In the second stanza of her first and former anthem titled “Nigeria We Hail Thee,” Nigeria at independence sang thusly:
Our flag shall be a symbol
That truth and justice reign
In peace or battle honoured
And this we count as gain
To hand on to our children
A banner without stain
The last two lines are where I wish to lay my emphasis in this piece. The promise, as the composer of that very anthem put it, was “To hand on to our children/A banner without stain”. But each time I see the blood-stained standard of Lekki, I think of the day Nigeria “died” by gifting her young a deathly present. Under Buhari and his former army chief, Tukur Buratai, the Chief Butcher of Lekki, aided by errand boy of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the banner the nation handed on to her young at the Lekki turnpike was a blood-splattered tricolored green-white-green flag – a symbol of a promise broken!
What symbol does the Lekki soiled flag hold if not that of a broken nation and hope denied? A nation that killed her young and today continues to cover same up, for me, holds no ideal or fancy, not even promise or prospect. Again, the anthem “Nigeria We Hail Thee” said that in peacetime or battle, the honour and pressing need was for Nigeria to hand on to her children a pure banner, but we all know what we received and are still receiving from the Nigerian state. I shall not speak here of my personal experiences in this country, but for the average youth, it has never been easy from the get-go, generally.
So, now I come to the second stanza of the current anthem “Arise, O Compatriots.”
Here again, Nigeria, like in the second stanza of her first and former anthem, focuses on her youth; she even prayed the “God of creation” to help the youth it has continued to kill to date thusly:
“O God of creation
Direct our noble cause
And guide our leaders right
Help our youth the truth to know
In love and honesty to grow
And living just and true
Great lofty height attain
To build a nation where peace and justice shall reign.”
Now, the prayer in that second stanza commits Nigeria to the much greater task of nation-building through her young; a futuristic design and enterprise, one might say. But Nigeria, contrary to all platitudes in that anthem, builds nothing than it tears down everything for her youth, the teeming sixty percent of its population, to start from scratch. A Nigerian youth is not one who lives their dream on the average and so what has Nigeria done to “help her youth the truth to know”? What stake has she committed towards making them, these same youths, to live just and true, attain a lofty height and “build a nation where peace and justice shall reign”? It must be understood that it was against this background of broken promises that the youth, once called “lazy” by Buhari in foreign shores, left the virtual space – where the campaign to end all forms of police brutality began with a hashtag on twitter – to occupy the governance space with a 5-pronged demand seeking to end the operations of the now-disbanded police unit known as Special-Anti Robbery Squad, SARS and to further demand that reforms be instituted in the police sector.
That one year after the protest there is no restorative justice in sight for the victims of police brutality and other forms of violence perpetrated by our custodian of arms only leaves much to be desired. Again, beyond the facade of merely masquerading, it shows where the bread of the government is buttered, especially when considered against the background that government, at the heat of the protests, promised to inaugurate reforms in the police sector. As we can see today, government is not willing to travel the road of justice even after many state panels had submitted their reports on the EndSARS matter. Implementation has not begun and as with many national documents, the reports may continue to gather dust until the current government serves out its tenure.
Unlike my late father, who as a pupil saluted the British Union Jack, I saluted the tricolored green-white-green banner; and unlike my mother who grew up singing the first anthem Nigeria “We Hail Thee,” I grew up singing the second, but today, neither holds any appeal nor fancy for me again, for Nigeria had broken her contract with the youth and so committing to Nigeria’s project seems a tall task.
Why, one may ask, have I chosen to dwell so long on national anthems and flags here? It is that anthems themselves, beyond bringing us to recommit to a creedal national oath, daily bring citizens closer to the nation’s ideal, identity and history. In Nigeria, lines of the anthem which I once blissfully mangled as a lad, and which I sang with gusto as an adult, do not tell me again there is a project of nation designing here; it tells me rather that there is a broken promise sealed in the blood of the youth even before the EndSARS protests and the Lekki shooting, the day of infamy.
What about national flags? Those represent the symbol of a nation and its dignity, reason part of civic duties and obligations expected of a citizen is “to respect the national flag and symbols.” This is where patriotism and patriotic fervour comes to play. Sometime ago, I had visited a traditional ruler for his support for a memorial lecture being organised by my Old Boys Association where after taking me round his palace to see its beauty I had told the traditional ruler that the flag in his palace should be washed and kept tidy like the well-manicured lawns in his compound, a decree he once promulgated. And while at Benin Republic sometime in 2014, the Nigerian flag I saw somewhere was flying at half-mast. When I enquired, I was told the flag had been in that position since Yar’Adua died! I raised an alarm that the flag be hoisted back at the summit and it was done. Today, I’m not sure I would be interested in the position of that flag nor would I care about rendition of the anthem like I have done before. Maybe I could still, but the flag and anthem of Nigeria can only feel the same again for me if we get that restorative justice for all victims of EndSARS with prosecutorial trial of those indicted officers; that to me is the meaning of a nation “where no man is oppressed”, as a line of the last stanza of the first and former anthem went. How do I appreciate, with patriotism, a flag which citizens were holding and waving when bullets started to rain on them? How do I the anthem?
So today, while Buhari’s myrmidons would have us believe there was no shooting at that Tollgate and that the policemen/women (peace to those members of the Force who died after the peaceful protests got highjacked) were the only victims of the protests instead, as now advanced by Onochie, Buhari’s motormouth, the self-contradictory positions advanced at different times by the army from not being at the Tollgate to being there but not firing a shot and then later to firing only blanks, we know that the truth is somewhere in-between. And from denying ever sending the army to the Tollgate to later agreeing he sent them, and from saying nobody died to agreeing that few corpses were found somewhere within the coordinates of Lekki that night of October 20, 2020, meant that Sanwo-Olu’s defeatist plea is what it is prima facie; a self-righteous disavowal of wrong. What do we make of Lai Mohammed, a government minister paid with taxpayers’ money to manufacture defensive li(n)es? Do we not know where his bread is buttered and should we not, in trying to understand his own convictions, turn to students of Rufus Miles, that American author who taught and told us: “where you stand depends on where you sit”? Sure, a sitting minister will definitely stand with his/her government, even in an effete attempt, so as to remain “relevant” and in office. Any wonder ministers who themselves trained as doctors tell us that young doctors should head to the farm, feel free to leave the country in droves being redundant here? So, where can the youth play, is the question.
So today, I will remember the victims of the protest and those before; maybe someday there will be a national dialogue, the kind that interrogates Lekki shooting, but for now I will move on aware that this nation failed her young in living the lines of her anthems and the symbols of her flag with Lekki shooting, and that this current dispensation, both at national and subnational levels, holds untruths preferring the preservation of vile regime, even in effete attempt. This is the sad but comforting fact with which I now live, so help me God.
