation of Israel, is to be found in his perspectives on life, and his concept of freedom. Moses was the only Jew that was not a slave, and the childhood and time spent living in the house of pharaoh, shaped his worldview, and engagements with the Egyptians, from whom he was purposed to save his people.
Nigeria has a generation of Moses, and the time is now, for them to emerge, if Nigeria is to ever become the promised land it was purposed to be at the dawn of creation. Who are they, and where are they?
At the time the Moses generation were born, Nigeria was a country at war with itself, or just coming out of the civil war. The Nigerian state into which they were born, may be likened to a mango tree, laden with fruits. Ripening fruits. But as with the fruiting tree in the middle of a forest, it’s fruits are never harvested by the deliberate efforts of men, it’s ripened fruits, are the feeds of the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air. Nigeria’s seeds, embedded in its fruits, were wasted away, and never harnessed.
We saw and benefited from the exertions of men, and women of thought. And if we would think, we would remember when the rain began to beat us, and when the seeds of today’s tragedies were planted. I remember the cries of Operation Feed the Nation, or OFN, as it was called in those days. I recall the 1973 census, and the lies it told. I was a patient at UCH, in Ibadan, the very same place, that once hosted the Saudi king and his princes. The reason our doctors and nurses were deliberately targeted for recruitment by Saudi hospitals in the 1980s and 1990s.
The generation that went to public schools, several in our parents villages and hamlets, would today reject thoughts of our wards and children in any of them. If the hospitals were mere dispensaries at the first coming of the current godfather of a moribund system, they have become mortuaries today.
One of the manifest failures of the current regime, remains the inability of a sick president, to build the State House clinic, to the standard where it could the country the embarrassment of sending the president abroad, to treat the most basic ailments. If it is expertise that is being flown in to manage his care, I would have had some kudos for him, but it is the very height of presidential shamelessness and governmental irresponsibility.
The Moses generation survived the second republic, with the entrenchment of sybaritic care of the rulers, and the resultant impoverishment of the people. We entered our teenage years as subjects of dictators, from Buhari-Idiagbon, to the evil cripple on the Minna hilltop.
We watched the SAP debates, and the many political circuses that were the Babangida political and economic theatre, designed to distract the people, as a man devoid of vision, institutionalized corruption, even as he enabled the worst of nepotistic instincts in restructuring Nigeria, into the nightmare that it has become today.
Nigeria had 12 states when our schooling began, and we were obliged to learn them all, by rote. Then 19 it became, and then 21. Then I lost count until we now have 36, abi na 37? Abuja is confusing. States were created, to promote our federalism, was the usual justification provided, but the lies, lie exposed in the light of day. Local governments became federal government creations, and revenue allocation must be based on local government areas. Figure out why the Lagos State LCDAs cannot be afforded constitutional recognition.
Our fathers watched the lies enthroned, and some of them were actively complicit in the lies themselves. Theirs is a generation of liars. Some of them lied by the fact of their silence, they legitimized the lies, by their silent acquiescence. Yet more reinforced the lies by their own actions and inactions. But the problems of today were seeded on their watch, and they have looked to us, their children, to fix their mess.
But we the children, we are a generation of cowards. There were men of exemplary courage, in our fathers’ generation, that is the generation of Olufela, that is the same as Wole Soyinka, a name Apple devices would not attempt to autocorrect. That is the generation of Gani, Bekolari, and Bala Usman. We were trained in the fire of the Abacha years, the Tinubus of this world, had no business driving tippers of sand to block 3rd Mainland Bridge, in enforcement of NADECO and CD directives to stay at home. But they are the ones telling war stories of the wars in which we bled and died.
Our generation is the Aluta generation, we stared down armed policemen and soldiers in the pursuit of truth, we bled and died at the barricades in pursuit of today’s democracy. We survived SAP, we learnt to enjoy our yam with oils, and learnt the lexicon of poverty, like “essential commodities, and scarcity of goods”. The ones born into a functional society, became adults in a state that had began to fail, even as we left our teenage years behind.
The exit of our teenage years, marked the beginning of an exodus. A part of the Moses generation left these shores, exiles in strange lands, but the land of their birth, having been born, when dad or mum, were studying abroad. Now we send the wives abroad to birth the next generation of a nation adrift. Nigerians that once went to Europe in search of the Golden Fleece, now flee freely abroad, and into slavery in distant climes.
The Moses generation saw the past, lived in it, are beneficiaries of it, knows what it’s like when the state functions as it should, can envision the future better than the one we’ve accepted and are by the fact of our silent acquiescence, legitimizing.
The problem with the Moses generation is the cancer, and cankerworm of cowardice. As the Moses generation entered our age of responsibilities, a critical switch failed to come on, the one that takes responsibility for actions and inactions. We talk a good revolution, but would rather outsource the inevitable struggles that must accompany it. And we dissipate energy protesting the divine rights of our oppressors to their divinity.
When you see a problem, it is because you are either the solution, or a part of the solution. The Moses generation sees the problems with Nigeria, we know that what we are seeing is unsustainable, and we also know, or ought to know, that our children, the ones we have raised in ways that would suggest that some of us are still compensating for our SAP deprived childhood, cannot survive in the Nigeria that they will inherit from us.
This is a pivotal moment in the lives of the Moses generation. We are the only generation that knew a functional Nigeria, and we were also witnesses to the brutal rape, of our common patrimony. We shall either become, or Nigeria will never become. The choices are ours to make, and history shall recall where we stood, when the rolls were called.
DF
First published on Facebook on the 15th of October, 2018.
Great article and quite true. As a generation after the Moses generation, I can see the habits of the Moses generation all around me, even in corporate environments. We are waking up to possibilities. Thanks to globalization and few Moses like Dr Dele Farotimi