The details of actual events of Nigerian history are stranger than fiction, and the same should be said about Nigeria’s recent events of political and economic realities. The education system I passed through imposed on me a repressed understanding of the world, which is understandable for a post-independence fourth-generation Nigerian. Obviously, not every fourth-generation Nigerian experienced a repressed version of reality as I did; it was a privilege of social class and religious orientation to know a world of endless possibilities.
It is no wonder I stopped dreaming of being a performer the year I turned five years old. It was like society had decided I was too old for all that “cute entertainment stuff”. I had to be introduced to the reality of a child who is assigned male by genitalia in my social class, and because food was my only source of happiness in my pre-teen years, I dreamt of being a farmer. Becoming a student of science in secondary school broke the third wall of the unknown in my dream world. In junior school, I wanted to be a teacher, and that dream changed to an aspiring aeronautical engineer—I wanted to be in the skies once I learnt I could. Of course, it felt like one of the harshest Nigerian reality checks when I learnt that my parents would need at least N3m per year to support my skill acquisition at the only Nigerian aviation school I had heard of, located in the far north of Nigeria— Zaria. Where in the world would they get that? They had to give me up to my foster parents to afford me the privilege of education I had access to, and I could not possibly ask that of my foster parents. It was a repressed world after all.
As a reclamation of my ability to heal and dream, I embarked on the discipline of socio-cultural practices and research and embraced the exploration of my performing talents in the arts post-National Youth Service Corps. However, this discovered creative freedom is constantly being tackled into repression by the actions and inaction of the Nigerian government for the past decade-plus. I recently learnt that the atrocities of the annulment of the 1993 elections were the precursor to the 2023 elections’ disenfranchisement and invalidation of Nigerian citizenship by the sitting administration. These events have directly impacted my entire Nigerian experience since I was born a year after the infamous overthrowing coup of 1993. Every Nigerian born around this year of conspicuously terrorising acts is forced to only hear of the glorious days when one naira equalled one dollar, or/and today, read about the events that turned our nation’s tide for the worse via one of its lead perpetrator’s tell-all book confessions that should have been titled “A Journey in Afflictions” instead of “A Journey in Service”.
30+ years later, the sitting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and his political juggernauts are celebrating this man’s “bravery”, and I can only imagine that he was celebrated for writing a book that does not implicate the current politicians in administration. The vitriolic plights of Nigeria’s political zeitgeist today have inflicted unprecedented economic destabilisation, among other implications, that it pales in comparison to the economic conditions of the 90s. At least then, the economic impact of the annulment was not so immediate that it felt like the end of the world for the average Nigerian, but indeed it felt like a foreshadowing tale of today’s dystopian Nigerian economy, where basic amenities are thirty times more expensive today than they were thirty years ago. Now we are too busy surviving what feels like an economic genocide on middle- to low-class Nigerians by tyrants and formidable patriarchs in leadership.
The rigid governance in the Senate is an extension of the horrors inflicted by Nigeria’s ruling political party today. The ongoing display of tyranny in the National Assembly by the Senate President speaks to the overt abuse of power and the heavily misogynistic political order in Nigeria. There is media evidence of the Senate President repeatedly attempting to manipulate other distinguished senators to vote a memorandum his way, and after many failed attempts, he completely disregarded the voices of the majority in the Senate. It is odiously obvious that Senate President Godswill Akpabio treats his position and responsibilities with the authority and likeness of an unhinged cult leader as opposed to the family head of the family he claims the National Assembly is. This pattern of abuse of power is emphasised by the six-month suspension of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan for raising a petition against the Senate President on abuse of power and sexual harassment.
This is still “Nigeria” trying to reinforce the regressive, repressive narrative on us to maintain the proverbial inaction that we have assimilated systematically since 1993. Younger millennials and Generation Z Nigerians realise simultaneously that our collective voices need to be raised now, louder than ever, and this has since sparked a 30-day rant challenge on social media. This Nigerian millennial outcry, therefore, is my first entry into the phenomenal rant challenge of struggling Nigerian economic ordeals today.
•Tobean Omotoso, an analyst, writes from Lagos
