-
Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that, as Frederick Douglass said ―power concedes nothing without a demand.‖ We resignedly think that some day God– that imaginary big-man-in-the-sky who is part Santa Claus and part Ojuju Calabar– will intervene and solve our socio-economic problems and rescue us from the despotism of the VIPs—the Vampires In Power. We forget or haven‘t heard Martin Luther King‘s remark that, ―To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system.‖ ―Shuffering and shmiling‖, we wait and hope that things cannot get worse, yet they get worse with each regime. We forget or haven‘t heard that there is no limit to which tyranny will not go if unopposed. We haven‘t heard what Frederick Douglass said: ―If you want to know how much a tyrant will impose on a people, find out how much they will take. And the Lugardists keep proclaiming that we should accept this prisoner-of-war camp as a blessing, as a gift from those British who said they came to civilize us by enslaving, terrorizing and robbing us.
Well, that‘s like the guards at the Nazi concentration camps claiming that the camps were a blessing and should be preserved at whatever cost; that remaining obediently in it is the duty of the prisoners. But the guards would say that, wouldn‘t they? But do the inmates have to accept the guards‘ doctrine? Nigerians have not awoken to the fact that Nigeria is going nowhere because, Nigeria is like an elephant with two heads, one in front and one behind, with each head pulling in the opposite direction from the other. Clearly, for any two-headed elephant to move properly, one of its two heads must vanish. In Nigeria’s case, one head is incorrigibly nostalgic for the ways of seventh-century Arabia; the other head lusts for the conspicuous capitalist consumerism of the European world. Note that I have not accused it of lusting after capitalist producerism — which it passionately abhors. Now, since neither of these two heads on the Nigerian elephant is appropriate for national survival, there is a need to chop off, not one, but both heads, and to graft on a new head — a single head that is passionate for production, that is indoctrinated with producer values and nationalism.
By the way, I must stress that Lugardism is not peculiar to Nigeria. All the states now in Africa are Lugardist. They were founded by white imperialist invaders from Europe for the exploitation of Africans to the benefit of Europe; every one of them in the AU is Lugardist. Lugardism is the doctrine that they are sacrosanct and should be preserved, that they should continue to exist even if they destroy the societies they hold prisoner.
Chinweizu
