According to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. David Cameron, Nigeria is ”a dream waiting to happen”. How very gracious and kind of him it is to remind us of this but I cannot help believing that it was said tongue in cheek. It is rather like a wicked parent telling an abused child whose legs that same parent had broken and crippled a few months earlier that ”don’t worry, one day your dream of walking will become a reality”. Worse still, whilst mouthing such patronising platitudes, the trucluent parent holds the child down and forcefully confines it to the cruel clutches of that wheelchair. History proves that this is what the British, the great race of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic warriors that David Cameron so proudly leads today, have effectively done to us as a nation and as a people.
Nigeria was a hobbled giant right from the start. We were an artificial entity created in 1914 for one purpose alone – to serve the economic and strategic interests of our former colonial masters and to provide a source of cheap raw materials for Her Majesty’s imperialist and all-conquering Great Britain. And that remains true till today. As a nation our only passport to international prominence and respectability is the ”black gold” that glues us together and that is better known as ”crude oil”. And given all the challenges and crises that we have faced in the last 50 years the debate still rages as to whether that ”black gold” is actually a blessing or a curse. Yet David Cameron comes to our sad, beleagured, underdeveloped, divided and undernourished country and mocks us. He tells us to simply ”dream of tomorrow”. How cruel can people be, even in jest? This is especially so when they pretend to be friends.
Fifty years after our independence this noble young ”Englander” is telling us that we should still ”wait for our dream”. Well that is a veiled insult if I ever saw one. Sadly most Nigerians do not even get the depth or import of what he is really trying to say and they are clapping heartily for him. They do not appreciate and cannot grasp the subtelty of the British. Such people need to stop and think. What he is actually saying, and he is absolutely right, is that as a nation we are a complete disaster and failure and that if we are lucky our shocking fifty-year nightmare of questionable nationhood may one day transform itself into a pleasant dream. This is deeply insulting. Yet the truth is that if anyone scuttled our ”dream” right from the beginning and right from the time that it was first conceived, that person was, more than anyone else, was the British, with their condescending, mercantile, imperialist, colonialist and neo-colonialist policies and attitude.
The truth is that Nigerians have been waiting in vain for Cameron’s Nigerian ”dream” to manifest and become a reality since 1914 when his forefather, kinsman and compatriot Lord Frederick Lugard in what can only be described as a lucifrean ritual with his pretty little consort Miss Flora Shaw merged and married us as one nation and named us ”the area of darkness” (”Niger”…”area”). We have waited in vain for the manifestation of that elusive, fickle, ephemeral, mirage-like, non-existent and impossible ”dream” since that time. We have been waiting for it since they scuttled us and crippled us by fixing the census figures and handing over power to their ”friends” when they gave us independence in 1960. Such wickedness and deceit, borne out of nothing but greed, avarice and the desire to dominate and control indefinately and into perpetuity has rarely been seen in the history of the world. All I can say is that may God deliver us from these deceitful and condescending devils. They castrated us from the start with their policy of slavery, pillaging, economic exploitation, indirect rule, fiscal bondage and their shameless support and encouragement of successive military governments and coups and now they have the effontry to mock us with childish, patronising and uncharitable words as a consequence of the nightmare that we have become. They glibly tell us to ”dream on” with a friendly smile and a pat on our back? And 50 years later we are still ”dreaming” and refusing to acknowledge the fact that our problem is both fundamental and structural.
How very sad Are there no men and women of vision, courage and character left in our nation or have we killed them all with our lamentable and abysmal culture of destruction of all that is good, our slavery and bondage to complacency and our wholesale and inexplicable espousal of all that is mediocre? Oh God of Heaven, if thou be as real, as merciful, as compassionate and as all-powerful as we believe you to be, deliver our country Nigeria and make her great in the comity of nations. Deliver her from the spirit of the inept and bungling dwarf that has seized her and transform her into the giant that she can potentially be. Let it be so that these mocking devils may know that you alone rule in the affairs of men and determine the destiny of nations. Let our English ”friends” that glibly and sarcastically tell us to ”dream on” eat their own words and show them that we are not the hopeless basket case that they secretly believe us to be. By the power of the Living God, one day our collective nightmare of national existence will be over and OUR very own dream, and not the one that was crafted for us by Brittania, will become a reality. God bless Nigeria.