There is an old saying among our people that it does not take the convening of a meeting for hallucinations to mature into madness. The thought is precise. Disorder does not announce itself. It does not require a quorum, a chairman, or a date in the calendar. It begins with a single misstep tolerated, then another excused, then a third rationalised, until the missteps fall into a rhythm of their own and begin to produce themselves without further instruction. By the time anyone thinks to call a meeting, the meeting has already happened, and what is left is to ratify the verdict.
Nigeria has reached ratification.
For decades we have spoken of the country in the polite vocabulary of development economics and political science. We have called it fragile, transitional, emerging, under-performing, challenged. We have used the language of diagnosis because we believed in cure.
The patient was alive. The patient could be reasoned with. The instruments still worked, even if the hands holding them trembled. None of that vocabulary fits anymore. What is happening in this country has crossed the threshold where descriptive language can still pretend to be neutral. The pathology has become the constitution. The exception has become the norm. The aberration has become the expectation. We have stopped slipping. We have arrived.
Consider what the air now carries. Insecurity is no longer a regional anxiety to be contained by a deployment of soldiers; it is the ambient condition of national life, the assumed background against which every plan must be drawn. A man in Lagos calculates kidnap risk before agreeing to attend his sister’s wedding in Kaduna. A farmer in Benue weighs whether to plant at all this season because the question is no longer harvest yield but whether he will be alive to see the crop. A traveller on the Abuja-Kaduna road prays not for safe arrival but for the smaller mercy of being abducted by men who only want money. We have learned to grade our terrors. That fact alone, that we now have a hierarchy of horrors and rank them like vintages, should have caused us to stop the country and ask what manner of place we had become. We did not stop. We adjusted.
Economic hardship has crossed the line where it can still be described as hardship. Hardship implies struggle within a system that, however imperfect, still rewards effort with proportionate return. What we have now is something else. It is the experience of running faster and faster on a floor that is itself sliding backwards. The teacher who collected her salary in 2015 and the teacher who collects the same nominal salary today are not in the same country. The currency she is paid in has been stripped of meaning while she slept.
The young graduate who once asked what he would do with his life now asks how he will eat at the end of this week. The middle class, that thin and always endangered band of people who once held the moral imagination of the nation in trust, has been ground into something below subsistence and above destitution, a class without a name, who go to work in laundered shirts and return to homes where the lights have been off for three days. They are too proud to beg and too poor to plan. They are the most quietly broken people in the country.
The brutishness of daily living is the third marker, and it is the one we speak of least because it shames us most. We have become a nation that no longer expects courtesy in its public encounters. The bus conductor curses the passenger. The passenger curses the driver. The driver curses the policeman. The policeman curses the citizen. There is no longer a baseline of mutual recognition between Nigerians as Nigerians.
Every interaction is transactional, suspicious, defensive. The shop attendant assumes you came to steal. The civil servant assumes you came to bribe. The neighbour assumes you came to inform.
We have lost the most basic civic substance, the unspoken assumption that the person in front of us is also a person, and without that substance, no policy and no programme and no constitution can hold a society together.
Lawlessness is the fourth marker, and here the descent is most visible because it implicates the institutions that were meant to be its opposite. When the police become a hazard to be avoided rather than a service to be summoned, the social contract has not been broken; it has been reversed. When the courts are understood as a venue where the wealthy go to formalise the defeat of the poor, the law has not failed; it has been weaponised against its own purpose. When the legislator is the most feared category of citizen because his immunity makes him untouchable and his appetite makes him relentless, then representation has not collapsed; it has inverted. The pattern repeats across every institution that was meant to restrain power. Each one has been hollowed and refilled with its opposite. The shell is preserved. The function is gone.
Crass opportunism is the fifth marker, and it is the cultural sediment that the other four have laid down. A society that has watched its rules dissolve will eventually produce citizens who have stopped believing in rules at all. The young
Nigerian who chooses fraud is not, in most cases, a moral exception. He is a moral consequence. He is what happens when a generation is raised in a country whose loudest and most rewarded figures are those who took the most and broke the most and were celebrated for it. We did not just permit our looters; we admired them. We built them ovations. We sent our daughters to their weddings. We named our children after them. The boy who now sits in front of a laptop in Lekki at three in the morning learned his ethics from us. He is doing on a small screen what his elders did on a large stage, and he understands, correctly, that the only difference between them is scale and timing.
Hopelessness is the sixth marker, and this is where the cry becomes shrill.
Hopelessness is not sadness. Sadness is a response to loss within a future that still exists. Hopelessness is the conviction that there is no future to be lost into. It is the quiet realisation, spreading now through whole age cohorts, that the country has nothing for them and will have nothing for them, and that the only rational response is exit, by plane if possible, by boat if necessary, by any door that opens. The “japa” phenomenon has been spoken of as a brain drain, as if it were a personnel problem. It is not a personnel problem. It is a verdict. Millions of the most capable young Nigerians have looked at the country, studied the evidence, and concluded that the place cannot be saved in their lifetime. They are not wrong. They are simply faster than the rest of us at admitting what we already know.
The worthlessness of life is the seventh marker, and it is the most terrible because it is the one from which there is no easy return. A society arrives at this point when the death of a citizen ceases to interrupt the day. When a bus falls into a river and the count is given in the same tone as the weather. When a village is razed and the news is buried below a politician’s birthday. When a young woman is murdered and the conversation turns immediately to what she was wearing. The nervous system of the nation has been cauterised. We feel less because we have felt too much. The body protects itself by going numb, and the numbness, which began as mercy, has hardened into character.
The eighth and final marker is the audible resignation. This is the sound the country now makes when it speaks to itself. It is in the shrug of the trader when the price changes again. It is in the laugh of the driver when the tanker explodes. It is in the silence of the church when the pastor prays for the nation. It is in the texture of every conversation that begins with “this country” and ends with a long exhale and the changing of the subject. Resignation is what comes after rage has exhausted itself and found nothing to grip. It is the most dangerous of the markers because it is the one that closes the door from the inside. A people who are still angry can still be moved. A people who are resigned cannot.
These eight markers have not arrived separately. They have converged. That is the meaning of the saying with which I began. Each of them, taken alone, would have been a problem. Together, they are no longer a problem. They are a pattern, and the pattern has begun to reproduce itself. Insecurity feeds hardship, which feeds brutishness, which feeds lawlessness, which feeds opportunism, which feeds hopelessness, which feeds the cheapening of life, which feeds resignation, which feeds back into insecurity at the next turn of the wheel.
There is no longer any node in the system that is correcting any other node. Every part is now amplifying every other part. This is what systems theorists call a runaway loop, and it is what theologians used to call damnation. The two descriptions point at the same thing.
I do not write this as a man who has given up. I write it as a man who refuses to participate any longer in the ritual of polite description. We have produced a vast literature of warning in this country, and the warnings have become a genre, and the genre has become a form of comfort, and the comfort has become part of the disease. We read the warnings the way one reads a horoscope, with mild interest and no intention of acting. The warnings have failed precisely because they have been many. They have become noise.
This is therefore not another warning. A warning presupposes time. What I am describing is the closing of time. The hallucinations have already met. The meeting has already passed its resolutions. The madness is no longer pending. It is in session, and it is in session everywhere, in every state, in every sector, in every household, in every conversation, in every silence.
The question that remains is not whether the doom is coming. The question is whether there is, somewhere in the country, a remnant capable of recognising that what we are inside of is not yet the doom but its immediate antechamber, and that the antechamber has a door, and that the door, for a little longer, is still ajar. I do not know if such a remnant exists. I know that it has been the pattern of nations to discover, at the last possible hour, that it did. I know also that it has been the pattern of nations to discover that it did not.
The old saying did not promise that the madness, once formed, would be irreversible. It only observed that it would form without further prompting. Whether it can be unmade is a separate question, and the answer to it is not in any saying. It is in us, in what is left of us, in the next thing we choose to do or refuse to do, in whether we will treat this cry as one more entry in the genre of warnings or as what it is meant to be, which is the last sound before the silence.
I have written what I came to write. The rest is no longer a matter of words.
About the Author
Charles Ugwu is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
