[MrOneNaija]

THE VANGUARD CONUNDRUM

Short of re-enacting a violent military coup à la Nzeogu that selectively decimates corrupt political figures, can one say that there exists in Nigeria today credible leaders - political or otherwise - that are imbued with a coherent worldview for societal transformation of the progressive kind? There is also the related issue of historical cum moral models or precedents: For many, the allusions to Brutus and Nzeogu may be quite problematic. While Brutus was a paltry dreamer of Shakespearean fiction that could easily have passed for a bumbling fool, Nzeogu was an idealist whose political (and intellectual?) inadequacies suggested the kind of shortsighted exuberance that readily lent itself to sectarian manipulation and bigotry. That is tragic for any self-styled revolutionary.

The difficulty facing those who are genuinely concerned with helping transcend the rot in Nigeria today is not so much that the conditions are not ripe for a sudden and violent uprising that would usher in a new beginning, so to speak. Today, the paucity of a truly honest and visionary vanguard that would lead a mass movement against the untenable status quo is apparently evident, for very obvious reasons.

For illustrative purposes, Nigerians vividly remember the electoral debacles of 2003 and 2007 in particlular. In either situation, confronted with the brazen and unprecedented transgression against the people's collective will by the incumbent tyrant and his allies, those that fancy calling themselves representatives of pro-democracy and human rights outfits instead sought refuge in primal allegiances of tribe and religion, not to mention other silly alibis, and basically dozed off. The critical question to ask today is, are we better prepared now to deal with the debilitating and essentially contrived lethargy that passes for governance in Abuja and elsewhere in Nigeria? Put differently, do we have the wherewithal to mount a revolutionary change in our dear Nigeria that is strewn with vermin in the Obasanjo and Babangida hue?